Dynamic Unity

12/03/2024

The horse evolves constantly, and we need to evolve the same way. Mastering the forces around the Center of Mass, the new understanding of balance control, demands daily adaptation of many muscles, tendons, and fascia. As muscles and fascia evolve in constant coordination, the horse physique can evolve in improper coordination, and it is our job to feel and correct it. It is very easy to be fooled by feeling. We get used to an incorrect feeling. Working alone is a problem as we spend days or weeks before we realize that the horse went in the wrong direction, which is more difficult to correct. I faced this problem. My luck is that all my life, I have ridden four to eight or more horses per day. They were all different, and one helped me recognize the wrong evolution that another horse developed.
Video lessons are useful. After live training, they are the second most efficient solution, as I can point out a developing problem before it becomes a problem or even pathology. There is also the constant evolution of science and the refinement of the practical application. Many horse difficulties are easier to correct with today’s knowledge than they were a few years or even a few months ago. The concept of the Center of Mass, for instance, The evolution from linear thinking, makes possible an education that was a struggle, thinking that balance control was a linear control of forces. Before Steven Levin explained the Center of Mass, I felt the constant lateral shifts with every horse and felt they were part of balance control but not as important as they truly are. Today, instead of trying to increase the balance through the greater tone of my body or the false theory of shifting the weight backward, I focus on channeling the numerous and minute lateral shifts. It is easier and more effective.
The knowledge evolves constantly, and if we don’t evolve, we go backward. I don’t understand why riders need to believe that they know all. We talked about that with Betsy this morning. We have worked together for decades, and we are very comfortable with the fact that we need each other knowledge. Betsy evolves considerably in her riding, and I evolve considerably thanks to her scientific research. Without the practical application, the research goes nowhere, and we need to constantly question the practical application with new knowledge to go anywhere. The covered brutality, part of the equestrian world, tries to forcefully achieve what the training techniques cannot achieve. The reason is that conventional thinking reduces the horse’s part of the performance to obedience to the rider’s directive. This is arrogant and ineffective. The horse coordinates many systems that are out of reach of the rider’s control. Whatever authors believed was the result of their skill was, for a significant part, the horse’s willingness and sophisticated mental processing. Only now has science reached a level of understanding, exposing that horses have done it for centuries despite archaic and even false theories. Our authentic leadership is our knowledge, not our capacity to impose our views. Knowledge engenders intellectual modesty, allowing us to consider the horse’s reaction as a solution that might be better than anything printed in the book. This acceptance engenders respect and kindness.
Jean Luc

11/19/2024

Yellowstone fans that are real horse people got a little confusing information on the Sunday, November 17, 2024 episode. This popular show appears to take pride in its western production on being very authentic - yet some how they had a BIG mistake with treating a horse with intramuscular Banamine.

What is the BIG deal? In this Yellowstone episode a horse was administered Banamine (Flunixin Meglumine) intramuscularly. Yet the nonsteroidal, anti-inflammatory is only administered orally (in the mouth) or intravenously (in the vein). Remember Banamine is never recommend to be administered to horses any other way.

Why not? Banamine causes muscle damage when injected intramuscularly! There are spores of bacteria known as clostridium that can rest in healthy muscle; however, the bacteria may awaken if the muscle becomes damaged from an IM injection particularly when Banamine is administered this way. This may cause clostridial myositis - which is a serious and sometimes fatal disease. Post injection signs of a problem would be swelling and a painful injection site with gas underneath the skin. The bacterial toxins may migrate into the bloodstream causing depression, colic, fever and a lose of appetite. Treatment by a licensed DVM is necessary if you make this mistake. Supportive care, antibiotics, and possibly a surgical excision of the infected injected site may be necessary.

This episode of Yellowstone was a good reminder - what is entertaining may not always be real and correct. Check with your equine veterinarian if you are unsure how to administer Banamine.

11/15/2024

09/05/2024

09/05/2024

“Can you remember who you were before the world told you who you should be?” (Charles Buchowski)
Can you remember the rider you were before the equestrian world told you who you should be? Who you were was the real rider. Who you are entering the show ring is marketing. Carl Jung says we devote the first half of our life to forming a healthy ego. The second half is going inward and letting go of it. Once you enter the second half, you discover the real nature and value of your horse and, through your horse, the real person you are. The earlier you enter the second half, the better rider you become. Showing can be just ego, and you exploit a talented but dysfunctional horse until pathology ends his career. Showing can also be a partnership where your value is your capacity to prepare efficiently the horse’s physique for the athletic demand of the performance.

