Glenshee Equestrian Centre

“ON THE BIT”—NEXT PHASE: BALANCING  POINTS: ·       Balancing ·       Building ·       Rewarding In the previous stages, you worked on relaxing the frame, primarily by loosening the jaw, poll , and any bracing in the muscles of the neck . You should have found that this transfers its loosening effect all the way along the topline, through the shoulder and down into the hind legs, creating regularity and an easy, swinging in the gaits, as well as an overall lengthening of the horse’s outline. However, as noted before, using the inside “Direct (Leading) Rein” will have the effect of slightly loading the inside fore. This is not the great sin it is often made out to be, especially when the horse is relaxed (not rushing) and working at a natural pace (not pushed) on straight lines and gentle curves (not tight turns.) However, your goal in this next step is to shift that balance fro...

“ON THE BIT”—FIRST PHASE: LONG AND LOW KEY POINTS: ·       Flexing ·       Loosening ·       Lengthening FIRST STEPS: LOOSENING In this fist phase, the main priority will be to release any tension in the jaw, neck and poll, and thereby relax the topline, which will encourage the horse to naturally adopt a long and low frame on his own as opposed to an inverted and braced one. WHAT DOES THIS ACCOMPLISH? To accomplish this, one uses a single, simple rein aid: the “ Direct (Leading) Rein. ” The basic theory behind using the leading rein to get the horse stretching and relaxed in his topline is based on a technique advocated by Boucher.   He understood that, in order to raise the head and invert the topline, the horse has to brace the muscles on both sides of the neck as a pair.   Bringing the head to one side with a gentle leading rein (he employed a lifting hand for th...

So, what did work? To begin with, we wen t back to basics to fill in all those blanks left in his training. E veryone thought that just beca use they put him in draw reins and got his head down that he was “on the bit.” They thought that just because he was moving forward h e had impulsion. They thought that just becaus e they could shorten his stride he was collected. Like so many people in the H/J world (and an alarming number of people in dressage) they had co mpletely missed the point. Of course, at the time I also knew nothing about the technicalities of dressage. I only knew when it felt right and when it felt wrong. And I ha d the benefit of riding my own horse who was super-sensitive in every respect and wou ldn’t tolerate anything but the lightest contact. I didn’t know how to hold a mouth or to pull, or to drive a horse into my hand with seat and leg; that was all foreign to me and doing so always felt wrong. Everyone talks about c ontact, contact, contact. And yes,...