January Trainer Tip “If I want my horse soft in my hands, why do I have to use my legs?”
How essential is it for you to use your legs while riding? I'll answer your question with another question. How important is it to have the ability to stop your horse, turn your horse, and have your horse "carry himself" while staying soft and responsive in the bridle? Let's face it, It's not much fun to ride a horse that pulls your arms off, and is difficult to "steer", or turn. It's also not much fun (for either the instructor or the rider) to have to repeat lesson after lesson, on issues of basic control. As trainers, instructors, and riders, I think we can all find common ground in the fact that teaching horses to respond to leg aids is one of the most difficult aspects of horsemanship.
The reason for this difficulty is twofold. First, is that horses which are not well schooled, grumpy, or flighty, can very quickly teach their riders not to touch them with their legs. They do this by showing their irritation at our requests by getting nervous, kicking, balking, and head tossing. These are all examples of avoidance behavior. As well, many riders and instructors fall into a pattern of riding mostly around the rail. What this can eliminate is the sense of creativity to do any number of bending and suppling exercises. When horses are ridden mostly off of the rider's hands, with little or no input from leg aids, riders are actually teaching their horses to become stiff and non-responsive.
Let me explain. Riding a horse is no different than a sports coach having a conversation with his key player. If the coach can't communicate well enough for his player to understand exactly what he means, the results will be a disaster. Clear communication with our "key player", the horse, is just as critical for developing an edge in competitiveness as it is in just going out and having a good pleasure ride. Precise communication with a horse is difficult at first because he does't speak our language, and we don't speak his.
If we are to communicate with our horses in a precise manner, we have to touch them in order to generate a stimulus or "cue". Repeated use of this stimulus will generate a response, and using the stimulus, response, reward pattern, we train our horses to consistently move away from pressure. I equate this pattern of touches or "cues" to a dialog that I'm having with my horse. This dialog is always necessary any time that you want your horse to do something specific. Additionally, the word dialog implies that there is a "conversation" occurring between two parties. Indeed there is. You the rider, make a request of your horse by touching him, and he replies either by moving away from the pressure, or by ignoring, avoiding, or resisting you. In response, you either reward him for complying with your request by releasing the pressure, or you touch him again in order to make another request, etc. As such, your touches are your language. In order to develop control over your horse, you will have to touch him. In order to develop precise control over your horse, you will have to touch him in precise places to help him co-ordinate his movements. Just using your hands is not enough information for your horse to know how you want his entire body to move.
When we use words and language to communicate we have an infinite variety of ways we can intonate and structure our language to manipulate the words that we are saying so that they mean exactly what we want them to. (At least to us, they make sense!) If we think about using touches, holds, or pressure in general, as we would our language, we immediately free ourselves up to reach an entirely different spectrum of communication. For example, as a clinician, one of the common complaints that I hear from my participants is, " I'm using my leg, and my horse ignores me". Well...when we want to get someone's attention we may verbally say the word, "hey". If there is no response we have the option of saying the word louder, or we could say it more frequently, or we could say it more frequently and louder. Or, we could change the word (cue) that we are using. The same thing applies within the structure of your communication with your horse, only translating your verbal language to that of pressure language requires that you adhere to a few rules, or risk muddling up your translation. Rule number one is "If you initiated a request for your horse to "move over" by "pressing" your leg into him and received no response, the moment that he ignored you was the precise moment that your communication with him ceased to say, "please move over". Instead, continued pressure from your leg really meant to your horse, "It's okay for you to ignore me". Continued application of leg with no subsequent response further changes the meaning to "It's time for you to ignore me now." In this instance, you are actually training your horse to ignore you.
With horses, the meaning of your cue is the response that you get, not necessarily what you think the cue should mean. Horses are always willing to demonstrate for you exactly what your cue means to them. If you intend for your horse to move away from your leg when you cue him, make sure that you use your leg decisively enough that he does. My rule of thumb is to first ask with a squeeze, immediately followed by a bump or kick if I don't get an initial response. If he continues to be non-responsive use a crop to back up the leg request. When he complies, reward him with a release of pressure and verbal praise as well. (The use of your hands is similar in that any continuous pressure exerted on the mouth will become either something to be ignored, or avoided by your horse. How you apply pressure to a horse's mouth, however, is different in that jerking with your hands is not acceptable.) When you are definite in your "instructions" to your horse you do him a tremendous favor by taking his guesswork out of trying to figure out if you really meant your request or not. Also, horses do what they are used to doing. If your horse is used to ignoring you, he will continue to ignore you. If he is routinely schooled in a way that predictably produces a response, not only will he be responsive, the stimulus necessary to produce the response will become less and less.
