This was bugging me yesterday so I thought I’d ask here.
bend – When a horse (bird’s eye view) is evenly bent, nose to tail like an open parenthesis ( with the head at the top, is that a left bend (referring to the barrel) or a right bend (referring to the head/tail)?
I had one instructor tell me she used leg yield at the canter as an exercise to straighten her horse and I was left floundering (since leg yield at the canter, from quarter line to rail, seems to me to be an exercise to trip the horse, unless the horse is bent the other way in which case, how the heck did she round the corner in the first place?) Merely one example of how talking about bend is confusing without a demonstration. Got me wondering if we all understand the left right part the same way.
diagonal – When one is tracking left, and posting on the “correct” diagonal, is that the “left” diagonal (the one that is correct for tracking left, and following the motion of the left hind) or is that the “right” diagonal (the one that is correct for tracking left, but following the motion of the right shoulder, which is also the action of the left hind, but one can’t see behind one so one says “right” because that’s the indicator you can see?) If you are riding straight down the center line, are you on the right or left diagonal if you rise when the right shoulder advances?
tip pelvis – Obviously thinking too hard about this stuff, I also realized that my riding instructor used to say to tip my pelvis. And I never knew if they were talking about tipping the top of my pelvis forward or back, or the bottom of my pelvis?
There is an older book by Michael Schaffer called “Riding in the Moment - Discover the Hidden Language of Dressage,” in which he talks about, and I’m paraphrasing, how, all too often, the only people who know what the hell an expert is saying are the people who already know what the expert is saying.
He then tries to break all these dressage/riding concepts down into plain language, with lots of diagrams and illustrations. It’s been a long time since I looked at the book, but IIRC, I found it helpful, but still struggled with trying to visualize some of this stuff.
I would say the correct diagonal tracking left is the left diagonal- although honestly IME it’s usually “right” or “wrong” and not called out by direction. Not everyone is taught to look at the inside shoulder, I was taught by a saddleseat trainer initially and was taught to look at the outside.
I’ve also heard people use “outside” and “inside” diagonal when doing more advanced work since the horse’s bend may or may not align with the direction of travel but timing of certain aids will correlate with a particular diagonal.
Yes, but that’s another one. Is an “inside” bend a bend with the barrel to the inside of the arena, or the head/tail toward the inside of the arena (and so on)? (Yes, I know you were talking diagonals, but I’ve moved it on to bend).
The moves are pretty obvious but the nomenclature can be confusing.
There is inside bend and outside bend. This refers primarily to whether the head and neck is bent away from the direction of travel (shoulder in series of movements) or towards the direction of travel (half pass series of movements, more advanced). Anyhow, you go by the direction of the head, left or right bend, whatever the move.
The correct posting diagonal on a curve is to go up with the outside front foot and inside hind foot rising. You can switch this for specific tasks like teaching lateral or lead changes. On the straight there is no “correct” diagonal . I myself have learned to say I’m posting on the right diagonal when I am rising with the right front foot, perhaps because I am tracking left on a 20 metre circle. Because we need a name for the diagonals even when we are riding in a straight line, there is no value in naming the diagonal after direction of travel.
Doing lateral work or bent work in order to teach straightness may seem counter intuitive but the point is that every horse starts life asymmetric. Lateral work gymnasticizes both sides of the body and makes the horse eventually go straighter meaning balanced on both sides. It also helps the horse get his hind end under him.
As far as exactly what exercise for what horse, that takes a very good eye and feel to know where the subtle imbalances are, and a big tool box of lateral moves.
Now every move goes in both it’s “true” and it’s counter bend form. You can do shoulder in and counter shoulder in, canter and counter canter (“wrong” lead and outside bend), travers and renvers, etc. Shoulder in can be done at all gaits, but probably most effective at trot. Half pass can be done at all gaits, but works really nicely at canter and builds into canter pirouette. I don’t see why you can’t leg yield a canter.
If you are wondering what a coach means, ask them. If you are working on basic position stuff and your proprioception gets skewed, halt and get them to stand by the saddle and poke you into place. Here is where your leg should hang. Here is where your shoulders should be.
The ideal pelvis is neutral, the ideal back posture is erect and lifted. But depending on what you the student bring to the equation the coach may say “lean way back” if you are perching or “tip your pelvis” if you are either on your crotch or on your back pockets. Those instructions are very situation dependent. And if you don’t know which way coach wants you to tip, it will get worse! But we can’t tell without seeing you ride
Uhoh, you’ve been thinking too hard Let me make your confusion even worse!
