Luckily horses are very clear once we have learned to look and listen. I’ve altered the quote below (from Maya Angelou)
“I have learned that horses will forget what you said, horses will forget what you do, but horses will never forget how you made them feel”
So how do we know that our work is good? In a world where so much teaching is against the horse rather than for the good of the horse, how do we tell the difference?
How do we know whether the work made his body feel better?
Which after all is the whole point of Dressage- from the French verb ‘dresser’ which actually means to prepare or to straighten, to sculpt our horse into a thing of beauty that is empowered rather than diminished by our interventions. Did it make the horse feel good? What signs do we look for to know it made them feel good?
My favourite sign is helicopter ears- they go soft and floppy and assume all sorts of funny angles. Rocky has huge ears, as do all his family, so this one is pretty obvious, as well as being visible from on top!
Another sign is soft liquid eyes, with relaxed ‘eyebrows” and slow blinking. When the work is good, the horse is calm, because horses are kinaesthetic and they find it frightening to be out of balance. When their balance is aided to improve, they relax and chill out. They almost look stoned after good work. Stoned, not exhausted.
Breathing slows and calms: soft hurrumphs or gentle chuntering are signs of a relaxed mouth , tongue and larynx as well as relaxed brain. Harsh sharp breathing, breath holding, or sharp snorting, teeth grinding or calling out are all sure signs of a horse either stressed or on full alert.
More on the mouth from James Dunlop: “In the French Tradition, it is the state of the mouth that governs everything. There are three mouths possible. A dry mouth, a soaking wet one with gobs of foam on the chest and legs, and a moist one in which the lips are just moist and the lower jaw relaxed. The third mouth is described as being ‘fraiche’ and offers a gentle murmur (L’Hotte) as if to be ‘smiling’ ( Beudant) . It is to this third mouth that we should aspire.”
I always get off the horse after a work session and look critically at the muscles. Is the neck soft and inflated, are the under neck muscles soft, does the neck come nicely out of the shoulder girdle. Does it look wider at the base than the middle of the top? A good neck should be an even triangle from withers to poll, and from shoulder girdle to poll.
The horses ridden in hyper flexion, also called Low Deep and Round by those trying to make it sound better, have this weird tube of muscle that runs up from the middle of their necks, with no splenius or trapezius; in layman’s terms they have a hollow missing triangle just in front of the withers and also under the pommel. This photo below is an example of a horse showing aberrant muscle development from excessive flexion.
A lovely reminder of the missing neck muscles, also showing why forward down and out is the healthiest position for the neck
Is the lumbar back full? Does the hors’s skin shine and glisten and move smoothly over his frame or does it look dry and tight and stuck to the bones? Is the tail carried, not clamped, does it swing softly as he moves? If the tail swings, the back can’t be braced.
And finally, does he look proud after work? Does he go strutting back to the field to tell his mates how cool he was? Does he look better and stronger and bigger each time? Does he offer the improved posture next ride without having to do the prep work? If he offers the new posture or the new body usage next time, you know it felt good and he’s choosing to seek that posture. If you have to do all the work all over again, every time, it didn’t feel better. And that means it probably wasn’t right. So don’t repeat it…because if you aren’t improving your horse you are breaking him down (Charles de Kunffy).
Learning our alphabet is the first step of learning any language. And dressage is no different. Except that learning our alphabet isn’t quite the right phrase, really we need to be learning our horses’ alphabet.
Elizabeth Ball
As horses are movement itself, and the best way to access a horse’s brain is through his body, learning our horses’ alphabet actually means learning the alphabet of our horses’ movement.
First, the gaits. The step pattern, the footfalls, the sequence of pure gaits. How will we know if we have a pure walk or a good quality canter if we don’t know what the pure gaits consist of?
Humans are born with the ability to make every common sound heard in every language, from the Welsh ttthhh to the Xhosi nk. Babies learn, by imitation, to repeat the sounds they hear the most around them; they perfect those, the voicebox adapts and they may lose the ability to create other language sounds.
I learned to speak French in the Ecrins mountains when I was 10. I have a regional accent that most native French can pinpoint to that area, and I always get a very warm welcome when I go back to that region.
Glacier des Violettes- the best mountain HVS in the world runs up to the left of the glacier- Ailefroide
But there is one telling detail that a true linguist would spot, one omission- my rrrrrr is weak. I can just about roll my rrrr, but not quite like a native.
Coming down from the Violettes
In the same way, horses are born with every variation of every gait at their disposal. Some will come easier than others, some are bred selectively, such as the tolt or the pacing gait, but all foals can do all gaits at the beginning. They learn first by copying their mothers, and their peer group, which gaits are the easiest for day to day life. And then in training, we reward them for the four pure dressage gaits, and every variation thereof. But we can only do that if we know how the four pure gaits are meant to look , feel and sound.
A young Milton with Caroline Powell- brought on slowly and correctly to become the world’s most successful show jumper
The reason these specifically defined pure gaits have been selected as the most desirable over the centuries is because time has shown that these gaits are the most efficient for the horse to carry a rider in a healthy biomechanical posture.
And we have to understand that aberrations of these gaits are not healthy, and should not be ignored, let alone rewarded. How many lateral walks do we see in FEI dressage tests, not only ignored but scored highly, against the directives?
Then we need to remember that horses are born crooked. Just as humans are born right handed or left handed, the symmetrical, perfectly balanced horse has not yet been born.
Training is therefore first rehabilitation, followed by therapy, and finally it can become gymnastic.
To complete the training of the dressage horse we need to be able to speak to his body in sentences, in combinations of aids that combine targeted exercises and accurate patterns to enable the horse to develop strength and suppleness.
CDK talks about the daily vocabulary of training; like a virtuoso musician practising their scales every day, a trainer must help the horse to run through his full physical repertoire every session- all bends, all gaits, every length of neck, every length of stride, all directions of travel.
Paul Belasik
Run through, not drill.
Simple repetition does not bring about improvement- targeted focus does. When doing scales we did them fast, slow, staccato, slurred, syncopated da deee and deee da, forwards and backwards. Every variation, to avoid strain and boredom.
The quality of each movement will vary according to the horse’s level of training, but a fragment of each exercise will be possible in every horse from the very beginning.
This can be achieved from the ground, in hand, or from the saddle.
The brilliance in the virtuoso comes from a solid foundation, from the long hours spent perfecting the details of the basics.
Perfect practise makes perfect.
So know your horse’s alphabet, and help him to write three dimensional poetry in motion.
