The Art of Natural Dressage

Stretching out down and low is very good for horses, but indeed it lifts the weight off the hindlegs. However, if a horse has a past of being tense, stiff, crooked o just not being trained for a while, I would always stimulate walking or trotting long and low, because that way the horse stretches his back muscles and makes them 'even' again on both sides. Only after stimulating the horse to go like that for several training sessions/weeks I would go towards more collected exercises and start stimulating a more collected frame.

And yes, I'm back from Greece, which was a holiday-work combination so I was quite okay with it.


On the round-deep problem: When a horse (at liberty or on a bitless bridle) would curl his neck up rather than stretch out, I would try to avoid that position and instead focus on stretching out. When working with reins, the horse who curls up naturally (like indeed Iberian, baroque horses but also arabians) will find it very hard to come towards a real elevated neckset on his own later in training, because they tend to let the neck fall down in a rollkur-like position when they get tired of the elevation. The same by the way goes for a horse totally at liberty. The problem with moving with this neckset isn't just that the horse sees less of the ground he walks on, but it also overstretches the neckmuscles and backmuscles. That draws the hindlegs up (looks like more action), but also backwards. Stretching forward downward also stretches the back, but only to an amount that is entirely natural for the horse: the grazing position. The pull on the hindquarters isn't that exaggerated, so that they're better able to move under the body. Next to that, the curled up rollkur neckset also tightens the lower neck muscles instead of stretching them. They are the muscles you least want to strengthen!

Both forward-out stretching and curling the neck down put more weight on the frontquarters, but the first is safer and more relaxing for the backmuscles in a natural way. Blacky tends to curl his neck too much when being asked for flexion at the poll and then lets the neck fall downward when he tries for too long, so that he has a roll-kur like neckset - and stimulating his lowe neckmuscles instead of the upper ones... So now when I ask for a collected pose, I ask him to have his head lower when flexing at the poll so that he doesn't tighten his neck with the lower neckmuscles. Next to that, when he wants to lower his head again, I ask for a stretching down and low with the nose on the vertical immediately and reward for that, so that he really relaxes all over. Another plus side is that since we started stimulating this downward stretch instead of curling up, is that Blacky stumbles much less. That could have something to do with that the curling up overloads the frontlegs more than stretching down and out, but also that he can see better where he walks?

YEAH Miriam is back in tha house!!
I think Baroque type horses have to have a more developed/trained muscle system to lift the very heavy (mostly fat ) neck to an upward position. I heard that you can develop the muscles for "neck carriage" by galopping with a forward stretched neck.
I never tried to train this way because I'm not even really trotting yet with Evita. What do you think about this way of musculair neck training?

I found this article:

http://www.ausequinearts.com/ArticleSch ... Horse.html

Miriam, if you went to Greece one month later we could meet there!

Too bad, by then I will be in Sicily. Sigh...

By the way, Spanish horses do have had their necks bred for centuries to shorten and curl up nice and high. Just as they have been bred for a high and impressive frontleg movement. Why were they? Because a horse who naturally curls his neck and steps up high always look impressive, also when uncollected and with a bad rider on. For the gaits another reason is that upwards instead of forwards legmovement is more comfortable to sit on, even when the horse is stiffbacked and hollow. Where you in the latter case would be shoved off a big warmblood by the force of the gaits slinging through his rigid back, on most of the baroque horses you can sit quite comfortable in the hollow of a tense back. So because of how they were bred their default mode when stiff-backed so to say is neck high and curled up, and frontlegs stepping up high. So if he does allow his bakcmuscles to relax, the neck will fall downwards, but still be curled up. Only when the horse also dares to relax all his neckmuscles, he will move his neck downward with his nose on the vertical. Friesians have a similar problem, and actually more exaggerated because they were bred as coachhorses and were selected for almost vertical necksets with the 'curl' only being at the upper half of the neck (the so-called teapot necks). To them the rollkur is a backrelief, but the neck essentially stays stuck in its wrong default position, even when the head is low: the nose is pointing towards the knees. I saw Tineke Bartels show the benefits of the rollkur-system on her Friesians last year (during Horse Event), and it was very clear that although the horses stretched their backs (up to a point that the hindlegs were more drawn up behind the body than placed under it (another thing Friesians were bred to so, as high-stepping coach horses), their necks stayed crooked and even when drawn upwards into the regular collected dressage neckset, remained curled up and never had the poll as highest point or the nose near the vertical. If a horse is bred for curling up his neck (which a lot of breeds are), then a rollkur system will never learn them to get their nose forward to the vertical again, because these horses have tense neckmuscles with the biggest part of the tension being in the lower neck muscles: and they pull the head and nose in. And a round, deep, curled up position only trains these lower muscles to become stronger and be shortened even more.

