Veterinary physiotherapist and BHS Stage 3 coach based in Aberystwyth, West Wales 🏴
16/02/2025
There’s always a lot of opinions about training aids so I thought I would pick on one each time so I can focus more on the individual effects.
First up ……… THE PESSOA!
So taken from the website:
“Based on the principles of pressure and release, the Pessoa helps to place the horse in a better position to assist muscle build-up and increased use of the horses back muscles.”
The whole concept of the Pessoa forces the body of the horse into a position that it might not be strong to maintain, resulting in compensatory movements potentially leading to injury.
Like the majority of training aids, the Pessoa has an element of head and neck control. They talk about pressure and release but the only ‘release’ the horse gets when they tuck behind the vertical as you can see in all 3 pictures. When a horse constantly works behind the vertical, their muscle development is far from correct! A posture in which the poll is low and the head is behind the vertical is not natural for the horse. You can see over flexion between C2 and C3 which leads to an overdevelopment of the splenius muscle, resulting in weakness through other important neck muscles.
The Pessoa has to be used with a roller. It has been shown that a roller causes pressure points on the spine, and with the Pessoa attached, this pressure becomes greater than the amount that is thought to cause back discomfort (MacKechnie-Guire et al, 2018). This pressure would increase on a spine with poor musculature, so consider that. If your horse is rehabbing from an injury, the likelihood is that their spinal stabilisers would be weak. Adding a Pessoa workout into that rehab is likely to cause pain, and it has been shown to have a negative effect on longissimus dorsi which is a main trunk stabiliser. If the back is weak, it is likely that the core is weak, and with one of the big trunk stabiliser muscles being negatively impacted, everything ‘drops’ with no engagement.
The Pessoa also has been proven to affect whole horse locomotion. Walker et al (2013) has shown that animals ‘working’ in the Pessoa experience a reduction in speed, stride length, head angle and lumbosacral angle. When used on a horse with sufficient back musculature, the Pessoa does not increase the effort put in by longissimus dorsi so it begs the question why use it at all?
The ‘benefits’ stated on their website can be achieved without rushing the horse or tying their heads down, using polework, hill work and other methods!
As with everything to do with horses, every day is a school day and to show that we can all learn and adapt our way of thinking, I have added a picture of my own horse working in the Pessoa highlighting the issues that come from it.
What are your thoughts and experiences with Pessoa use?
