“To know is like sitting in a dark room. You don’t know it is dark and it doesn’t worry you. But as soon as you light a match you know how dark it was before. Now that match is a little knowledge. And the bigger the flame is, the more light you have, the more darkness is pushed back, the bigger is the horizon of your knowledge. But it also makes you realize how much more darkness is further on.” (Franz Mairinger, 1983)
Introduction
We don’t know what we don’t know. That can make progress difficult because we may not know what to work on, and we may not be aware of certain mistakes we make.
There are strategies, of course, with which we can discover some of the things we don’t know that we don’t know. The fastest and easiest way is to take lessons from a good teacher on a highly-trained schoolmaster. Together they will let you know very quickly what is missing and what you need to work on. Unfortunately, this is not an option for most riders.
Strategies
But even if you are working alone, there are things that you can do that bring a little light into the darkness. One area of research in which you can discover things you didn’t know before is the seat. Any time you change anything in your seat your horse will respond by becoming either a little better or a little worse. It’s similar to the children’s game where one child thinks of some object and another one asks a question about it to guess what it is. The first one then answers with “warmer” when the question gets closer to guessing the object correctly, and with “colder” when the question leads in the wrong direction. When we ask the horse questions, he guides us through his answers.
We can systematically research certain questions with the horse’s help:
You can change the alignment of your pelvis in all three dimensions. By tilting your pelvis slowly forward (hollow back) and backward (round back) you can find out where the neutral/vertical position is. You will discover that there is one particular angle, in which the horse feels most comfortable. This is where he will feel the roundest, softest, and most content. The farther you move away from this alignment, the stiffer, more resistant, and more uncomfortable the horse will become because you are interfering with his balance and ability to move.
Since our body awareness often lies to us, the neutral position may not be where we thought it was. But the horse will show us. If our own conformation is hollow backed, we will probably feel like we have to round our back in order to get to the neutral position. If our conformation is rather round-backed, the neutral position probably feels like we are hollowing our back.
You can apply the same strategy to the rotation of your pelvis. By bringing one hip forward and the other one back, and the horse will show you which rotation matches your current line of travel. This alignment will obviously be different for a straight line than for a circle, and it will be different on a large circle than on a small circle. When your pelvic rotation matches the line of travel, it should be pretty easy to keep the horse’s feet on this line and to create a lateral bend through the horse’s body. The more your pelvic rotation deviates from this alignment, the more difficult it will be to stay on the line and to bend. It will feel like you have to use a disproportionate amount of leg and rein aids to keep the horse on the line and to bend him.
Again, our body awareness may not be accurate. We may have to rotate our pelvis a lot more than we thought we did, or perhaps sometimes we even have to rotate it in the opposite direction than we thought.
You can test your weight distribution in the same way, by letting your weight flow from one seat bone to the other and back. There will be one weight distribution that matches the line of travel and the balance or degree of straightness of horse and rider.
One factor that plays an important role here is that all horses and all riders are more or less crooked and asymmetrical. But we need to try to make a balanced, straight unit out of the two asymmetrical entities. That’s why sometimes the right adjustment of the seat and weight may differ from the general book wisdom. The traditional instruction manuals always assume that both horse and rider are straight and symmetrical, and this can lead to negative results and frustration.
You can also test the weight distribution in terms of the size of your support base. Is the horse more comfortable when you distribute your weight over a large area, including your inner thighs and knees, or is he more comfortable, when all of your weight is resting on your seat bones or your pelvic floor?
Next, you can test your torso position by moving it like a joystick slightly forward and back, to the left and to the right, until you find the posture in which the horse is roundest and softest. This posture depends again on the line of travel or the movement that you are riding, and whether you are on the horse’s stiffer side or hollow side.
Sometimes we are not aware that we have started gripping with our legs or that we have started putting a backward traction on the reins with our hands. So it makes sense to double-check ourselves. You can find out how much leg contact or leg pressure you have by engaging the muscles on the outside of your hip and thigh to rotate your femurs inwards and to lift both thighs slightly away from the horse for a step or two. Then you relax your leg muscles and let your legs hang. The contrast between your original leg position and the slightly lifted leg tells you if your leg was merely hanging with its own weight, or if you added any pressure. If the horse improves when you lift your thighs off, the leg contact had been too much.
It’s similar with the rein contact. We may not realize that our wrists have become stiff or that we have added a backward traction on the reins instead of merely receiving the amount of contact that the horse puts into them. This is why “Überstreichen” was invented and incorporated into some dressage tests. It consists of completely releasing the contact on one rein or both by moving your hand(s) forward towards the horse’s mouth for a few strides. Then reconnect the rein smoothly without jerking on the horse’s mouth. If the horse improves during the Überstreichen, the rein contact had probably become too heavy or too dead before.
The same idea can be pursued in terms of the seat and weight. Spreading the weight over a larger area will remove some weight from the horse’s spine and redistribute it around the rib cage. In addition, you can enhance the upward swing of the horse’s back for a couple of strides by using the momentum of the horse’s own movement to create a small vacuum under your seat that the horse’s back can fill. If the horse lifts his back, widens his rib cage, and becomes rounder when you lighten your seat, it’s an indication that you were sitting too heavily or too rigidly before.
As far as the horse is concerned, you can investigate the parameters of the gait by varying the tempo and stride length until you find the setting in which the horse can balance himself and relax.
You can increase and decrease the horse’s energy output to find the one in which he works best. You can experiment with the alignment of the horse’s feet on the line of travel by moving the shoulders and the haunches a little to the left and the right.
Summary
When you are working on your own, you can investigate certain questions together with the horse and let the horse show you how he wants to be ridden. Each horse is different, each situation is different, and the preferences of individual horses change over time, as they develop and move up the levels. That’s why you should investigate these questions again from time to time with your horse in order to be able to adapt your seat and aids to the horse’s changing and evolving needs.
