04 May The Masterful Student #13
Our young PRE stallion Xander is a right-handed (hoofed?) horse. He is more comfortable and bendable when going right. From our very first rides, I could feel how it was easy for him to shorten the right side and to stretch the left. Ever since, we spend a lot of time going left, gradually teaching him to accept the aids on the left and respond with some left bend in his body. All that time going left has paid off and now I feel a development that’s surprising although common: the difficult side is easier and the formerly easy side has new challenges!
Now that we’re training shoulder in and travers (haunches in), I have more sophisticated and targeted tools to straighten and strengthen Xander’s body. In dressage we focus on symmetry to make the horse more even in his work, more rideable, and to promote long term soundness.
The horse’s spine is like a fly rod, in that it is more bendable as you move toward the tip, and less bendable in the middle and end. When we’re riding lateral work, it’s important to be aware that the rider isn’t just bending the tip of the fly rod (the neck.) However, when starting young horses in lateral work, sometimes that is exactly what happens. They understand the bend in the neck before they understand the bend in the body. It takes some time to educate them to the leg and to create bend in the body, which is what moves the horse’s body into a curve, and off the wall into three or more tracks.
If the rider starts too early with too much outside rein, trying to get the displacement and tracking in the shoulder in right away, they can actually shorten the outside of the neck and put the horse in a slight counter-bend. Or, the horse will do that itself when it feels the stiff rein on the outside and doesn’t want to move into that rein in a nice curve.
Over-riding the outside rein in the shoulder in and creating counter-bend (or letting the horse counter bend) is not fruitful, as it negates one of the primary purposes of the shoulder in: to stretch the outside curve of the horse’s body so that the rider can address the horse’s asymmetry.
As my husband Paul wrote in his recent article on lateral work in The Horse Magazine, it is the ‘green stick theory.’ He says, “Because of handedness, you have to use the green stick approach. If a green stick is bent to the right, you bend it to the left and then when you let it go, it is straight. If your young horse carries its haunches constantly it seems to the left, you can use lateral exercises in the opposite bend to correct the crookedness and even out the asymmetry.”
The other purpose of the shoulder in is to bring the inside hind leg further under the horse’s body and cause that leg to carry more load. The rider is teaching the horse to tip the inside hip under, which is a baby step toward collection, shifting the weight toward the hindquarters.
Early in the lateral work, the rider might have to prioritize bend if the horse really crooked, and worry about loading later. However, this doesn’t mean that you should ride your young horse with a huge amount of bend and displacement. Rather it is the opposite, you should gradually develop bend beginning with shoulder-fore and avoid excessive sideways movement, which can put the horse on the forehand.
You may also start to notice unevenness in the contact when you start lateral work, that the horse is reluctant to take a feel of the rein on the soft or empty side, and wants to hold all of the contact on the stiff or heavy side. So don’t forget, as you are teaching the horse to bend, you are also trying to keep the horse moving up into both reins and not taking all the contact on his preferred side. You will notice this in both directions – that if the horse is stiff on the left rein for example like Xander, he will want to carry more contact in the left rein whether I am going left or right. I joke that some horses could be ridden with just a single rein because they never use the other!
Recently, as Xander became more accepting and softer on the left rein, I felt that he was falsely light on the right rein. Because he was always transferring the contact to the left rein, he wasn’t really accepting the right. Xander wants to overbend on the right, collapsing his neck to avoid the contact on the right side.
It’s often the hollow or empty side that is harder to ride, because the horse won’t take a connection there, overbending or not following the empty rein. The stiff side, while often heavy, can sometimes be easier to ride because there is a clearer connection.
When Xander starts to outsmart me and gets too uneven in the contact, I have two things I can do to get him back in both reins: I can make a simple circle, or I can ride serpentines. Making these changes of direction with good balance and regular tempo helps Xander move from rein to rein smoothly and with control. The key is to ride a very straight section for several steps so the horse steps smoothly up into both reins and understands the change of bend as a process from one side to the other. The key is not throwing them right and left. The spine needs to straighten on its way to the other bend, and the new inside hind leg needs to engage as the hips change position to go the new direction.
Riders who are always developing or correcting bend with the reins are missing the point. The rider must get used to moving the horse’s ribcage or torso. Their feeling and thinking must be concentrated on the body, not just the neck. This will help to supple the stiffer parts of the spine and stabilize the neck, especially in horses that have very bendable necks.
Typically, we can ride in our outdoor arena in early March, but this year we had a long, cold, wet spring in Pennsylvania. In early April we finally had a few warm days that dried the footing and we were outdoors in the sun at last! I set aside all the lateral work and concerns about bend to focus on the simplest factor of young horse training – accustoming Xander to a new environment. Our outdoor is a novel space for Xander – he was started in our round pen last summer and then graduated to the indoor for the fall and winter.
Our outdoor arena sits alongside a country road which although not overly busy, certainly has its share of noisy farm equipment rumbling by, school buses, UPS trucks, people cycling, walking dogs or pushing baby carriages. There’s a lot to see and some of it appears quite quickly!
I took a couple of days to simply lunge Xander outside and let him see the real estate. There was some excited leaping around the first day where he showed me his potential career as a bullfighting horse. He had his share of playful scoots and bucks, but by the second day was already much calmer. He seemed more excited about the large open space than he did about the traffic on the road, which was a good sign.
I’m including some pictures here of Xander’s early shoulder in work, not perfect but fairly symmetrical and obedient.
