Part 2

     It is a beautiful morning and you can hardly wait to get on your horse. This future Olympian is four years old and you have ridden him for the past two months. At first he did not want to walk, and when he did, it was with stiff legs and unable to follow even a straight line. Once he mastered the walk you asked him to trot and he seemed to struggle with the same lack of balance. That too became better but he still drifts and leans in the corners or on circles. You did not ask for any circles smaller than 20 meters, for that was obviously difficult enough for him. When he offered a canter, you took it and he handled it well. This time his trouble with his balance showed as a heavy leaning on the bit. To assess your horse one would say he is unbalanced, weak, and therefore a bit tense. This is typical for a horse his age and level of training. Due to his willing attitude he has already shown a great deal of improvement and should have a bright future.

     What are you going to work on today? My suggestion is to strive towards pre-riding looseness and rhythm. What I mean by looseness is the total absence of tension in his body and mind. This is not to be mistaken for suppleness (step two on the scale). The loose horse is using its muscles just enough to keep moving while the supple horse is relaxed in its mind but its muscles are hard at work. You have observed your horse in his pasture or paddock and know that his gaits are clean; he has a 4-beat walk, a 2-beat trot and a 3-beat canter. These beats repeated at equal intervals create the rhythm that is the absolutely necessary basic requirement for successful training. Working with gaits that are clean in their beat and rhythmic is just as important for him today as it will be the day when he is at the top of his game.

     One of the reasons I gave for your horse’s problems in dealing with the weight of the rider was weakness. This lack of strength is what slows training down so much. We can teach a horse the aids for all the movements in a short period of time. It is the development of the strength necessary to execute them correctly under the rider that takes so much time, patience, and hard work.

     Strength is another variable in our system of training. As we work our horses with rhythmic gaits and supple muscles, these muscles grow both in strength and in volume enabling the horse to perform the ever more difficult exercises without tension. While this seems like stating the obvious, it must not be considering how often we see riders with problems on a 20m circle try to fix it by forcing the horse onto a 10m circle. Unfortunately such actions often appear to help. Rest assured they do not. By forcing a horse to execute a task beyond his physical ability, you have given him the option to either endure punishment or find an evasion. Given the same option, what would you do? One of his evasions would be to reduce the strain on the muscles by stiffening the joints. Unless this rider returns to the basics and starts to strengthen her horse before she asks for more difficult work, this action will show negative consequences every step of the way. A less noticeable but more pervasive and more difficult result to correct may also be the horse’s loss of confidence in both himself and his rider.

    The term, balance, has made its way into this article on several occasions, so I believe it is worth a closer look. When we first mount the young horse, we upset its natural balance. The horse was moving on the forehand, shifting its weight back onto the hindquarter only at moments of excitement, either playing or fighting. This arrangement served the horse well and will always be its first choice. When under saddle, the horse must carry additional weight and obey the will of a rider. For these reasons this balance is no longer sufficient and the horse must rebalance itself towards its hindquarter. The horse does not know that and would continue to struggle with the additional weight and the need to obey instantly even when it is physically unable to do so. We all have seen the pictures of frustrated riders and horses with pained expressions on their faces. You, the rider, however, do know that your horse must rebalance to be prepared to do the job. The first and absolute minimum requirement would be that you restore the horse to its natural balance with you, the rider, on board. That means that the horse must carry the same percentage of the total weight on the front legs that it did before you added your tack and yourself to its weight. Naturally he would not move with this distribution of weight, but it is also not unnatural for him to shift his center of gravity back a bit since he has done that many times playing.

     You may remember the question I asked at the beginning of this article: What are you going to do today? You are going to let your horse discover his new natural balance. You can not teach him since you do not yet have a common language. You just get on, establish a light contact with his mouth, and carefully prod him forward. Under any circumstance avoid the attempt to form him. His system can not yet deal with it and resistance would be inevitable. You are up there in a light seat, you feel a gentle contact with his mouth, and you are using any means you think will make him move better forward without frightening him. As soon as he responds, you will feel the contact become stronger. Do not give in to this pressure! Instead, resist it with steady hands and massage slowly with the inside rein to encourage him to relax the poll and push himself off the bit and start to chew. This pushing off is the first step of his to move his center of gravity back just a little bit. This action must be rewarded instantly by you in that you stop asking for more forwardness and allow him to be in harmony with you. Many positive effects are happening now. His mind settles, his muscles learn to work slightly differently and grow in strength. He learns that if he tries to please, this work is not all that bad. He is getting the first hints of a language; prodding legs mean move forward. Little by little he is letting go of the tension in his back, the neck drops down a notch, and his movement is becoming rhythmic. So by returning the horse to its pre-riding looseness and balance you have fulfilled step one of the training pyramid; Rhythm.

     Here we already have the first example of how, although concentrating on one step of the pyramid, we also improved upon the requirements of other steps. To help our horse rebalance, we pushed it forward and asked it to relax its back and stretch into the bit. By doing that we turned the natural looseness of the horse into the suppleness of muscles that are working correctly. By making sure that the horse kept its rhythm this suppleness caused it to stretch and accept the contact with the bit, turning it into a connection. Please do not let that distract you from working the pyramid in its given order. Remember experience has shown us that you can not, for instance, perfect step two to a ten until you have trained step one to the best your horse is capable of. Let me try that again. Your horse can not become as supple in his movement as he can be at this stage of his training unless he moves in rhythm. Another way to look at it is that a horse can move in rhythm while still tense, but it can not be supple while its movement is erratic. This means that the pyramid requires of the rider to be as firm in some things as it is and at the same time to be as flexible as necessary to move your horse along. This then defines the pyramid as a guideline for training and not an absolute prescription.

     Reading the last chapters carefully, you probably have already noticed the close connection between the first three steps of the scale. Before we can start forming the horse we must have rhythmic movement, supple muscles, and a horse willing to accept the rider’s aids through a soft connection. Steps one to three have been called the familiarization phase of the scale. During this part of the training, strive to help the horse deal with the new facts of life. Where there was play, there is now work. The Alfa horse in the field has been replaced by a human. This young horse has to adjust from living in the great outdoors to apartment dwelling. From doing pretty much as it pleased, it must now obey at all times. For the horse there are many changes beyond what meets the eye, and time and patience are well spent here to allow the youngster to overcome insecurities, maybe even fear, and develop confidence in itself and its rider.

     Allow me to digress a little from explaining the pyramid to mention two more points that are not directly parts of it but will, in my opinion, contribute a great deal to its success. One is the need to have an experienced and sensitive rider guide the horse through the first three steps. If that is not possible, an experienced professional should act as the mentor of a sensitive rider with a secure seat. The youngster is just too impressionable at this stage of his training and mistakes made now, especially if they stay uncorrected, will negatively affect all future training. The second point I want to mention is to please vary the location of your training as much as possible and include riding outdoors. If you can do it in the company of experienced horses, that is even better. Riding in a field or on trails will help so much to settle the nerves of a young horse. It will make it surefooted and at the same time will encourage it to move out, instilling in the horse the desire to go forward. That is step four in the pyramid and will have to wait until the next ride.

                                          End of Part 2