15/12/2024
Something to think about….
Healthy Balance
What is it and why is it so important?
Balance applies to everything in life.
All living things can survive against a large margin of error.
But to thrive they need healthy balance.
A tree needs a healthy balance of water and heat.
A human needs a healthy balance of work and life.
And horses are no different.
Horses need a species appropriate lifestyle, environment, hoof and body care to name just a few.
And a healthy horse balance applies to their physical, psychological and emotional state.
In fact l believe that horses need even more healthy balances in their lives than humans because they are trying to survive as an equine species, navigating their way through a human species world.
And this human world is controlled by different communication systems, human centred goals, belief systems, cultures and the plethora of opposing human traits.
Most of us have heard the word balance associated with riding and most of us will have our some sort of interpretation of what we think that means.
But balance is difficult for riders due to many physical and psychological life conditioning experiences.
Balance is even more difficult for horses when they are carrying an unbalanced human on their equine purposed backs.
Loss of balance for a horse has a profoundly damaging physical and psychological effect on them. This is because from an equine evolutionary perspective healthy balance can mean the difference between life and death.
Historically as riders we are taught to follow the relentless dogmatic school exercises which allegedly provide the horse with balance and schooling.
Yet this traditionally regurgitated belief system provides the horse with nothing but psychological distress and damaged compensatory muscles.
I used to believe that l was riding my horse in the arena for schooling because when l was younger this is what l had been taught.
What l didn’t realise was that although l had put my belief and trust in the experts, they didn’t know how to school a horse anymore than l did.
To try and explain a little bit of how rider balance affects a horse, l have been teaching this analogy for years.
Imagine carrying a toddler on your shoulders through a toy shop with all of those magical coloured attractions.
Your toddler will automatically reach over to touch and grab those irresistible cuddly toys.
Now when your toddler learns over, they automatically unbalance you and you will feel your body being pulled over.
You would automatically use compensatory muscles to rebalance both of you back to vertical so that you both don’t fall over.
This is your instinctive human survival response.
You, unlike your horse, have the added human benefit of holding onto your toddler to stop them from falling off and to rebalance them.
As riders we are predators on prey animals’ backs and we continually unwittingly unbalance our horses from above.
The consequence of this for the horse is to display every equine evolutionary response with their movements and expressions in an effort to survive.
But when we don’t know about or don’t listen to these communication presentations, then the only option left is for our horses to shut down.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Simple laws of physics can help us be better riders on the horses who weren’t designed to carry us.
I always think that you shouldn’t maintain a position on a horse that you couldn’t sustain on the ground.
If you don’t sustain yourself when you ride, then you become an even bigger unnecessary burden for your horse which triggers a negative domino effect on their psychological and physical equilibrium.
When a rider learns to ride a horse with balanced posture and synchronisation, then it is not only kinder, but it keeps both horse and rider safer, healthier and balanced in both body and mind.