Rule number two has to do with the fact that all horses will at first "stiffen" when any pressure stimulus is applied. When we teach a horse to move away from our leg pressure it is natural for him to contract his muscles, as a defensive response, before he moves away from it. This is particularly true when the horse is kept in a straight line when the pressure is applied. If the rider is unaware of this natural occurrence, what quite frequently happens is that the rider systematically teaches his horse to stiffen as he moves away from the leg pressure. This stiffness in his spine can extend from his tail all the way to his nose.
What do your legs have to do with a horse that is "stuck" in the bridle, or "heavy mouthed"? First of all, let me explain what I mean by "heavy" mouthed. When horses are "heavy mouthed", or "tough mouthed" does this really mean that the skin and sensitive structures in their mouths are tough or numb? Not at all! What the rider perceives as the sensation of "soft" is really the flexion and relaxation of a multitude of muscles in your horse's neck enabling him to smoothly articulate his vertebrae. This means that a soft mouth is really the flexion of all of the joints in the neck, plus the rotation of the horse's head as he gently complies with your request to yield to the bridle. When your horse is "heavy" it has nothing to do with his mouth not feeling the pressure of the bit, it has to do with his entire body being stiff and rigid because his muscles are in a tight and contracted state. Simply put, what you feel in your hands is how your horse is reacting to what's happening to his body at that moment. What also compounds this problem is the fact that we tend to first feel this stiffness with our hands, through the bit and reins, and we subsequently try to fix it first, with our hands. The horses head and neck are 25 to 30 percent of his body.
When we try to soften a horse by simply using our hands, its like fixing a problem that exists within 100% of the horse by addressing only 25% of it, and the wrong 25% to boot! The antidote to this problem of stiffness is to be more precise in our communications with our horse when we are teaching him! If we want a change in the gait or frame of our horse, we need to realize that we will have to involve his entire body each time we make a request. We can do that by using our legs to push him forward to the bridle, to help us steer him, and to help us stop him.
Here's how I solve the problem of being more precise when trying to create a soft response from my horse to pressure from my legs. I set my exercises up in such a manner that I use my horse's own, natural, tendencies to my advantage. By approaching an exercise in this manner, I ask my horse, through the use of pressure, (which isn't natural), to do what he naturally wants to do anyway. As such, I am also limiting my horse's possible responses to my initial cue in a passive manner.
For instance, let's say that I am on my horse at a walk or halt and I want to get him to move his hip to the right from a cue from my left leg. The initial set up for this exercise is the most important part. First, I will use my left rein to ask the horse to move his head and neck to the left so that his head is near my leg. In this position, because the horse is already out of balance, all that is required is a light stimulus from my left leg (well behind the girth area) because he will naturally want to move his hip in order to "get straight" and be more comfortable. The pressure that I use becomes less confrontational. As well, I tend to make my idea for his movement, his idea, because I put him in a situation by holding his head, that required him to move his hind end in order to get comfortable. In this manner, I can systematically develop complete control over his hindquarters using relatively small amounts of pressure. (I covered this exercise in detail in the last trainer tip)
All the way through my training, from the very beginning through the advanced work, I will avoid riding on the rail. By working your horse in a circle or other patterns, your horse will have a natural tendency to bend, or soften his back. Also, if you pick definite patterns, you will be forced to use your legs to steer him precisely (instead of allowing the rail "to turn you"). If he bends his back around the "edge" of the circle, he will have to relax some muscles just to accomplish this. If each time you correct him you also maintain forward motion in a circle, you will be teaching him to relax when you cue him. I can also keep my horse working "as if" he were in a circle by doing a series of bends and counter bends. Naturally, the only way that I can accomplish these positions is if I use my legs to finish the request that my hands have initiated. A nice analogy for this is imagining that you are playing with a toy train without any tracks, on a slick floor. You have four cars connected together and as you push on the rear car you realize that you have no control over the direction of the train. If you guide the first car while you push on the last car, you still will not have complete control. Only when you control the middle section will the train go exactly where you plan for it to.
When I put horses in various positions during a schooling session, I will widen out my hands to expand the confines of the "zone" of space that exists around his neck as defined by the reins. By holding my hands close together, I narrow the zone. By widening my hands, I expand the zone. With an expanded zone, the horse has more room to move his shoulders around so that he can be more flexible. I can also move the zone by opening one side up, and closing the other, making it easier for me to move the shoulder on the open side. Additionally, with widened hands, I put myself in a situation where it becomes a necessity for me to use my legs for me to effectively steer my horse. This is as it should be, because if I want to change anything about my horse's position, I must realize that this new position requires him to make changes within his entire body to sustain the new change. By using my legs, I involve more of his body in my request, as compared to just using my hands.
By thinking in this manner, I can come up with numerous exercises to control my horse's hips, back, and shoulders so that I systematically develop control over my horse's entire body. When you can control your horse's body with your legs, the frame that you want becomes easy to establish. Most importantly, the frame that you establish by asking your horse to move forward away from your legs and into your hands will be soft and balanced, taking the struggle out of maintaining a winning ride.
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