Eda wrote:
But, now I am really getting the point of the essential point of your views. So, you are saying that as the horse is capabable of having learned reflexes withing its behaviour you are beliveing that it's also capable of having those reflexes within it's body movement to achive higer collection which the horse would never achive at libery and that without influencing the head? To achive the same Haute Ecole (without the "bad" sides) without a bit or blidle? So you never create the circle of aids which is after all is not needer for simple work in the saddle, but for the higher steps of it?
I think that horsetraining should be done with the horses' body and the horses' mind in mind. For the horse there is no circle of aids: he can do all the movements we want from him in dressage without us sitting on board, giving weight-aids, leg-aids and rein cues. He can do them totally at liberty without any human nearby at all, because that's where dressage started: people saw what horses could do with their bodies, how they could move when playing, fighting and flirting on their own. And tried to recreate that. And then indeed you need to balance your aids, because with just pushing with your legs, the horse will run away, and when just pulling the reins upwards or backwards, squeezing them or anything else, the horse will back away, halt or buck you off. The 'circle or aids' is a purely 100% human concept in order to teach humans that they should balance their leg- and reinpressure out: if you use more of one, you should counter that ('energy') by using the other more too. if you don't, the horse will stop moving in that same gait and instead change gaits. The idea of the circle of aids is invented in order to teach humans how their horses have been taught to respond in the classical dressage with it's classical dressage tools.
There's nothing wrong with that - but it's not for the horse. It saves the horse from being drawn and poked and then being punished for not responding in the right way, but the circle of aids only exists in the head of the rider who has to balance out all his 'tools'.
Horses don't have a circle of aids, and don't need it either. They can do everything on their own already, even when every horse has a certain specialisation or is built more in this way or that. Still every horse can play, show off and therefore naturally collect. What happens when a horse collects naturally, on his own, without human intervention? Not a circle or aids, but a circle of muscles and mind that starts to work together instead of against each other. The horse momentarily realises that he can both place his head into a more upward position and tuck his hindlegs further under the body: that he can put more strain on all his muscles and by that become more balanced and more supple. That if you want real control, you dont just tense your biceps and let the triceps hang loose, but you tense both a little, so that your arm is truly balanced and ready to respond any minute.
So there's two (of course in reality much more
) ways of riding, training horses towards collection: one is to bring along a lot of tack and learn how to use them upon your horse: that's the circle of aids.
The other is to teach your horse how to use his body in such a way that he collects naturally again, but now conscious instead of unconscious when playing with mates in the field. That's the circle of muscles: training both his body and his mind. And that're where groundwork comes in, because when using no tack at all, just his natural responses, you need to start at the most natural starting point for the horse: the ground. There you first ask him if he wants to train with you, and if he doesn't want to, you look for ways to become less threatening and/or demanding so that he does want to come along with you. There the circle of muscles is connected with the circle of the mind. You work both on the bodily and mental side of collection: you use classical dressage exercises - without tack! - like the shoulder in and travers to stretch his body and make him more supple. These also teach your horse to focus himself and be calm and cool, while on the other hand you run and play with him and run around in order to teach him that showing off his power (collection!) isn't wrong at all. Then the horse will start to combine both tracks, and become collected, make himself more impressive and taller, while on the other hand stay cool and focused. Only there the riding in collection starts.
By the way, just because you don't use reins anymore doesn't mean that you have no control over the way the horse performs certain movements! That's where you can follow the classical dressage ideas pretty good: you don't form your horse through the reins, but through exercises. Sjors tends to tense and hold his head too high during the passage. The solution is not adding more aids, but changing the passage after a few steps into extended (collected) trot, and then bakc to passage and then trot. That way he will start to take the relaxed back and more level head set into the passage, because he sees the extended trot as more comfortable as he has already reached the right body posture over there.
So just because you don't have reins of spurs doesn't mean that you have to accept everything the way the horse does it. You do have to accept and reward that indeed in the beginning in order to make him more sure of himself, but after that you can start shaping his behavior by countering it with other exercises, or refining it by combining more exercises together.
Quote:
To be honest- Mr. Nevzorov's horses are tense (physically, as well as I belive that mentally) and lack in relaxed and long stepping behind.
That's not the problem of training horse without bits or reins, that's a problem Nevzorov himself or his specific training system. Because just like the classical circle of aids, when working without any tack you have a circle of the horse: both muscles and mind influence each other directly. If the only break or rest you offer your horse during training consists of wild running and wild games, your horse will be on the one hand more sure that you really do allow him to express himself in collection at the most wild, but on the one hand be mentally tense because every moment he might be asked to leap off again - and that means more muscle tension. There's no real mental break. The same goes for the muscles influencing the mind: horses relax when their head goes down into a grazing-like position, so stretching forward-downward has a very strong mental benefit too. But when, like in NHE, you don't use or stimulate this headset at all and instead only ask for a collect flexing at the poll or wild running at liberty, the muscles can't tell the mind to relax.
That's not 'bad', it's a choice that is made in that system: rather have flashy, heavy collection with an exited, maybe even stressed horse, than a more cool horse performing a calmer, maybe more boring, collection in the same exercises. It's just what you want to get. For me, I love collection and I really think it benefits the horse, but I don't want to loose the mental component out of sight either: the horse should be both physically and mentally relaxed when collecting, otherwise I think it is harmful for him. So our training sessions are less flashy and slower, but that's because I want to keep that circle of body and mind in one piece, instead of breaking it in two and try to reach collection by only working on one half. But the really interesting thing with this is that with the same lack of tools you can already create two totally different ways of collecting horses, with different kinds of collection as result!