Teaching the horse to coordinate his physique efficiently is delightful. It quickly became the primary purpose of our life with the horse. The showing can be part of our partnership, but the pleasure in the show ring is the capacity to prepare the horse’s physique for the movement in one stride or two. Our value as a rider is the capacity to adjust to the situation when the preparation is not optimum, which includes not forcing the horse when his body coordination is not optimum. Once we reach this level of knowledge and ethics, the judge’s score is an insignificant detail. You leave the ring with a sound horse and pass the vet without needing another corticoid injection.

How can we liberate ourselves from the pressure created by the system? Simply by learning how the horse’s physique effectively functions. The concept of obedience to the rider aids lets us believe that we can micromanage each instant of the horse’s athletic performance. This is not the cutting age; it is the dark age. Advanced knowledge demonstrates that, to the contrary, the horse coordinates for the performance, numerous systems that are out of our physical influence. Advanced understanding of the horse’s body function sends the concept of obedience to the horse museum as a heretical belief that has hampered the horse’s performances for centuries. The horse willingly coordinates his physique for the performance. What we interpret as resistance or disobedience are difficulties related to the horse’s morphology or athleticism and the horse’s nature, which protects against muscle imbalance or other issues instead of analyzing them. If knowledgeable, we are the ones who can identify the cause of the horse’s difficulty and correct it through appropriate gymnastics. If we are not knowledgeable, we can learn. The practical application of new knowledge is a fascinating journey.

Tradition is the pressure of dead people. They never pretended to know all; they offered their experience as a work in transition, a stopover along the way. They believed the hind legs propel the body upward from their advanced position under the horse’s belly. Of course, this is not true, but they believe it is because the naked eye cannot register fast movements. It took advanced technology to realize that at impact and during the first half of the stance, the alighting hind and front legs excerpt a braking phase. It took research to understand the concept of storage and reuse of elastic energy. Yes, it is useful to engage the hind legs, but not for the reason our ancestors explained. The elastic energy stored in the tendons, fascia aponeurosis, and muscles during the decelerating phase is used for the propulsive phase. Science deeply changes the meaning of the classical literature. It is not the engagement of the hind legs that allows balance control; it is how the back muscles manage the hind legs thrust forward through the thoracolumbar and cervical spine.

This is where a paradigm shift is necessary. The hind legs induce a force into the thoracolumbar spine in the direction of motion. The back muscles, supported by the core muscles, convert the hind legs thrust into forward motion, horizontal forces, balance control, upward forces, and other forces. Traditional equitation principles don’t permit educating the back muscle efficiently. It is doable through harmonic tensegrity, a subtle interaction of forces between the rider and the horse’s whole physique. It cannot be done efficiently through biomechanical thinking. Biomechanics helps understand how the horse’s body functions, but the advanced understanding of fascial connection, close kinematics chain, and kinetic energy places the interaction between the rider and the horse at a more dynamic and sophisticated level. The horse can feel touches that are too subtle for a human to feel. When we are told ”more legs,” we are told a piece of advice that guarantees our failure. It is the same when we are told that fitting the saddle to the horse’s back muscles imbalance corrects the back muscles imbalance. It’s the same when we are told that trimming the hoof properly balances the whole horse. One element of truth needs to remain one element of truth, not the whole picture.

What fascinates me with the tensegrity approach, and this is true for the riders, and for the horses, it is to see horses and riders discover aptitudes that were there all along but burrowed under rules and regulations. Knowledge of equine biomechanics and the practical application of knowledge through the biotensegrity approach allows us to be who we are before the equestrian world told us who we should be.
Jean Luc

09/03/2024

“It is hard to tell which is worse: the large diffusion of things that are not true or the suppression of things that are true.” (Harriet Martineau)
Aggressive marketing largely diffuses things that are not true and pushes the rider into the corner. The problem is that most misinformation is based on an element of truth but is so distorted or inflated that it becomes misinformation.
The rider is at the center of the problem. The rider, not the saddle, can identify and correct back muscle imbalance. The rider is the one who can unload the forelegs, educating the horse’s back muscles to convert the hind legs thrust into upward forces, not the hoof care provider. The rider is the one who can prevent cervical arthritis, as many lesions observed in the necropsy room are consistent with compressive forces. Of course, the rider needs to evolve from an equitation compressing the horse between the hind legs and the bit. Trying to release a contracted muscle without considering whether it compensates for dysfunction in another muscle group could further imbalance and stress the affected joints.
The rider needs knowledge and the capacity to apply new knowledge. The rider can succeed but not by accepting to be pushed into the corner. The center of the equine peripheral industry is the rider. Therapies and shoeing help, but the rider is the one who can correct the kinematic abnormality before it becomes an injury. The rider can identify and correct the back dysfunction that causes the kinematics abnormality. But to do so, the rider needs the intellectual modesty to accept that the horse conceives and executes a large part of the performance. The rider assists the horse's mental processing. The concept of obedience to the rider’s aid is obsolete. Our task is to understand the performance’s athletic demand and assist and guide the horse’s mental processing in the right direction. We talk about evolving from biomechanics to biotensegrity because knowledge of body parts does not teach us how to coordinate them in action. We must jump into a new dimension where subtle nuances of our whole physique replace our hands, legs, and body weight..
Jean Luc

