Have you ever ridden your horse, felt a problem, but not really being able to detect what the problem really is, and where it comes from? My advide: step off the horse, and start to look at how it moves from the ground.
I always say, if it doesn’t work in high speed, slow down to walk, if it doesn’t work in walk, step off the horse.
Recently I made a post on my instagram with a video of Grani, asking if people were able to see his weakness or just detecting the weaknesses in horses in general.
I got quite some interessting answers, making me want to write a blogpost about it.
Just to sum up, the video is of Grani working on a circle in the longe.
Some people wrote that they saw some kind of a stiffness in his back, and some wrote that he needed more activity in the hindlegs. The second answer is right (which I also pointed out in the post) and this will seem like for the untrained eye, that he is stiff in the lower part of the back, what he actually isn’t.
I was very excited to see, if people would be able to see his weakness, because if you aren’t trained in looking at the horse from the ground, it won’t be that easy.
The main problem though, was pointed out, by not only one person, but two.
One described him as having a lack of flexion in the neck - that he needed to bend more on the circle, where another one supplied this answer by saying he was thinking more ‘outside’ - with other words, he has too much weight on his left shoulder, and also due to the lack of energy he needed more activity in the hindlegs, which would make him reach more forward and take longer steps . Obviously I know Grani quite well now, and knows he weaknesses and I can confirm that both of these answers are right.
Like humans, horses can be left handed, and right handed. As you might know, like humans, most of the horses are right handed, making Grani as a left handed a bit ‘rare’, if you can put it like that.
When we talk about this, we use the term ‘Croockedness’. There’s been made quite some studies about this, and it’s detected that this ‘croockedness’ occurs during the pregnancy. The fetus will lay in the uterus bending his neck to one or the other side, determining whether the horse will be ‘right handed’ or ‘left handed’.
While you have the detected your horse’s natural croockedness, it will make it a lot easier for you, knowing how to train your horse towards the straightness, that we need, to make it perform effortless.
There’s many different ways to train this natural crookedness, so that you will end up having a straight horse.
Obviously you can do it through different exercises in your daily dressage work, but I also like to work with it from the ground, where my weaknesses, weight and other disturbing factors can’t affect the horse.
Therefore I can really recommend you to read the book by the German pair Gabriele Rachen-Schöneich and Klaus Snöneigh called ‘Correct Movement In Horses - Improving Straightness and Balance’ (picture below), which is about how to detect whether your horse is left- or right handed, and how to work with it from the ground (and later in the saddle) to improving the straightness in the horse.
I’ve been lucky to witness Klaus, when he has been teaching in Denmark and now this is a permanent part of our program, when we start working with the young horses.
We have great succes with this and feel like the horses have a better balance from the start, making it easier for them to move, when we get in the saddle.
As I said, I will therefore highly recommend you, to start looking more at your horse from the ground. I have felt like many times that this pointed out some things, that later made it easier for me to feel in the saddle.
