“I am getting better with my timing and can finally balance him some of the time.
He is unbalanced normally by bulging out through his right shoulder and left hind can also fall out. If I keep my outside leg and rein on him I can keep him fairly straight.
He tends to fall forward and get heavy in my hands but if I utilize circles, some lateral work and half half’s I can bring him back some of the time.
He is getting straighter and can hold himself a little more now but still needs a lot of correction.”
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This is a pretty typical description that gets sent to me for a consult on a horse.
To most of us, this sounds like all too familiar problems and something that normal riders and trainers deal with on a day to day basis.
But the more I learned about the development of bodies, their actions and how they work in motion, the more I realized that these are not training issues.
They’re developmental ones.
We’re taught to train the horses by repetition, micromanaging and “holding them together”.
Which is about as effective as me always tying my sons shoes and never letting him struggle through the learning process with my giving him gentle redirection.
It doesn’t work.
When I read the above email, what I hear instead is -
“I am getting better with my timing and can finally balance him some of the time.”
- He is not developed enough to properly carry a rider and thus needs to “be balanced” instead of having it on his own.
“He is unbalanced normally by bulging out through his right shoulder and left hind can also fall out. If I keep my outside leg and rein on him I can keep him fairly straight.”
- He doesn’t have a developed thoracic sling to keep his center of gravity where it needs to be and is likely underdeveloped in his abductor muscles.
Both of which would allow him to comfortably lead with the front end of his body, and so without them he goes to answer the question with his hind end.
“He tends to fall forward and get heavy in my hands but if I utilize circles, some lateral work and half half’s I can bring him back some of the time.”
- He’s not developed in his trapezius and pectorals and has gone to use his under neck and poll to hold himself upright, and instead of helping him find the right muscles to activate, he’s instead being micromanaged until he finds another shitty compensatory pattern to make the desired effect happen.
“He is getting straighter and can hold himself a little more now but still needs a lot of correction.”
This last one is really the heart of if all -
What if horses didn’t need correction to find straightness?
What if we instead just looked at all of these things as symptoms?
Invitations to look deeper inside of “why” the horse can’t perform that movement?
If a horse cannot do a movement, it’s because he’s struggling with accessing that part of his body.
So let that session be about helping them find it, and then go from there.
We need to shift our lens of training from one of micromanagement to support and correct to one of allowing the horse to fail.
Let them fail and show us when they go into biomechanical failure so we can gently redirect them back to a better way of moving when that happens.
Unlocking the body, one developmental training session at a time
The above listed horse is now tracking along balanced and happy with little to no redirection.
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