When I was riding the other day, I remembered a quote from Nuno Oliveira: “When the horse resists against the left rein, try to replace the left rein aid with your left leg.”
My horse had started out a little stiff on the right that day, and I could feel it coming from the right hind leg through my right seat bone, and I could feel the same stiffness in the right rein. This is a crookedness issue: the contact in the right rein felt heavier and harder than I liked because the right hind leg wasn’t stepping under enough. This usually also means that the horse supports too much weight with his right front leg.
The heaviness or stiffness that you feel in the rein is caused by the hind leg on the same side not flexing and supporting the body mass enough. It pushes too much. This is caused by the lateral imbalance. If the rib cage hangs to the right and the right front leg supports too much weight, the right hind leg doesn’t have room to swing far enough forward under the body, and if the left hind leg doesn’t stay grounded long enough and doesn’t push enough, the right hind leg is forced to touch down too soon, so that it can’t reach a position in which it is able to support the weight.
So I rode a circle at the walk on the right rein and used my inside leg to engage the inside hind leg whenever I didn’t like the rein contact on the inside rein. This helped to a degree. Then I started thinking whether I was perhaps not allowing my pelvis to swing enough to the left and right, thereby limiting the motion of the horse’s rib cage. If the rider’s pelvis doesn’t accommodate the lateral swinging of the horse’s rib cage towards the outside enough, it will get stuck in front of the inside hind leg, blocking its path. So I focused on relaxing my hips and encouraging the horse’s rib cage to swing towards the outside more by moving my own pelvis more actively in that direction. The rein contact improved further. It helped the horse to stretch more into the outside rein and to soften and lighten on the inside rein.
Since the rib cage can only swing far enough to the outside if the outside hind leg flexes and supports the body mass enough, I like to use a combination of a few strides of counter shoulder-fore, followed by a few strides of a very shallow renvers to create a better connection to the outside hind leg (outside in terms of the circle). The counter shoulder-fore brings the outside hind leg more underneath the body, and the renvers position allows me to sit on it while simultaneously engaging the inside hind leg (inside in terms of the circle). Since these lateral movements are used for a specific gymnastic purpose, it is sufficient to ride them with a very shallow angle and only for a small number of strides. When you return from the renvers to a single track with the bend to the inside, the horse feels straighter, softer, more supple, and lighter than before. The inside hind leg is able to swing farther forward under the body because the outside hind leg is doing its job, the horse can bend and stretch into the outside rein, so that the contact on the inside rein is light and soft. This particular exercise works very well at the walk and trot. It can also be used as a preparation for an up transition into the next higher gait.
Most riders’ natural first reaction is to pull on the inside rein when the horse feels heavy on it or doesn’t bend well in one direction. Unfortunately, this only makes the problem worse by blocking the inside hind leg even more, which makes the horse lean onto his inside shoulder even more, which makes him even heavier on the inside rein.
So, next time you’re in that position, try to remember the biomechanics behind the hardness you feel under your inside seat bone and the heaviness or resistance against your inside rein. Try shifting the weight to the outside by letting your own pelvis swing more in that direction, use your inside leg or a tickle of the whip to engage the inside hind leg more. In addition, you step into the outside stirrup in a pattern like outside front > outside hind > outside front > outside hind. This also helps to shift the weight from the inside shoulder into the outside pair of legs.
If your horse is advanced enough that you can play with shallow lateral movements on the circle, try the counter shoulder-fore - renvers combination and see if your horse improves.
Egon von Neindorff often used to repeat in his lessons: “We speak of the rein, but we actually mean seat and leg.” This is an example of how this could look in practical application.
