Terra Equestrian

10/21/2024

10/16/2024

09/23/2024

Onyx was naughty like this

09/03/2024

Kylan Thulin-Gizzi loves horses. Particularly those small in stature. This year, he is headed to the Thurston County Fair with his two small horses.

08/08/2024

“When you are angry you will find that you have lost yourself. You have lost yourself to outside forces. Your actions are no longer seeking to benefit your life. You must center yourself, allow yourself to calm down and postpone the making of decisions to a time when you have stabilized.”
― Avina Celeste

Art Credit: Morgan Cameron

01/29/2024

01/28/2024

01/24/2024

08/30/2023

At some point, if someone rides numerous horses, along will come one who has either been draw-reined or hauled on to the point that the horse curls behind the vertical and pretty much goes there as its default position.

There’s a truism that it is much easier to mess up a horse’s mouth than it is to repair it, so the best way, obviously, is to never create the behind-the-bit situation, but that is not the issue once it has been established.

Sometimes a bitless bridle or a mild hackamore will help, if the tension is in the actual mouth, and the horse has learned to fear the bit. Sometimes lots of walking on a long or loose rein will help reestablish trust. But sometimes that curling under has become so ingrained that it never entirely goes away.

Behind the bit is usually posture created by humans. Many good trainers are super careful about “placing the head” and similar concepts, because they would rather have the horse above the bit than behind the bit.

The idea being that it is so much easier to carefully and gradually get a horse to soften in its head and neck and poll posture than it is to undo the tendency to curl once it has been implanted by bad riding.

And yet, despite that, we see and hear so much “stuff” about head set, and there is so much tack, so many bits designed to “place” the head.

Try to “unplace” an over-flexed horse to understand how much risk strong hands and the wrong equipment can produce, and how hard it is to repair the damage.

08/29/2023

08/22/2023

07/25/2023

07/22/2023

A surprising number of riders, including many with experience, bounce in the saddle at the canter. As the pace of the canter increases, the bouncing tends to increase. Riders who cannot sit the canter try to use various means to avoid the discomfort. Standing in the irons in various ways is a common "fix".

The reason riders bounce in the canter is because the movement of their hips is restrained by their shoulders being closed and tight. Closing one's shoulders stops the hips from moving forward in a synchronized or unified way with the movement of the horse when cantering.

Changing a rider's position by opening their shoulders can be helpful. Here I offer an image of the rider moving their hips freely like a child's swing. I have employed this image effectively when teaching riders to sit the canter. I tell riders who bounce at the canter to envision their body as the chains or ropes hanging from the top of a swing set's frame, with their shoulders along the top horizontal pole of the swing's frame. I ask the rider to open and push their shoulders back and open to make a straight line between their shoulders in the most relaxed manner they can. Then, when cantering, I tell them to envision their body swinging freely back and forth like the swing.

It is useful to also explain that the 1-2-3 beats of the canter are not on a single arc plane exactly like the seat of the swing, but rather there is a rotational movement in the swing of the three beats of the canter. After the rider opens up their shoulders and lets their upper body and hips swing with the horse's motion at the canter, they begin to feel the elliptical rotation of the horse's back in their hips during the 1-2-3 beats of the gait. At this step I use an image of an egg on its side to help them envision and feel the elliptical movement at the canter. When the rider is relaxed and they let the horse's movement move their body, they stop bouncing and can sit deep in the saddle at the canter.

This teaching method works with most students. When it does not, it is usually because the rider is carrying excessive tension in the upper body. I address this by having them walk, slowly trot and sometimes canter, in a circle on a lunge line with their arms outstretched like wings with no stirrups. This is important work because both the horse and rider greatly benefit from reducing and removing the rider's body tension that causes them to bounce at the canter.

02/21/2023

01/31/2023

What distinguishes a mustang to most people is the freeze brand on the left side of his neck.