The inside of a bend is always the concave side ( <-- of the horse and the outside is the convex side --> (
The outside of the arena is the wall/towards the wall. The inside of the arena is not the wall - if you are travelling clockwise in the arena, the inside of the arena is on your right.
If you’re on a circle, the inside is towards the centre of the circle. If you’re circling right (clockwise) your bend to follow the circle with the horse’s entire body would be a right/inside bend. If you stay on that circle and counter bend so that the concave side of your horse faces the outside of the circle and the convex side faces the centre of the circle, you are on a left/outside bend.
Now this is where it gets confusing. When your on that right circle while bend left, your left leg is both your inside and outside leg. Your instructor will need to explain (and eventually you’ll come up with a shorthand that your both understand) whether they are talking about your leg as it correlates to the bend or to your placement on the circle. They should in my opinion always use the inside/outside in relation to the horse’s body position unless otherwise stated (or super obvious) to describe the rider’s legs/hands.
Leg yielding in canter will absolutely not trip the horse. It’s difficult at first, but is no more dangerous than asking for leg yield in walk or trot. Because of the footfall pattern in canter there is no crossing of legs so there’s nothing to get tangled
Diagonals - right and wrong. Left and right are confusing to riders imo.
My answer to this would be that you are on the correct diagonal if your next turn will be to the left.
ETA - Oh wait, not confused enough? I forgot a bit. If you’re travelling down the wall in renvers position like this |) ( | is the wall, ) is the horse but missing a bit of angle where the butt is closer to the wall than the head) your leg closer to the wall (on the inside of the bend) should never be called your outside leg even though it’s right frickin’ there practically on the dang wall which we all know is the outside of the arena. Sigh. Dressage is far more confusing than it needs to be
Summary - the side of your body which is on the concave side of the horse is always the inside and that description of inside/outside always takes precedence unless the instructor is specifically asking for a spatial thing. Hypothetically, you could be on an outside bend on a circle and the instructor could ask you to maintain that bend while moving towards the inside of the circle in a spiral shape.
Clear as mud? Excellent. It’s 5 o’clock somewhere. This is why dressage riders enjoy adult beverages
Yes. When I ride, I pretty much just here “put her in a mumblmumble bend” because I understand the exercise and what I’m trying to accomplish.
My questions here are about the nomenclature. It makes sense to me to name the bend after the visible part of the horse (head and neck headed right versus where I’m sitting), but then you get into bends in the haunches!!
This one is so confusing to me because the point of a diagonal (I have always understood) is that one is sitting on the inside hind. Yet, we don’t see the inside hind, so we let the outside fore stand in for the inside hind as the visual indication if one can’t feel it. But that has us on the 'right diagonal" when turning left, which is a real brain twister for those of us who can’t keep left and right straight. Thus the appeal to “inside” and “outside” diagonal. But then you have the odd teacher every so often who says “Which diagonal are you on?” (By which mostly they mean, “You’re on the wrong one: look and switch” but the literal among us (raises hand) is going “which one is this? What’s the right name?”)
Well, yes, that’s obvious. But is the bend NAMED after the concave side is my question.
That was the position of the gal I was talking with, yes. But it seems counter intuitive to me, since the footfalls at a right lead canter, just to pick a concrete example, in front is left fore quickly followed by the right fore. If the horse is then moving left (leg yield), you line up the front legs nearly in a straight line, unless all the sideways motion is only happening in the flight phase.
(Plus of course the obvious question of why a horse in a right lead canter is somehow so counterbent that a leg yield to the left is going to straighten his body. A right lead canter should produce a right bend naturally. Even a stiff horse would be relatively straight if not bent right. If the horse were really counterbent left, it seems very unlikely you’d even GET a right lead canter).
And then we have the question of what “stiff to the left”. Won’t bend left is my interpretation of that, but where in the body is the stiffness that won’t bend? IME, it’s usually in the barrel haunches rather than the shoulder/neck /head which would lead to some confusion on which part of the body you’re really working on.
Right or left bend refers to which side of the horse is concave. So right bend - ( - right side is concave side.
If you’re riding on a circle or around an arena, someone might say bend in or bend out- as in bend the concave side toward the inside or outside. Inside bend on a clockwise circle would be right bend, outside would be left bend.
IME those are pretty universal descriptors.