Don’t feed the trolls. Or to paraphrase; don’t waste your energy worrying about what the bad guys are doing, because, as we all know, energy follows thought. I have been on a fairly steep learning curve this year in various ways, and one of my newly acquired and necessary skills is not to feed the dark side in any way, with energy or attention.
Dont feed the trolls. Every time we post a completely negative image of a horse ridden incorrectly, whether it is to stir up outrage or simply to dissect the ‘finer’ points of training, we are creating three inadvertent effects.
One is that we are exposing this image of incorrect training to a whole plethora of people who may not have seen it otherwise. If there are 500 people on my friends list, that is 500 people that have been exposed to a incorrect photo unnecessarily. Wouldn’t I rather ensure that those 500 people are exposed to the best most beautiful example I can find?
No photo is perfect, of course not. And not every photo of every old style SRS rider or every ODG is perfect.
But how much better to discuss nuance that would lead towards perfection rather than just complaining again and again about the head cranked in and the flinging legs.
Don’t feed the trolls. All we see in Horse and Hound and the other trade rags are horses held behind the vertical with cranked nosebands and flinging forefeet. If the general horse people don’t read other material and don’t go back to the old books where we can find the good photos, and the correct pictures, they may well never have seen a single image of a horse moving correctly.
And what is more, they don’t even understand that lack in their education.
When gold medals are won, it is a natural assumption to think that any image of that gold medal wining horse must portray the most correctly moving horse in the world moving correctly. How do we explain to those who don’t understand the fundamentals and have never seen correct that actually it is the most successful horse in the world, not the most correct; that they are simply the most successful horse/rider combination from a selection of horses and riders chasing a false paradigm.
How do we explain to those who don’t know any different that this riding that is so highly rewarded in this current era actually causes horses to break down long before their time?
It is up to those who do know better to share the best possible images, and to keep explaining in a clear, concise and kind way why these better images are correct and beautiful and harmonious. It is up to those who do know better to keep teaching, with positive emphasis. People learn much better when they feel, relaxed, encouraged and safe. So rather than making them feel stupid, we have to teach, not preach. If people ask me why I ride the way I do, then I do my best to share what I have learned; as I do for the barefoot husbandry.
It is my duty and pleasure to help others on their journey.
The second problem with showing incorrect images is that our subconscious just absorbs those images. Our primitive brain doesn’t discriminate between good and bad images, it just retains whatever visual information it is exposed to.
We retain 80% of what we see, 20% of what we read, and 10% of what we hear
Visuals are processed 60,000X faster than text
This means the picture of the incorrect horse has gone in and been filed before we even get a chance to analyse it. As we stare at it, picking it apart, the details of that image are going in even farther. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use pictures as a visual aid to learning, but that we need to be scrupulous about how we use them. We need to ensure that we are exposed to many more good images than bad; so that it is the good images which are normalised and internalised.
We need to get over ourselves and accept that our analytical brain is simply not as quick as the lizard brain. We need to train our eyes so that the good images still have the ability to make us feel happy and incorrect images of uncomfortable stressed horses make us feel uncomfortable.
Think of Tarantino’s film “Kill Bill”. At the beginning the gore and violence is shocking. By the battle scene at the end, a bleak homage to the darkest of Samurai cinema, the violence is choreographed like a cartoon and we are strangely immune to the horror.
Tarantino is a master of manipulation of the human psyche.
So ideally we need to see at least 3 good images to every single poor image. The good images don’t need to be perfect, but they need to be near enough to good balance that we can see the next step might be better.
The third part of the problem is more subtle and a bit woo woo energy.
Energy follows thought.
We all know this. It’s why your mother always say “Oh I was just thinking about you” when you phone her, it’s how the dog knows you are coming home, long before he can possibly hear the car, it’s how the horse always makes sure he is at the far end of the field if you are in a foul mood from work, before you have even parked the car.
By sharing, discussing, dissecting a picture, be it with love or outrage, we are directing energy towards the subject of the photo. In the energetic universe, we are feeding them, powering them up. How much better it would be for all of us if we could direct our energy to power up the good teachers, the shining examples, the worthy mentors. And starve the others of attention and therefore energy.
That simple change would create the most amazing positive feedback loop.
I am doing other, to the best of my ability, and shining as bright as I can in my little corner. And I just hope the light from my horses’ eyes is warm enough that people feel the difference and are drawn towards it. Then we can show them how to do better.
And that shift in my mindset had provided a much better head space for me and the horses to work in. Riding is the ultimate martial art. And all martial arts are about discipline of the mind first.
If I tell you not to think about pink elephants, what have you just done? It is impossible to not do something without thinking about doing it. Rather than not doing what the bad guys do, do more of the good stuff.
When I google “stuck in a training rut”, pages and pages of stuff comes up, mostly about running or weight training, or weight loss. This pre-occupation with fitness and appearance tells us more about the over-arching consumerism of the internet rather than the obsessions of the rest of non horsey humanity…. hopefully…
Getting stuck in a training rut is a phenomenon that happens in any past-time that requires discipline to develop skill. The easy gains are all found at the beginning of the journey, mastery comes from sustained application. And somewhere in that process of sustained application there will bad days, and weeks, and months. Bad because they are frustrating, bad because they are boring, bad because nothing seems to be getting any easier, bad because it seems unfair to do all the work and still not be quite where we want to be.
I’d like to reassure you ; everyone who ever got good at anything had a period where they felt like they were stuck in a training rut.
I’ve just moved my piano from one friend’s house to another (long story; pianos need a 5′ wall with no extremes of temperature). Once the removal men had gone, I sat down and had a little test. I can’t remember any of my party pieces now but I can remember all the scales and arpeggios (arpeggi to be absolutely correct) that made playing those pieces possible. I spent hours, on the piano and on the baroque recorder, practising scales and arpeggi, making sure the precise fingering was nailed, working on tone, fast, slow, even, syncopated, syncopated the other way….so that when the solo comes up in the concerto, the basics were there.
In sport it is the same. Athletes work daily on form, on flow, on strength and suppleness, on power and endurance, they don’t just practise their main event every day.
Self Discipline is the key when stuck in a training rut
Getting stuck in a training rut with horses is different, because there are two of you. First of all, let’s note that it is unlikely that the horse himself has any idea we are stuck in a rut, because they have no idea where they are meant to be going, or in fact, where they used to be.
The horse won’t say to you that their half pass felt more brilliant yesterday compared to today. They are however peerless at delivering instant feedback.
What you are receiving is exactly what you are aiding, to the best of the ability of that body, on that day.
A couple of ground rules here.
I do not believe that any horses are deliberately naughty.
They are reactive, in the moment.
They also have the capacity to associate, if not truly remember.
They can process experiences and learning. I believe we should appeal more to their intellect, rather than labelling them stupid.