09/01/2024

A Natural Evolution.
The natural evolution from biomechanics is biotensegrity, which is the faculty to harmonize the complex functioning of the body parts. In the late nineteenth eighty. I wrote introductions to Biomechanics in the late Magazine Dressage and CT. Reductionists attacked me viciously, pretending to protect the classical approach. Forty years later, as I encourage thinking riders to explore Biotensegrity, the same type of reductionists attack me viciously, pretending to protect Biomechanics. Conclusion: reductionists reproduce but don’t evolve.
For long, I felt that the practical application of biomechanics demanded a new dimension. Many have tried integrating body awareness and therapies but have downgraded biomechanics’ evolution. When the therapy is the science of sophisticated motion, band-aids and thicker paddings defy the purpose, hampering the refinement of the motion. I knew that experience was helpful, but by experience, I mean experience riding and training high-level competition athletes. Not too many riders have this experience. Thinking deeper, I realized that experience erases many theories strongly supported at a lower level but ineffective at a higher level. Experience also replaces these elementary theories with a refinement of the whole physique and greater respect for the horse’s mental processing. Basically, extensive experience practiced Biotensegrity before Stephen Levin came up with the term Biotensegrity.
Evolution, for those intellectually capable of evolving, often commences with intuitive thoughts but supports and furthers the thoughts with extensive and constantly evolving knowledge. There is a constant battle between cult leaders who want to keep members of the cult within the theories they promote and intelligent minds who seek further knowledge. The aim of cult leaders is their ego. The aim of sensible riders is the horse, and the complexity of the horse’s body function demands an evolved form of riding and thinking. “In a mechanical system, the parts shape the whole, while in an organic system the whole shapes the parts.” Organic systems, are more flexible, adaptable, and evolving. The components of organic systems, such as the rider and the horse, interact with each other in complex and dynamic ways. Unlike mechanical systems, organic systems do not have a fixed set of rules dictating how they operate. Organic systems evolve and adapt based on the interactions of their components, and the system as a whole changes over time.
Mechanical thinking promotes relaxation as the cure for protective reflex contraction. There are no resting muscles in living anatomy and physiology. The non- linearity of collagen does not allow for zero tension in human contractile tissue. In other words, contractile tissues never rest. Biotensegrity understands that the efficiency of a tensegrity structure is the complex interaction of all the structure’s elements. Tightening or releasing one element alters the function of the whole structure. Mechanical thinking remains at the level of obedience to the rider’s aids. Biotensegrity thinking understands that the horse is the one who can efficiently orchestrate complex systems with the rider’s assistance.
All along, horses have done a lot more than academic equitation ever understood. Horses have achieved different levels of balance control despite theories believing that the hind legs propel the horse’s body upward from their advanced position under the belly. The theory is false, and science has explained that for decades. At impact and during almost the first half of the stance, the alighting hind and foreleg produce first a braking phase resisting impact forces and converting impact forces into elastic energy stored in the tendons, fascia muscles, ligaments aponeurosis, and used for the propulsive phase and the swing. Theologians believe that the hind legs propel the body upward, and scientific measurements have demonstrated that the hind legs’ thrust is primarily a force in the direction of motion.
Since Richard Tucker’s 1964 study of the biomechanics of the vertebra column, the evolution of knowledge constantly upgrades how the hind legs’ thrust is converted into balance control by the back muscles. We have evolved from the linear theory of balance control, which supported riders’ actions such as half halt, to the actual understanding of the Center of Mass, which explains that balance is the horse’s ability to center the forces above and around the Center of Mass. Now, we need to think at a different level. Balance control is our ability to channel the forces in the direction of the motion and around the Center of Mass. Reductionists will claim that the concept of narrowing is included in the classical theory of straightness. Now. I defy the reductionists to provide a sound and factual explanation of the rider’s aids capable of centering the forces above and around the Center of Mass.
We explain the process in our four different online courses. It is a complex process, and the rider’s ability to evolve from mechanical thinking is the greatest evolution. Many succeed and enjoy a new relationship with their horse. The evolution from Biomechanics to Biotensegrity is a natural evolution. It is not one or the other, as the biomechanical knowledge evolves constantly. So does the understanding of Biotensegrity, but without the evolution to Biotensegrity, riders try to apply new knowledge, tightening the bolt to secure the joint and the horse develops pathology.
Jean Luc

08/25/2024