I have not seen any similar consensus on what to call the diagonals…
There is a great deal of confusion indeed in what part of the body each exercise works on.
Actually the barrel does not bend that much, certainly not like a cat. That’s a fiction of dressage exercise diagrams.
Yes, much “stiffness” is in the shoulders, and good lateral work helps mobilize the shoulders.
Many horses start out or canter naturally by bending their neck away from the lead and falling onto the inside shoulder. You can see this a lot with poorly trained barrel horses. So no, cantering on given lead does not guarantee correct inside bend in that direction.
That said, we can’t give you a definitive answer why a long ago coach used a certain technique out of many possibilities. Certainly one possibility is that the leg yield requires a very slight bend to the inside of the arena, away from the direction of travel. For a horse that gallumphs around balancing by throwing his neck to the outside of the circle and falling on his inside shoulder, a leg yield makes him shift his head and neck back to the inside of the circle, weight his outside shoulders more, and start to approximate a correct bend. You are moving to the outside to get a correct inside bend. It’s very very useful whether your horse falls in or out of a circle, which tends to be about the shoulder falling in or out
If your horse is bent to the right as though to take a right hand corner in correct bend, so the concave side is the right side of the horse, that would be called a right bend. Sorry I didn’t realize I hadn’t answered the entire question!
In leg yield the body of the horse is completely straight. There is no bend at all. There is flexion in the neck away from the direction of travel. Remember also that there is not just the pattern of footfalls, but that the horse is constantly moving forward. Then, also remember that leg yielding in this way isn’t a mechanical means of actually straightening a crooked horse, but of showing them they can shift and change their balance at will and get out of the habit of weighting legs improperly.
So … let’s say our hypothetical horse is right-hand banana (concave on the right side) who tends to bring the hind legs inwards, over bends in the neck, and dumps a metric ton of weight on the right fore in comparison to the left fore. We are on right lead and we head down the centre line (or the 2nd 1/4 line for babies). Coming off the ~10 diameter bend of the corner we use the outside rein to straighten the horse. Then we ask with our inside (right) leg to move the horse a little sideways to the left. This immediately asks for the horse to adjust balance and use its body in a new way. The wall (magnetic, especially to young horses!) helps guide the horse’s entire body sideways. Because the horse is moving forward more than sideways, the footfalls proceed left hind, diagonal pair (where that pesky RH is asked to step a bit farther under the horse’s body), then right front - all landing in the proper sequence and in front with zero crossing of limbs so there is no possibility of tangled legs.
For our hypothetical, right-hand banana horse, doing to same exercise on left lead will help the horse learn not to stompy stompy so much on the RF as it needs to be able to lift out to the side a bit and has support of the LH to make it a less cumbersome task.
If you can possibly give it a try, it will make more sense when you can feel this silly little exercise’s magic.
It’s not a matter of fixing a Grand Banana with this exercise (because a Grand Banana will have some sort of physical issue that has led to such dire banananess) but it’s the normal asymmetries that most horses have that this exercise will help. Straightening is a little thing with big impact. Teaching the horse to balance and move easily and equally in both directions will bring it closer to symmetry. It’s the exact same thing as in yoga and ballet training. We all have a side that stretches easier than the other. Through systematic, careful training, we aim to work towards something as close to symmetry as we can get both in our movement and in our musculature.
I hope that didn’t just make your confusion worse!
Yes, have seen that, of course. I guess I’m discounting that, as the discussion I was having was with a much higher level rider, who would not even begin a canter with the head bent away from direction of travel. Which is where my brain started to twist.
Unfortunately, the exercise was introduced in a 4 person class as something for us to try, and it seemed to me to have such limited specific utility that I really thought it odd. The horses in the arena were not poorly trained barrel horses at all. But the instructor said she “used (the exercise) all the time”. So compound my confusion:
I suspected I might be misinterpreting what was said with all the left this/right that.
Yes, true, correct. But (1) the horse is not static, he’s in motion, and the footfalls, IF the flight is carrying the body slightly left during a right lead canter, would line up the footfalls one in front of the other: my concern for the trip hazard. (and of course, item 2., none of the horses seemed to be exhibiting the problem the exercise is intended to cure, but that doesn’t mean much. Instructors introduce exercises all the time that one may not need at the very instant, but may find utility later.) (and of course 3., the common fault mentioned in leg yield, that riders ask for bend where it is not wanted, and you wind up with a ‘straightening exercise’ creating even less straightness.)