They are communicating all the time, but mostly in a whisper.
And good therapeutic schooling work should effect a body change that feels good to them and which they then choose to repeat, having learned from the feel.
So your horse doesn’t know he’s stuck in a rut. Unless you start drilling a particular exercise, ignoring the feedback from his body and it stops feeling good for him. Unless you get cross and tense and start playing crazy pretzel demon on top of him to get results; then he feels anxious and his body stops feeling good.
When stuck in a training rut, do your best not to let your frustration transmit to your horse
Remember, the first aid is your mind.
When I got stuck on a scale or a sequence, I would mix it up. Play it backwards, play it really slowly, play it in opposite rhythms Dee da Dee da Dee da then da Dee da Dee da Dee.
We can do the same with our horses. Go back to walk. If it’s a trot exercise, how slow can you make the trot? The power comes from the slow stuff anyway. Is there another way in; counter bend on the other rein for example? Are you mixing up circles and squares and straight lines? Are you paying enough attention to the crucial details? Are you doing enough transitions? (no never none of us)
And most importantly, are you using your everyday vocabulary of training; your scales and arpeggios; every day, every gait, every bend, every length of rein, every length of stride. The emphasis might change but the basic ingredients need to be there every day. And I include jumping and galloping as gaits to be included regularly, and hacking out on uneven and challenging surfaces as part of that foundation for every length of stride.
So yes, go out on the farm ride, freshen yourselves up. Yes, go hacking and break up the arena routine. Definitely jump or do poles, if you can, incorporate them into the regular work. But when you school, remember that the precision of the ingredients is what leads to brilliance.
Bodies take time to build. No one learned to dance Swan Lake overnight, nor to play Rachmaninov on the piano, or even to run 100m in under 10 seconds. These things take targeted and dedicated practise. We need to be accurate to be efficient- practise alone doesn’t make perfect, Perfect practise makes perfect
But it is allowed to be fun too. And the most frustrating stage is usually just before the next big breakthrough.
When your normally quite careful horse finds his inner dragon- breakthroughs often come after plateaus or training ruts
So don’t be despondent when you get stuck in a training rut.
First, remember to giggle with your horse. They are always doing their best to do what you ask, so we must make sure we ask well.
Second, enlist the help of a friend. Go play out, jump some fences, book a trip to the gallops, borrow a garrocha pole. Try crossing the reins, or Fillis hold, or no reins at all…
I don’t know the lady pictured here but what a lovely piaffe- Goals!
Third, check your basics. Saddle, teeth, bodywork; are they all up to date? Have you done the human self care stuff too? Has your ownback man been recently? Do you need a trip out? Too often the horses get stellar care while we work all hours to provide it.
Four- revisit the basics. Work on your equitation. Work on your equitation some more.
Can you and your horse do a 20m circle in all gaits with even contact through both reins, even balance between the four feet, even bend from tail to poll, and a smooth transition at the exit point?
If your answer to that last question is yes then congratulations!! You have got stuck in a training rut at the most advanced level and you are invited to be my next guest blogger!
So there you have it. Training ruts are part of training process. The big lasting progress will come from daily attention to the discipline of detail. But your horse is mostly just a body…so have fun while you practise, dance, play, mess around. The arena is your dance floor, or your playground. The horses will always tell you what’s working for them.
Charlie kindly gave me permission to share his beautiful drawings from time to time; When I am stuck in a training rut, beauty is a source of inspiration
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Finding every opportunity to praise- the power of positive feedback, and the soundbite that summarises my current training philosophy.
I don’t get too hung up on R+, R-, I do use so-called aversives like spurs and whips and bits but I try to use them in the non-aversive way that we are taught is possible by 2000 years of classical tradition. And I am willing to learn and evolve, with the horses as my most reliable and honest teachers. So this article summarises where I am now. It’s a long way from where I was 10 years ago. And we may all read this in another 10 years and think what nonsense?
I seek to share my current understanding because writing it down helps me to clarify my thoughts, and because occasionally it seems to help other people too.
So, I seek every opportunity to praise…the horse, the junior doctor, myself. It becomes a way of being, seeking the opportunity to praise the positive in every action or interaction
As some of you will already have read, my glorious warmblood was recently diagnosed with a kissing spine.
As he is still young, green and growing, and as my personal circumstances have been a bit complicated recently, I have made a conscious decision to take his rehab very slowly. To allow the growth spurt to complete, to let him down and let the spasmed muscles relax, to get him pain free and in good shape physically and mentally and then to start again from the beginning. This time I will pay meticulous attention to posture and correct muscle usage and see if we can end up with a better back that will allow me to sit on it without causing trouble or pain.
This rationale also gives me time to completely rebuild our training relationship, from the ground, so we have trust and a good communication system in place before I get back on. And this process has set me thinking about how I train: what is my methodology?
And I have arrived at the soundbite; seek every opportunity to praise.
Proud pony loves praise
I’m not very good at clicker training. Currently I don’t own a horse that is more motivated by food than by praise, so the premise of training to a click backed up by food doesn’t work for my current equine partners. I’m also not as quick to click as I am to praise with my voice, so for me it is much easier to ‘mark’ with my voice. And as horses are basically telepathic, even if they don’ t hear the word, they hear the thought…so for me a clicker just introduces a layer of delay.
I’m also put off by the tragic story of Tilikum- when clicker training goes wrong, the result can be dangerous frustration for the animal.
I’m sure the horse will come along one day that forces me to learn clicker training and I will have to eat these words, as I have so many others!! But life is a journey…
The key question is what to praise. Now the horses and I are back in company rather than living at home in our little private bubble, we are once again exposed to other humans and their relationships with their horses. One can learn a lot by listening.
The other day our neighbour was grooming her pony. Every other word seemed to be a No, or a Don’t Do That, or a Stop That, or another No.
Now I am a proud survivor of surgical training; in the good old days, you knew you were doing well if the boss kept quiet, and you only got spoken to, or rapped on the knuckles, if you were doing it wrong. When we read about how to raise children, we read that “the average toddler hears the word “no” an astonishing 400 times a day, according to experts. That’s not only tiresome for you but it can also be harmful to your child: According to studies, kids who hear “no” too much have poorer language skills than children whose parents offer more positive feedback.”
Disciplining Your Child Without Saying No. – Redbook
But if we just randomly say Good Boy, how will the horse, or the child, learn what was good or desired?
It’s all about timing.
