In one of our courses, a member asked a question about crookedness. She wanted to know which exercises to ride on the hollow side and the stiffer side to combat the symptoms of crookedness. There is unfortunately not a simple, straightforward answer to this because crookedness leads to imbalance on several different levels, such as…
I’m sure you are all familiar with the concept of Straightness as one of the elements of the German FN Training Scale. Those of you who are rooted in the French tradition know it as one of Alexis L’Hotte’s three main training principles (Calm, Forward, Straight). You have probably also run into its opposite - crookedness - as a tricky and quite pervasive issue. But has anybody explained to you what straightness is and why it is important? Why should you spend your entire equestrian life correcting the horse’s natural crookedness, as Jacques d’Auvergne wrote? Can’t we just go out and have fun on our horse?
When a flying change fails, the reason is usually that the horse became crooked and/or fell on the forehand. This results in a loss of the connection between the inside hind leg, the ground, the rider’s weight, and the reins which prevents the half halts from going through. That’s why things generally don’t improve if you keep cantering and keep repeating the aids for the flying changes.
It saves much time, sweat, and aggravation for both horse and rider, if you interrupt what you’re doing, bring the horse back to the trot or walk, or even to the halt, straighten and balance the horse, check his body for stiff, braced areas, remove the muscle blockages, and re-explain the biomechanics of the flying change (i.e. shift the weight, change the bend, move the pelvis).
As the horse is developing his conscious competence, he will often need time to think and to plan his next move so that he can perform the task deliberately. As he moves from conscious competence to unconscious competence, he can do flying changes anywhere, any time, with less and less preparation.
Happy New Year! It’s time to set our 2022 Riding Goals!
The New Year is upon us yet again. I think for most of you, it would be fair to say that 2020 and 2021 may not have gone according to plan for you, but if you were creative and resourceful, you may have been able to find a way to still continue your progress and learning, in spite of the less than perfect circumstances.
Not to make light of what has been a very tough two years, but I think it is also important to take stock of what HAS gone well and why. Times like this can teach us valuable lessons such as:
✵ No one else is more responsible for your learning more than you are.
✵ You are in charge of your learning.
✵ When there is a will, there is a way.
✵ Within every problem, there is a solution.
✵ You are more capable than you may have previously realized or believed.
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 school master. 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.
Many riders struggle with a square halt for years. For those who are not familiar with the term, here is a brief definition: In a square halt, you should only see two legs when looking directly from the front, from behind, or from the side. The weight should be distributed evenly on all four legs at the lower levels. At the upper levels, there should be more weight on the haunches than on the front legs.
“Ride more forward!” is probably one of the most frequent instructions dressage riders hear from their teachers. Unfortunately, riding forward is often misunderstood as riding fast (by teachers as well as students). However, true “forward” begins with the horse "thinking forward”, which means that his first instinct should be to take a step forward (not sideways or backward) whenever you apply a driving aid.
During the last year I have been working on the roundness and softness of the canter with Gulipipas. When his canter doesn’t feel good, it is because the inside hind leg is not flexing enough. This results in a rough feeling under the seat and resistance against the inside rein. To the extent that the inside hind leg softens and flexes more, the canter stride becomes rounder and softer.
This made me think of Gustav Steinbrecht’s statement that the impulsion and roundness of the canter strides comes from the outside hind leg…
This week’s blog is another practical tip that comes out of mistakes I made in the past. Every time something goes wrong it is an opportunity to look more closely at what is happening, how it is happening, and why it is happening. It is a great chance to learn something new and to gain deeper insights into the biomechanical and psychological causalities in riding. So, in many ways mistakes are blessings in disguise because they can push us further along and help us attain a higher level of understanding and competence.
I recently received an email from a lady with a question about a tongue issue that her horse had all his life. His tongue often comes out of the front of his mouth, c. 4cm, and goes back in, almost like a snake’s. It sounds like a licking motion. He has a tendency to worry and to get distracted.
Since I don’t know the rider or the horse my advice had to be relatively general, suggesting several possible causes for this phenomenon that she can investigate on her own. And then I thought that this might be an interesting topic for others as well because mouth and tongue issues are not uncommon, and they can be caused by a variety of factors.
We are often asked how to get a horse light in hand and off of the forehand when he is leaning heavily on the bridle. Both issues are closely related to each other. The rein contact that the horse offers is not a localised affair that is limited to the rider’s hand and the horse’s mouth. It is, rather, the result of the horse’s balance, overall posture, and muscle development. That’s why it usually doesn’t help to change bits, because the underlying causes are located somewhere else.
Transitions are always vulnerable to mistakes because the horse’s balance has to change from one gait to the next. The energy level is different in each gait. The necessary amount of core muscle engagement is different for both horse and rider. The movement is different. That’s why transitions are always prone to disturbances in the horse’s outline and rein contact. If the horse gets crooked or strung out, or if he loses balance, it will be reflected in the suppleness and the rein contact. Riding a smooth transition means managing all these different ingredients and helping the horse stay straight and in balance. That’s why so many riders and horses struggle with transitions.
When I returned to riding as a middle-aged person, my first horse had a very loud ‘no.’ He was cheerful enough about doing the things he wanted to do, but my goal—to learn dressage—prompted a storm of tantrums and hissy fits of truly epic proportions. This, of course, felt horrible. He was treated well, I thought, and the requests I was making were not very difficult. So why did he spend his time looking for ways to make my life hard? Why did he keep saying ‘no’?
It happens to all driven and focused riders at some point. We get so focused in on what we are trying to work on that we lose perspective or we forget to add in enough variety of other things because we want to “fix” this certain issue (and we want to fix it TODAY!).
On the one hand it is important to have a level of perseverance. Giving up at the sign of the slightest resistance or problem is not a path to success, but there comes a point where our dogged perseverance can backfire and make the matter worse. In those circumstances, we need to shift our gears, pivot in our approach, and shift our perspective.