Anyway, I am content to say I’m not sure I understand the whys and wherefores of the specific exercise, why it was introduced to our group, and what it was intended to accomplish, and it was rather long ago. BUT, I am content that we as horse people do seem to share a common nomenclature, and I’m not completely backwards in how I’ve interpreted these things (always a fear of mine. I’m still unclear on pelvic tilt. I think of it as tilt relative to a stable base in the saddle: The bottom of my pelvis is down, thus any tilt “forward” must mean the top of my pelvis moves forward (relative to the bottom) not the bottom of my pelvis moves forward. It almost sounds like it doesn’t matter on the surface–the top and bottom move in relationship to one another-- but one ‘tilt’ would result in a rounded back, and the other would result in an arched back (if one presumes the bottom of the pelvis is not moving).
Ah was this a clinic situation where you don’t have a chance to clarify any terms the next week? That can be hard.
The horse doesn’t need to be leaning visibly out to be unbalanced. A sensitive trainer would feel much more subtle shifts
As far as cantering in leg yield, cantering half pass is a major move, I think in the tests it’s 4th level? And it builds into the canter pirouette. Half pass is bent to the direction of movement but it doesn’t change the footfall. I guess because in half pass you’re going towards the leading leg so that’s different. But canter half pass is an important move and horses don’t get their feet tangled. I’ve ridden it extensively (not on my current horse) and it’s a light collected woosh forward and sideways. And they don’t get their feet tangled if you push them out onto the rail in a leg yield at the canter or do a half pass to.the inside
My Equestic names RF/LH as the Right diagonal, and LF/RH as the Left diagonal. The Equestic Clip was developed in Europe so it is either an arbitrary naming or how diagonals are named over there.
I found it confusing for a long time, and still have to think “RF/LH” when I’m looking at the symmetry analysis, because I’m usually focusing on getting the hind leg active and have to remember to look at the R side when considering the LH.
If you were in a 4-person class, you were likely learning the exercise to know it, not to cure anything. It’s a very useful exercise to have in one’s back pocket/tool chest.
Honestly, there is no more chance of tripping in a canter leg yield than in any other leg yield. They are not going wildly sideways at any time. No legs cross, unlike in walk and trot where legs actually do cross! Does it feel weird though? Absolutely. There is an element to it that can feel like breaking up the canter on horses that tend to get lateral in canter. (Which is another great use beyond straightening for this exercise!)
Oops missed this one earlier. Anterior/forward tilt is the top of your pelvis going forward. This one had me for a while as what I feel is my butt sticking out.
Posterior/backwards tilt is the top of the pelvis going backwards which may feel like your butt being rolled under you. “Sit on your pockets” is what a western instructor might say to try to correct someone who is perched forwards.
That was my example: canter half pass moves in the direction of the anticipated leading leg, so it does not result in trip hazard. Thus you do leg yield at walk and at trot, and both can help with straightening (if correctly performed. There’s always that caveat!!) but the footfalls of the canter led me to believe one does not do leg yield at canter. Other exercises (including a proper bent-in-tye-direction-of-movement strike off) are the appropriate exercises for a crooked horse.
I’m guessing that’s what it was. I didn’t find the discussion very enlightening at the time (thus my confusion to this day!!), but I’ll take your word for its utility. (actually, since I’m well past retraining horses, so I can let it drift out of my consciousness!)
Leg yielding, specifically changing from half pass to leg yielding and back is an excellent way to correct a horse’s or rider’s half pass. If the horse becomes/is over bent, change to leg yield for a few strides. If the horse loses the quarters or runs through the inside shoulder, change to leg yield for a few strides.
These are training exercises to make the horse more balanced and straighter, thereby improving the correctness of the movement.
A good way to think of it is that it is a “big” version of counter flexing a horse who has become heavy on the inside rein and/or is pounding the inside fore into the ground while the outside fore flies off to another postal code.
So, you’re doing half pass towards the left. If you are going to do a leg yield to correct, is that also going toward the left? Or do you shift to a right direction leg yield as the correction?
Let me make your confusion even worse! 
Your instructor will need to explain (and eventually you’ll come up with a shorthand that your both understand) whether they are talking about your leg as it correlates to the bend or to your placement on the circle. They should in my opinion always use the inside/outside in relation to the horse’s body position unless otherwise stated (or super obvious) to describe the rider’s legs/hands.