Here’s an example. Rocky, the young warmblood, has really mobile shoulders and very expressive front legs. His reaction to food, to buckets, to grooming, to challenge, is to wave, particularly his right, foreleg around, and for me the waving is often at waist height. There is no point telling him not to do this; by the time we are saying No Don’t Do That the foot is already up in the air. He doesn’t choose to do it, it’s a reaction, an instinct. Horses don’t reason or plan, they react. There is no possible way of teaching the horse Don’t Do That once the action has already occurred.
Instead, how about we teach him to put the leg back down on the ground on command? At first this is opportunistic training; every time the leg hits the ground as he’s scraping or waving, I praise- “Down- Good”. Eventually, we just have to say ‘Down’ and the leg will land.
I don’t want to teach him not to wave the leg around; who knows, we might want Spanish Walk one day, although I’m not sure gymnastically that this particular horse will ever require that exercise LOL; his shoulders are already mobile enough.
Goofball Rocky with his very mobile shoulders
So the principle is: rather than trying to teach a negative after the unwanted behaviour has occurred, instead we teach a positive correction to the unwanted behaviour, a correction that we can cue and then reward. This has the advantage of not preventing a behaviour or movement we may want to access again in the future, and also gives us the opportunity to praise our horse rather than rebuke him. Horses, like children, respond much better to positive feedback than negative. They enjoy being right, and being rewarded for being right.
Another common misconception is that we can get a horse to calm down by stroking or patting them when they are on high alert.
Effectively, what we are doing here is rewarding the horse for being anxious or fractious. We are reinforcing the unwanted behaviour. Far better to change the mood and then reward the following calm, which is the desired behaviour. How do we change the mood?
Laughter or yawning are my two favourite strategies here. When Cal was a youngster and we were hacking around Kingsley as the annual scarecrow competition hit full swing, I used to giggle at the crazy stuff in the hedges. The best one was a pair of legs, sticking up out of the hedge, as if diving into a pool; I think it must have been London Olympic year. Cal would be eyeballing the scarecrows and sidling past at speed and I would be chuckling and giggling, but with hands loose on the reins and concentrating on loose legs and relaxed seat. He’s pretty bombproof now.
At competitions with Cal, or handling Rocky recently when he’s been in pain having physio, I focus on boredom and yawning. Boredom slows your heart rate and lowers your energy, while yawning relaxes the jaw and the neck, and therefore the hands, as well as changing the frequency of your thoughts. When the horse comes down in energy, relaxes or yawns, then we can take the opportunity to praise the relaxation and the calm, because that is the desired behaviour.
Now I’m far from perfect. I’m not trying to preach, just to share some stuff I have learned. Tonight was worming night, and Rocky still had me swinging around the stable because yet again I didn’t do enough prep work in between wormings. But I will do the prep work, and it will get easier.
Butter wouldn’t melt
When I’m riding nowadays, I’m alway looking for the moment to praise, the topline stretch or the moment of throughness or relaxation that I can mark as desirable so I might get offered it again. I am also careful to praise myself- although that’s much more subtle. I don’t vocalise those moments so much, although maybe I should, but a turn in balance or good use of a seat aid will get noted as a nice feeling, or a good moment, with a nod or a smile.
More importantly, I don’t beat myself up for the not perfect moments anymore- I have a giggle, regroup and do it again, better. I no longer hate my disobedient legs, or my flappy elbow, or my gripping left hand, instead I notice them, change them, forgive myself, correct them again…until the corrections become fewer and further between….and then you notice your flappy knee or your sticky out toe and move onto to the next bit of homework.
Finding every opportunity to praise, ourselves and our horses, keeps training fun and rewarding, and beats the winter blues.
So here’s some homework. First spend an evening wth your horse just listening to what you say to him, is it no or is it yes, is it don’t do that or clever boy?
And then spend an evening being really careful to look for the moment to praise, both you and him, for the good stuff, and to replace a Don’t with a Can You Do this instead. And then observe both your moods. I predict your horse will be proud and puffed up and loving at the end of a positive session.And you will go home energised and enthused and looking forward to the next session, no matter what has occurred, because you have both had more fun.
And then suddenly might just happen over a very long time 😉
Suddenly happens over a very long time… this is another of those annoying contradictions that is so true of dressage training, of deep learning, or of developing expertise. How many times have you heard someone say- “we were stuck for ages and then suddenly, it just happened, as if by magic.”
Or the converse, “everything was going so well and then suddenly, out of nowhere, it all went horribly wrong. ”
Suddenly happens over a very long time.
Watching good dressage training
can be like watching paint dry. Cal and I have a fairly predictable school routine now; first we cover the arena with many random footprints, changing direction, weighting different hind legs, suppling the shoulders and the barrel.
All the while, I run through my position; are my legs kicked out of my hip sockets, are my knees down, are my calves long, are my seat bones open and my pelvis neutral, have I got 3 good spines, a good flat back, a solid frontline, and most recently, a seat that moves through my hands.
Then we move on to checking the 4 corners of the horse, have I got control of the 4 corners, is the weight equal between sides, is the bend even in both directions, have I got directional control, is he full from tail to poll, have I got lift and stretch?
Then we start doing laterals, in walk first and then either focus on trot or canter work. We pick an exercise to use as a test, then another to improve on the dilemma we find, then test again. Suddenly happens over a very long time.
It sounds very serious but we actually laugh a lot together, Cal and I. He is much less perturbed these days about having to be right all the time. The key for me is not to mind the moments where we lose balance, or lose steering, or just lose everything. I practise non judgmental observation, then make the change required (hopefully- there’s a 50-:50 chance of being right usually) and then test the result. It’s taken me a long time to get to that stage- I used to get annoyed by our mistakes, or frustrated by my incompetence, or so focussed on achieving the task that I was rigid in my aiding and obsessed with task completion not quality of gymnastic (riding the exercise not the horse).
I rode last night in my winter jodhpurs, which don’t have a sticky bum, and I’ve been a bit short on riding hours the last couple of weeks. So, when I lost my rhythm, I slithered all over. I’m sure Cal was giggling, but he kindly didn’t drop me, or object!
Now these days I know that while it is important to complete the exercise, because there is magic in the patterns as well as in the aiding, it is also important to be able to notice and change each step….or at least some of them. Suddenly happens over a very long time.
Every moment I am asking what do we have, what do I like, what do I want to keep, what do I want to change? I say every moment, in horse time it’s probably every 600 moments, in between running the human position check program, doing the steering, checking the bend, the weight, the back, breathe, check my position…you get the idea. We take frequent rest breaks and we accept one or two steps of good initially because we know these few steps will build up to a whole long side one day.
