06/24/2025
TRAIN YOUR EYE, PART 2
What movement did I use to encourage this horse to come up from behind the vertical, without using my hands?
THE ANSWER:
Shoulder-in on a circle.
Not as a sustained exercise, but as medicinal steps for rebalancing.
I didnât do anything different in my body to magically make this happen.
Iâm just staying in the middle, and using inside leg to outside rein, and allowing him to bring his head and neck up naturally.
Iâm focusing our attention to a very specific body partâŚ
The stifle.
Itâs his knee, essentially, and I can feel it bend and engage forward and upward toward me, creating angles in the rest of the hindlimb that absorb and recoil energy like a spring.
I can also feel when it stays flat, creating a singular limb angle they lever over like a crutch⌠right onto their forehand.
If a horse is braced in their stifles and pelvis, it doesnât matter how much we try to activate the thoracic sling, the hindquarters are going to keep driving them onto their shoulders.
If the stifles arenât engaging, the pelvis isnât engaging, and the âgluteal bridgeâ into the long back muscle that attaches to the base of the neck isnât engaging to help lift the forehand from back to front, so weâre just going to have tension in the thoracic sling that doesnât go anywhere.
To add injury to insult, if weâre over-extending the horseâs topline forward and down in an attempt to force the thoracic sling to engage, or get a faux lift in the back via the ligaments, weâll be tractioning on the bridge from front to back, locking the pelvis forward, and introducing lumbar strain (if you see roaching or inflammation in the lumbar as a result of one of those programs, please stop!)
Donât get me wrong, there are times when we need to address a specific concern in the poll, or the sling, or the ribcage, etc., but the reason why most programs plateau, is because they fail to approach the horse classically- from the hindquarters, forward.
I get it. Most of us arenât taught to ride back to front, and because even the traditional lateral maneuvers that are taught to try to address this are often taught in a way that is counterproductive, we often resort back to riding the front end and the shoulders
We can also fall into the dead end of a misinterpretation of, âcalm, forward, straight.â
Itâs not, âride them straight,â itâs, âset them straight,â by working each side equally.
Riding only straight definitely has its place, itâs what weâre going to be doing the majority of the time, but itâs has limits in rehabilitation and development of the horse as an athlete, which they are by nature, and which they have to be to carry us safely.
It can also give us the false impression that weâve overcome resistance like coming behind the vertical, if weâre simply letting the horse run into their shoulders. But as soon as we attempt to rebalance the horse unilaterally or bilaterally, that issue will pop back up.
WHY do horses get locked up in the hindquarters, and therefore the shoulders and head and neck?
Sometimes itâs the result of them being in a flight state, the limbs thrusting horizontally.
Even when a horse is no longer in a flight state, that movement pattern can remain.
Most often, itâs from confusion during early training, because they learned to brace their whole body and never learned they can keep moving their hindquarters freely into guidance from the hand. This can go all to way back ďżźto how they were introduced to leading, where it wasnât initiated from the hindquarters.
In these cases, the muscles arenât necessarily weak, so much as theyâre temporarily âoff-line,â and the horse doesnât think they have access to them.
Sometimes itâs individual weakness or asymmetry.
A lot of people guessed leg yield, and they were close, but leg yield, thereâs too much energy lost through the outside legs stepping out.
The bend in shoulder-in wraps around the inside hind leg to keep it gathered, so that it doesnât just cross over too much and lose the stifle engagement.
Less is more. Iâm not actually looking for a lateral step, Iâm just using the feeling of a lateral step to engage the stifle.
(In true classical lateral work, there should be no lateral shearing like we see in exaggerated lateral movements and disengagements that damage the joints. Thatâs why they are safe even for young or hypermobile horses.)
For this guy, this approach resulted in an activation from stifle to pelvis to glutes to longissimus, back to front, that allowed him to lift the base of the neck and support with the thoracic sling, to slow down and rebalance, and his poll just naturally came up as a result.
I will note that shoulder-in MUST be balanced by haunches-in work, working the outside leg, outside leg to inside rein, and that for many horses, counter shoulder-in and renvers are better for rebalancing, but all the exercises have their place.
Less is more. Use your lateral steps mindfully, to rebalance a few steps, then release and let the horse walk and stretch and rest those muscles.
The explanation of whatâs happening is complicated, but the ex*****on is simple.
See if you can move a hind leg over a step, even on the trail, then let them walk forward.
Let the fence or the trail contain the outside hind for you so you arenât just fishtailing.
Get a feel for it, donât be intimidated by it.
PART 1:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19FfE3SZ4F/?mibextid=wwXIfr