Off course every individual is an exeption , but breeds have always been selected for special features, and most of these features were bred because they made the horse look impressive even when the rider wasn't, Think of the 'naturally' extremely high-stepping gaited horses, the extremely big moving warmbloods, the springy arabians, the low-necked and flat moving Quarter horse... All these horses bring in naturally what you are essentially told to achieve as a rider. The western rider's riding style is based on the idea that his riding system makes the horse a cool, calm, low necked, flat moving horse. It comes in really handy when the horse does all this already. Just like dressage horses: every old riding teacher will hammer on the fact that every horse can master dressage movements up to the grand-prix level, because you gradually teach the horse how to extend his movements, and how to collect them. But that takes years. If the horse is a really big forward (warmblood) or on the other hand upwards (baroque) mover already, things loook impressive already before you start, and you can skip at least half of the lessons. At least, that's the idea behind breeding for special purposes, and that has done it's job for centuries already.

And then even when you have two paper-less shetlands, they both bring along so many exterior flaws that you have to work around all the same problems in them too.

Miriam wrote:


I'm keenly interested in creating an appropriate headset with Tamarack that will be conducive to a well lifted back and hind legs reaching well under him.

I have been working a lot with his "pose", and we are now at a point in our training where he is very "clicker savvy"...that is, he is now actively seeking an answer to my questions (YAY!). It is very nice to see him move his head/neck up and down, seeking that perfect place where I'll click and reward. So now I can begin to shape a head position that will be of benefit to him in the long run, and not just look immediately pretty.

I took to heart Cheryl's comment about those wrinkles in Tamarack's throatlatch area when he would bring his head nearly into his chest. It's easy for him to do (as you said) but he does it "hard", and I wish him to do it a little softer.

So I have begun clicking for a slightly lower position, where his head is more likely to be vertical, rather than that (albeit cool looking) position where he's almost doing a rollkur on himself. I am also asking him now to bring his hind legs forward and to have a square stance, or to be a touch under himself. I find that this almost automatically puts his head a bit lower and the arch in his neck a bit softer and more gently curving. His poll may not be the highest point in doing this, but it simply looks more comfortable.

I also notice that when using the cordeo to cue the pose, he naturally puts his head a bit lower too and arches a little more outward...again, not rollkur-ing himself.

I think, that as his front end gets higher, as we progress in movements that are naturally more uphill (much later on), that the poll will lift along with his shoulders and the poll may at that time be the highest point for those movements. This to me, will be perfection! But I feel this will be for brief periods only, and for most riding, then he will have a slightly lower head set.

Am I thinking in the correct direction??

I decided exactly the same for Blacky! So maybe we're both wrong.

But the hindleg-neck connection is really interesting indeed. Especially with Sjors I saw this when asking for a flexed poll. He tends to do that a little too high still too, but the interesting thing is that when he places his head in this position, he takes a step back with one or two hindlegs. Really interesting stuff I thought! A clear sign that a too high neck (even when flexed at the poll) puts too much strain on the backmuscles, shortening them and through that pulling the hindlegs out and behind the horse.

So, lower heads it is. The good thing is that when flexing the poll at a trot, Sjors already assumes a somewhat horizontal neckline (but arched and flexed) in order to use his hindlegs properly. So he understood that part already before I did...