The last time I went to watch Charles de Kunffy teach, I had been playing with canter half pass on the long diagonal the day before. Cal could do about 3 steps of canter half pass before it all fell apart. I practised a good few times across the diagonal and then when we got to 4 passable strides I stopped. Charles asked for 3 strides canter half pass, then 3 straight then another 3 strides canter half pass. The horses were empowered, rather than pressured, and the few strides requested got better and bolder with each repeat. Such a simple lesson, and such a good reminder.
Likewise with your baby horse, if you only have 4 reliable strides of canter, take the 4 strides, ask for the trot, then ask again. The magic is in the transition, the taking weight behind occurs in the moment of change, the shift in the back occurs in the switch of rhythm, not in the lolloping around.
The trick to make suddenly happen over a very long time is to notice the quality of each moment and then to make the appropriate change. As Charles says so eloquently in “The Ethics and Passion Of Dressage”-
‘There is no neutrality in riding: you are either actively improving your horse or actively breaking him down’
Cal’s neck has ‘suddenly’ got huge. Over the space of a few weeks, it seemed to deepen by about 3 inches. Did I do anything differently to cause this sudden change?
No- we were doing the same work, the same basic regime, although the exercise are getting more advanced, laterals on a circle or curving line, transitions in shoulder in, smaller patterns.
Building muscle, and building a horse is incremental, and exponential. If the foundations are good, and the details attended to at the beginning, then latter progress can be rapid.
Charles writes about this too-
‘we remember that the “finished horse” is born of daily attention to minutia in schooling. Careful consistency, repetition and elaboration are part of that daily work which produce the supple horse.’
I have really done my homework over the last few years. I have worked on my position with every spare brain cell and bit of muscle memory I could muster, I have used any precious arena time as efficiently as possible, I have done thousands of transitions, of bend, of weight, of speed, of topline…
I’ve had a lot of fun as well, farm riding, eventing, charging around the forest, but every moment on the horse I have genuinely tried to ride as well as possible, in that moment.
And suddenly my horse is looking really fancy. Suddenly, over a long period of time, my horse has become magnificent.
And in the process, I have learned a huge amount, about positive thinking, about discipline and change, about body and mind, and about life.
Because once you have seen something, you cannot unsee it. Once the feeling of true flow has been experienced, nothing else will do. Suddenly happens over a very long time. You are either improving something or breaking it down. You get to choose which, every minute, every day. I would recommend that, rather than coasting along, you focus on improving the daily details, the gymnastic, the posture, the flow, so that you suddenly find magic, not despair.
And if you get into the habit of checking every moment for what do you like, what would you keep, what would you discard, some unexpected patterns emerge, in human life as well as in the arena.
And when effecting positive change, in the moment, by choice, becomes a way of life, then the world might just shift on its axis.
Good riding should be therapeutic. It turns out that good horsemanship can also be therapeutic, for the human as well as the horse.
Suddenly happens over a very long time….and then nothing will ever be the same again.
“The horse is indeed the only master of his forces that our own strength is quite unable to augment by itself alone. It is hence up to him to use them to his liking and to determine the way to employ them in order to respond in the best way possible to the rider’s indications. Should the latter want to act by himself, the horse lets himself be carried and adjusts his efforts to those that the man makes him feel. But if the horse knows that he can rely upon his own means only, he will use them without expecting anything but indications, and then he uses them in full, with all his stamina.”
It’s taken me a few weeks to be able to write about our glorious youngster’s diagnosis and the Rocky road to rehab.
I know all about the road to rehab- it’s almost 7 years since Cal fractured his carpal bone. And I completely believe a good outcome is possible – Cal’s fracture taught me to trust the process and detach from the outcome. He has become the most fabulous horse you could wish for. And the fracture, although well healed, made sure he was another horse I could never sell. (How does anyone manage to sell a horse?)
I clearly remember the early uncertainty, the agony of box rest, the hundreds of miles we walked in hand, and then finally the relief when he jumped his first course and stayed sound.
I just never expected to be on the road to rehab with Rocky.
We bought him as a yearling.
Well bred, well handled, but completely unspoilt, from a trusted source. He came home with us from the South Coast, after Paddy dumped me in the ditch at Longleat. Paddy did share some wise words with him on the trip home though- he travelled like a pro and learned to eat out of a haynet on the way.
We turned him out with another colt at a friend’s place and let them be boys, living out and razzing around together. We brought him in to the livery yard aged 3, a couple of months before we moved into our own place. Once our land was sorted the three horses went out together full time, and gelled as a little herd straightaway.
Paddy was hiding – Ernie thinks they are his brothers anyway
The pity party
The reason it’s taken me a few weeks to share a bit more is that I have been having a proper pity party. Everything we have learned about over the last few years, the entire focus of our horsey learning, has been about correct classical training, that is meant to preserve the health of the horse and prevent this type of injury.
The stages of balance, from Egon Von Nendirf’s beautiful book. Rider is Melissa Simms, who passed away only recently.
Good work is meant to be therapeutic. Rehab is really just about going back to absolute basics, working on the ground for now, opening up those intervertebral spaces and building the muscle in between. It’s basically what we should be doing all along.
Rocky had the joint space medicated, and this was followed up with some ultrasound to the muscles of his lumbar region, as these also were in spasm.
Rocky working at camp this spring
The ODGs knew all about kissing spine- correct classical training focuses on opening the back, elongating the top line, thereby preventing them occurring. Piaffe, the test of collection, also shows maximal length from tail to poll, when done correctly, along the arch of the top line.
Nuno showing an exemplary piaffe- all on the seat
Levade requires even more topline
The lumbar back is curved, the loins coiled, the hind legs and hocks flexed.
We’ve taken it really slowly
We did 6 weeks of in hand work and sat on him briefly at 3, did about 3 months in hand work and rode him away for 6 weeks at 4, and then did a bit more with him in his 5th summer, a few fun rides, a bit of light schooling and hacking, a bit of polework.
This year, his 6th year, was meant to be when the work got a bit more consistent. As often happens, our working lives have been the limiting factor, as well as Rocky’s ‘tricky nature’.
Do we even believe horses can have tricky natures?
This is not a young horse that has been over-worked…
Or was he?
I was starting to use judgmental words about him though- ‘backward’, the ‘work ethic of a flea’, because he would stop dead when tired and have a little buck when asked to go forwards.
Have we ridden him too much, when we should have been building a stronger horse with good in hand work and just riding a little?
Is the injury the result of an unfortunate conformational glitch?
Did the injury occur when he got stuck under the partition in the truck a couple of years ago? He didn’t thrash around or panic but still…
And then after a couple of days madness, I gave myself a slap and a talking to. It doesn’t matter how it happened- we just need to focus on the rocky road to rehab.