01/07/2023

I don’t totally agree with this, but it’s some food for thought 💭

WHY NOT OUTSIDE REIN IN TURNS

I get quite a few riders who come to clinics who have a background in dressage to some degree. Perhaps the most challenging thing most face at one of my clinics is my suggestion they let go of the idea of using “inside leg to outside rein” when turning or circling. The use of inside leg to outside rein is pervasive in the dressage world and one of the first things that is taught to a young rider. I was taught it when I was a teenager. There are many times when the outside rein should be applied, but creating a balanced turn or circle is not one of them.

For the purposes of this essay, I am going to confine the discussion to the use of the outside rein. Perhaps I will talk about the rider’s inside leg in another post.

When I ask people why use the outside rein to help a horse turn to the inside there are two common explanations.

1. First, the outside rein blocks the horse from overbending its neck in response to the inside rein. In other words, the inside rein flexes the horse's neck to the inside, but the outside rein blocks it from bending too much.

2. Secondly, when turning or circling, many horses are unbalanced and will drift to the outside of the turn. To keep the horse on the line of the turn or circle, the outside rein can be applied to block the horse’s shoulders from drifting to the outside. In other words, when circling to the left the outside rein can stop the horse’s shoulders from outside of the line to the right, as if the outside rein was a fence.

(Some teachers will tell students to use the outside rein to encourage a horse not to fall on its forehand. However, that is a totally other topic and best saved for another time).

Q. What do these two explanations have in common?
They are both examples of a horse not accurately following the feel of the inside rein.

Q. Why doesn’t the horse follow the feel of the inside rein?
Because the rider is using the reins to only move the feet and ignoring directing the thought.

I will remind you of the two axioms, “a horse is always trying to do what its strongest thought is” and “everything a horse does begins with a thought to do it.”

So when it is necessary to apply the outside rein to maintain balance and straightness it is because the inside rein is only being used to move the feet and body and NOT to help a horse have the idea to turn or circle. The connection between the horse’s mind and the inside rein is broken.

Let’s look at the two explanations for using the outside rein.

1. The outside rein blocks the neck from overbending.
If the connection to the inside rein was soft and accurate, the degree of the bend of the horse’s neck would be equal to the amount of feel on the inside rein. A stronger feel equals more bend and less feel will result in less bend.

2. The drift of the shoulders to the outside of a turn or circle is caused by the horse’s mind thinking to the outside. It’s a resistance to the feel of the inside rein instead of going with the feel with its thought. It’s like a feel on the lead rope causing a horse to pull back. But instead, it is the feel on the inside rein causing the horse to pull to the outside.

Imagine buying a new car. The salesman tells you, “when you want to turn left, turn the steering wheel to the left but make sure you have a friend in another car on your right lane who can bump into you when the car drifts to the right.” Would you really want to drive that car?

To summarise, the outside rein is a bandaid to cover up the errors caused by a horse not understanding how to follow the feel of the inside rein with its thought. The outside rein addresses only the symptom of crookedness when a horse is turning, not the cause. It does work to keep a horse on the line of the turn, but it does not ever fix the problem of a horse not following with the feel of the inside rein.

Sometimes a student will explain to me that almost the entire world of dressage is committed to the outside rein when turning a horse. People have been using it for hundreds of years. The great masters of the French, Italian, Russian, Spanish, German, and English schools have preached the use of the outside rein. So who am I to say otherwise?

I think I know why the use of the outside rein became popular, but I can’t explain why it is still popular. Tradition? The fact that the outside rein works to prevent overbending and drifting to the outside so why look further? I don’t know.

But I do know that teaching a horse to follow the feel of the inside rein makes the use of the outside rein redundant and leads to a softer, happier, more comfortable ride. I know this. It is not a theory. I’ve proved it to myself and to students over many many thousands of rides.

No doubt some of you will be dismissive of this post, perhaps angry or offended. That’s fine. But I urge you to make sure that your reasons for relying on the outside rein to create balanced turns are better than my reasons for looking to teach a horse to follow the feel of the inside rein with its thoughts to create balanced turns.

Photo: Right rein (outside rein) being applied to the left turn