Rehab is a rollercoaster of emotions, hopes and dreams, where actually we just have to knuckle down, do the work and trust the process. All the previous learning, all the work on posture, timing, training, helping horses find biomechanically correct movement, will surely get put to extra good use now.
The value of good in hand work
The value of good in hand work can not be overstated. I never manage to do as much as I should. Only last week, Cal, my supposedly advanced horse, was the demo pony for a Patrice clinic, which meant I was the demo human (gulp). We found a few holes in the simple work- for example the SI left has too much neck bend, and so doesn’t weight the inside hind or stretch along the outside, and leg yield left, he doesn’t actually choose to step past his barrel with his hind leg-the mistakes are much easier to feel and correct from the ground if we are observant and honest enough with ourselves.
It’s also important not to pussy foot around with the rehab horse. We mustn’t look at them as if they are broken- they find this really disconcerting. Instead we should look at them with soft eyes, taking in the details of the movement, the stretch needed here, the balance needed there. We should do all the best work, asking nothing less than enough, yet noticing and rewarding every try that gets us towards better. We should remind them of their magnificence, encourage them to use themselves fully and correctly, and welcome the moment when the whole fabulous horse turns up.
In hand work also teaches us about our horses’ training brain. Rocky has always thrown his whole genetically gifted body at any task. When I ask him to slow down and actually work within himself, paying attention to the details of which leg goes where, he then needs to work really slowly, with lots of breathing and thinking breaks. This is timing and observation I will need to take forward to the ridden work once we get back on.
Some vets recommend a Pessoa or similar training aid when rehabbing a horse with kissing spines. The advantages are that it stretches the horse ‘over the back’- that horrid modern phrase. The disadvantages are that any training aid attached to the mouth only serves to teach the horse to avoid the bit- imagine jagging yourself in the teeth every time you move a leg?
In classical training, the bit belongs to the horse.
The horse has to learn to trust the bit, to take it forwards, to use it as a point of reference to reach towards and work around. The bit should never be used against the horse, neither as a means of control nor as a tool to ’round the neck’. Even the subtlest of left/right actions backwards on the bars of the north or downwards on the tongue teach the horse to avoid the aversive pressure and duck behind the bit to relieve the pain. Working them in a training aid that attaches to the mouth isn’t subtle, and there is no way the bit can act in the corners of the mouth, as it should, when the head is strapped down.
I have been using the equi-bands, to encourage Rocky to lift his tummy and round his back – this specific training aid has no front part so all influence on the head is from the human hand to the front of the cavesson, teaching the horse to stretch forward over the topline. The connection to the cavesson should be like the connection to the rein- and the line held like a rein- it only acts forward and up, and continually places the contact in front of the horse so that he learns to take the contact forwards.
Manolo- the photo shows beautifully how asking for a forward long neck extends the spinous processes. His contact is a bit vague in this moment but you get a good sense of elbow bent, line held correctly, lower arm opening forwards encouraging the topline to reach.
And perhaps most of all we should never underestimate the healing power of love, positive energy, and sunshine.
Rocky chilling out after a work session with his Arc gizmo on in the sun
I started noticing the buzz about the fuzz a year or so ago. The fuzz is fascia, a part of the connective tissue that is generally ignored.
When we bought Rocky, our fancy warmblood, we bought a young horse with international standard genes. We had to have him gelded, and we were told to make sure we got some massage done on the gelding scar to preserve his fabulous movement.
We all know a little bit about fascia. It’s the stringy stuff in between the muscles in your chicken breast, or the marbling in your steak. It’s the layer that keeps healthy muscles separate so they can slide over each other and work independently.
In surgery, knowledge of fascia is critical- it’s fascia that determines the layers of anatomical cleavage where cutting should occur.
The French surgeons really get the buzz about the fuzz- they call it ‘cheveux d’anges’ or “angel hair”- a lovely romantic name for the delicate little tendrils we see when tissues are separated already by fascial planes act like a dotted line for bloodless and painless surgery.
Not that fascia doesn’t contain blood vessels and nerves- they are just fewer in number. If tissue is disrupted by injury, it’s partly the fascia that stabilises that injury, by thickening into a scar. That’s why it’s important to keep good mobility throughout life, and especially after injury.
Dr Hedley’s short film is a great celebration of the buzz about the fuzz
So, when I was looking for a horse massage therapist, I remembered the lovely Babs, of Chester zoo fame, who happens to be incredibly local to us, and who we knew from the last livery yard (before we moved onto our own land).
Babs came to treat the horses and I asked her about Myofascial Release Therapy. Her eyes lit up and she started telling and showing me.
What struck me first was how subtle and gentle the manoeuvres were. She was using gentle finger pressure on acupressure and meridian points.
There is a theory that acupuncture actually works along fascial lines- no other anatomical highway explains the effects of acupuncture: it doesn’t work along the determined paths of blood vessels, nerves or lymphatics.
Had it not been for my horse’s dramatic reaction, I wouldn’t have known there was any treatment going on.
Not Cal, but another equally demonstrative horse
Cal is very demonstrative- in between manoeuvres he stretched, adjusted, licked and chewed. And got more and more soft blink sleepy.
And his posture improved, and the gymnastic schooling work went through better and better.
In a perfect world, correct schooling work in itself should be therapeutic. We all feel that our horses generally have a hollow side and a longer side. If we strengthen to equalise to the shorter hollow side we end up with stiff horses, equally contracted on both sides. If however we work on lengthening and decontracting the short stiff side to equal the length of the longer side of the body and then start to strengthen, we build strength on suppleness and the power can come through from behind without any blockage. The basic knowledge of gymnastic schooling is mostly lost now, in the rush for progress and prizes, few people know how to nor take the time to build the horse up into an athlete before using the power they offer. Hence why my search for a good instructor led me to a lady who lives on the south coast and visits us once a month for 3 day clinics!!
The hyoid and tongue apparatus of the horse is connected to the hocks by an uninterrupted fascial sheet, varying in thickness but nonetheless a pure connection. So any bit action which constricts the tongue and hyoid will also adversely affect the movement of the hind legs. This is the cause of the funky trots we see now in high level dressage horses: neck and head restricted, tongue tied down, hind legs strung out behind rather than coming through to take the rider up and forward.
Funky trot- back is hollow, hocks out behind, head and neck restricted due to excess pressure on the bit
In humans, our mostly sedentary lifestyles prevent us from riding well. We get told we need a strong core to absorb the horse’s movement, but actually it’s a stillness in motion we need to seek, not a stiff brace. Think walking along on a boat not surviving a ride on the Big One!
We need open flexible hip sockets, a nice flat back with good isometric tone of our front and back lines, as well as the line from armpit to hipbones. Most of us have over developed or tight back and shoulder muscles with weak contracted front lines. Strengthening a shorter front line will only increase the dysfunction- we need to open up the hip flexors before we can engage our ‘core’ to get the balance required between front and back lines. I found a human Physio to help with this- again with focus on MFR.
Matt from BackinAction isn’t quite as gentle as Babs; often it feels like a Chinese burn as he stretches creaky, stiff fascia, but after 6 months of breaking down the fuzz, I can now access front and back trunk muscles as required, and even use my hand or leg without the other joining in, and mostly without bracing or stiffness. This is progress indeed.
So quite rightly, there is a lot of buzz about the fuzz. Is your fuzz soft and pliable, or tough and stringy?
And how about your horse? Does his skin move smoothly over soft muscles or can you see stripes or striations in the muscle? Have you inadvertently strengthened a stiffness? Does he pound the ground or float softly?
Supple horses with soft pliable fuzz and efficient energy transfer last a lifetime- isn’t that what we would all wish for our dream partners?
How much attention do you pay to the fuzz? For you and your dancing partner?
I’ve been meaning to try an online dressage competition for ages, so when our blogging support group got an offer for free entries in return for blogging about the experience, I accepted with alacrity.
We were approached by Melissa of Dressage Riders Online.
I chose to do a novice test- this month’s allocation was N24, a test I have ridden once before.
Now, the first advantage of doing an online dressage competition is that no plaiting is required- as Cal has enough mane for 2 horses.
Cal showing off his double mane at dinner
This grows at top speed, no matter how much I pull and tidy, I have resigned myself to sewing in 19-21 plaits for any competitive outing.
19 Plaits looking a bit flat after overnight attack of the Lycra hood
No plaits is therefore a huge treat for me, although Cal quite likes looking smart.
The other advantage of online dressage competition is that you get to use your own familiar arena, without any diesel costs.
We don’t have our own arena. My lovely neighbour has a fabulous arena that I am fortunate to be allowed to use regularly- it’s secluded and peaceful, more or less next door, I hack there and I quite often have the place to myself. Cal generally goes beautifully there.
Until we needed to mark out a 20m x 40m space. I enlisted Gary’s help as arena builder and camera man and he, being a perfectionist, brought his massive tape measure to make sure it was marked out correctly. So as I was working in, we had slithery snake-like metallic tape measure and moving poles to contend with. It was also quite windy so the hedge monsters were out in force and the new patio umbrellas were waving gently.
Cal kept it together remarkably well and was working nicely so we decided to go for the first take. I stopped at C to pass the phone over the fence to Gary, who had to crawl through the electric tape to take it off me, and Zap!!! He got a proper shock!
Gary yelled and jumped, Cal jumped and then decided that C was obviously a really dangerous place to be! Another 10minutes of working in at that end, I eventually convinced him that it might be safe to approach the fence as usual.
After 3 takes we had a test I thought might be worth sending in. Just as well, it was the last possible filming day of the month- I’m a bit of a deadline queen.
I’m not the only blogger who benefited from the free trial of online dressage competition-
was quicker on the posting trigger and even managed to share a clip of her test video, showing stretching on a circle.
‘Uh oh’ I thought, ‘I’m pretty sure there’s no stretching on a circle on my video?’
Sure enough there wasn’t- whoops!
With no judge to beep when I’d gone off course, I had merrily missed out a whole movement!
Too late- month over, video gone in.
On the Tuesday evening as I was heading towards Mostyn for an evening show jumping lesson, Melissa messaged me to say my WeTransfer link wasn’t opening properly, she was off to work and could I send my test to the judge directly? As I was headed into deepest darkest Wales on my own in the truck, this wasn’t the best news!
I had a couple more tries on arrival at Mostyn but I really could not get the WeTransfer app to work correctly from my phone.
I finally managed to send a link to my YouTube channel (get me- total technophobe dunce- YouTube??), when I got home at 930pm, convinced I would be too late.
But no, the judge was lovely and kind and accepted my video.
And we came 2nd!!!
The test sheet and the rosette arrived a couple of days later.
Gorgeous rossie 😀
Helen Copeland is a list 5 BD judge from the North East. The comments were really positive and helpful, with none of the usual meaningless phrases
(‘could be rounder’, and ‘needs to be more over the back’ in particular being two phrases that are guaranteed to send the test sheet into the bin without me reading further)
and I thought the marks more than fair for our rather challenging day at home.
The marks would have been even better was there not a big fat 0 in the stretchy circle box!
And I love Haribos!
So would I do it again?
Definitely.
I feel it is important to ride tests occasionally, in order to identify the challenges in the work and the next areas of focus required in the training. Along with the discipline of doing a particular movement at the marker as well as when the right moment arrives.
We’ve taped the marker spots on the neighbour’s arena fence so set up next time should be quicker.
My limiting factor will always be finding someone to video, preferably without electrocuting themselves first, but now I’ve got the technology sorted, actually submitting the video should be easier.
And most importantly, this is the the first judge for ages who has put useful specific comments that seem to demonstrate an understanding of correct training.
Because we train our horses classically, which to me means as ethically, and as biomechanically correctly as possible, the modern obsession with over tempo horses and false roundness in front, no matter what else is occurring, has actually properly put me off formal dressage competition. Obviously when Eventing we have to do a test so we can get onto the XC course.
So I’m encouraged to try online dressage competition again, hopefully with Cal in a calmer frame of mind next time, and see if we can improve our test riding. And hopefully see some progression in our scores as he improves.
So a huge thank to Melissa from Dressage Riders Online for the chance to try out online dressage competition.
You have hooked me in as a regular customer from now on in.
I thoroughly recommend this lovely site for friendly help and ease of use. If I can manage the technical video sending bit then honestly, anyone else will be fine.
Thanks to Gary for filming – please note no Garys were harmed in the production of this movie 😂😂, and to Stacey for being the best horsey neighbour ever.
And to Cal, for simply being the best teacher one could wish for 😍😍
Cal after Shelford UA ODE- his back looks amazing these days
Fallacies and paradigms- 2 of my favourite new words. Are you operating within a false paradigm?
First question – what is a paradigm?
Are you operating within a false paradigm, i.e. a false belief system? How does this relate to horses? I hear you cry…
Let me use a personal example of operating within a false paradigm.
Some years ago there was an incredibly successful black dressage stallion from the Continent. He and his rider posted record breaking scores. His movement was spectacular- his forelegs seemed to reach for the sky, stretching far beyond where his nose pointed, and the crowd gasped and cooed. And the judges also gasped and cooed. The record breaking scores led me to believe that this sort of movement must be sought, a result of the pinnacle of skilful and careful dressage training.
At the time, I wanted to learn more about how to train my horse, from scratch, all the way though to magnificence. At the time the black stallion was the epitome of competitive magnificence in my eyes. He was scoring over 80% and winning every gold medal around.
So my paradigm: because this combination was winning everything, he must be the most correct rider, and the black beauty the most beautifully trained horse out there.
As I read and learned more, I started to read about Rollkur. This rider is a well known exponent of Rollkur, or LDR, or deep stretching, or whatever fluffy name the proponents choose to use. This is an abusive training method where the horse’s head is hoiked in behind the vertical to achieve control and submission. This deprives the horse of his sight and also the use of his neck. It was first used by Nicole Uphoff and a big horse called Rembrandt who was too hot for her to handle in competition situations. Rollkur allowed her to ride him under control. And she won…lots.
Rollkur also has a strange effect on the movement of the forelegs. It accentuates flinging of the forelimbs while failing to engage the hind limbs. It creates or accentuates spectacular forelimb movement, but not in a biomechanically sound way.
Rollkur for prolonged periods of time was banned by the FEI in competition and warm up in 2010, on the basis that it is abusive, and that training in this position is bad for the horse’s health and soundness.
But the effects of Rollkur, the unnatural spectacular gaits on a hollow back and an overbent neck, continue to be rewarded.
So as an amateur learning dressage, I studied those high scoring tests. I tried to reconcile how this hero of dressage, a sport espousing harmony and partnership, could be considered abusive? How could the results of an abusive training method be winning rides, when dressage is an art as well as a sport, and is all about harmony, and improving the physique of the horse?
I did this weird thing in my head- maybe Rollkur done skilfully isn’t abusive? Maybe he wasn’t actually doing Rollkur, but something very close to it? Maybe it was possible to train a horse to show that degree of forelimb extravagance without using Rollkur? Maybe the horse was bred with that movement and he was simply harnessing it? May be we needed better horses to win, not to be better riders?
BUT DRESSAGE SHOULD BE A TEST OF TRAINING? Alerich, Wily Trout, these were thoroughbreds with ordinary movement, who were made more magnificent by correct training.
At my sister’s riding club in Germany, a Fjord pony used to win regularly at their equivalent of PSG, because he was trained to be the best athlete he could be.
I watched the black stallion’s tests on YouTube, over and over. And as I watched them more, and read more, and learned more, I began to notice other stuff.
The black stallion actually had very good, large moving, but correct gaits as a youngster. The trot in the later work wasn’t regular. The diagonal pairs didn’t match. The hind legs were uneven, one almost hops behind. The head is mostly behind the vertical, not mostly in front occasionally coming to the vertical as required in the FEI rules.
There was little harmony- the curb was torqued horizontally on tight reins and the stallion straining to escape. And his eye still haunts me, now I know what pain looks like.
I was struggling to understand how something that didn’t fit the FEI’s own definitions of the movements required could score so highly. The judges are the protectors and guardians of our sport- why would they reward incorrect work so highly?
When I want to learn something, truly learn and understand something, I go to the best textbooks.
I’m a surgeon- to know how to operate on a human, one needs to know the anatomy, the physiology, the function, and the likely effects of intervention. When we are schooling our horses, we are doing daily mini operations, working to improve the form and the function. To do that we do need detailed knowledge.
The first book in my dressage collection was a gift, and a key find.
Yet the details it contained of correct movements and exercises were not evident in the tests I was watching, nor in all the photos in this book.
Then came Aachen. The black stallion by now had another rider- who was struggling to ride him as successfully. More ominously though, his gaits looked very uneven by now. He was deemed fit to compete at Aachen, but the videos of that test show obvious lameness. How could the best equine vets in the world have passed him fit to compete?
Then came Rio. Another Continental horse was passed fit to compete despite having been on intravenous painkillers and antibiotics overnight, having had a temperature of 40C and despite being in obvious, glaring pain in the warm up. The cause of the injury was first reported as fractured jaw, then a spider bite, but the cause is really immaterial. How could a true equestrian even contemplate competing their horse after a night like that? A human can choose to go out feeling ill, a horse needs us to speak for them.
And the vets should have spoken for the poor chestnut horse. The team vets did their best to get him into the ring- dubious but possibly understandable; their job is to look after the horses for the team, after all. But the official vets, those adjudicating, how did they let him warm up, let alone enter the arena?
So the best vets in the world, employed by the FEI to monitor the competition, to make sure our equine partners are happy athletes as stated in their directives, allowed a very ill horse to be saddle up, ridden in obvious pain, and proceed to the competition.
My paradigm at that time- these are the best horses in the world, trained to the highest standard, protected by the rules and by the most experienced professionals in the world, whose job is to uphold the rules.
It would seem that paradigm was false…
Are you operating within a false paradigm? What are your beliefs regarding your role as a trainer, rider and protector of your horse? Have you examined those beliefs, checked them against your knowledge, discovered the gaps in your knowledge and sought to fill those gaps? Or do you blindly accept, as I once did, that the experts must know best?
And most importantly, have you twisted the observations of your own eyes, ignored your own feel, to fit in with your current belief system? I know I did, I denied the evidence of my own eyes, argued with others who didn’t know much about horses, yet who saw discomfort and weirdness more clearly, until the cognitive dissonance within my own head was churning me up inside.
BTV, on the forehand, clawed left hand, C2/C3 highest point- at the time I was proud of this photo.
Luckily for me at the time, I had a very clear and outspoken horse, whose body and mind did not tolerate training that caused physical or psychological damage, no matter how much I loved him, and how genuine I was in wanting the best for him. For Paddy, and now for Cal and Rocky, trying hard wasn’t good enough, I have to learn to do it correctly.
BTV, short reins, short neck, hollow behind the saddle. Around the time of this photo we scored 72 in a test but Cal was turning his back on me when I presented him with a saddle.
Hands better, my position improving, neck coming out of shoulders correctly, chest broadening nicely, topline filling out, hindleg stepping through better
I was operating within a false paradigm.
I don’t have beliefs any more, or heroes, or idols. I have growing knowledge, an expanding skill set, and I have learned to listen to my horses.
Horses don’t have paradigms 🙂
Baby Rocky- neck and back need A LOT more muscle to support that head but floppy ears and nice steps. And I have elbows and a back!
I’m a surgeon- to know how to operate on a human, one needs to know the anatomy, the physiology, the function, and the likely effects of intervention. When we are schooling our horses, we are doing daily mini operations, working to improve the form and the function. To do that we do need detailed knowledge.
