I have said this so many times and it proves a point. Sorry this doesn’t have anything to do with contact. But I often wonder, do they feel a fly land on them? What we see is a muscle twitch or tail swish, which could be reflex. They don’t otherwise react to flies - note how unprotected horses often have dozens of flies around their eyes and don’t seem to notice - unless they are being bitten. Back to the topic.
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In a former life I had a lesson where I did achieve the above, to keep my mare round and engaged and in contact without the reins.
We did a half pass and then around the short side, down the long side, turned and halted at X. I was not able to hold her for the full 4 seconds at the halt, as I was not strong enough, and I lost her, she raised her head and looked around.
It is all done with your seat, you have to be so so so strong.
If you have not read Franz Mairinger’s Book Horses are meant to be horses, there is an anecdote in there. The horses in the Spanish Riding School were suffering from Strangles and were quarantined, so he was riding a stallion in a field. There was a steam train that went past. Of course they are always on time when you don’t want them to be. The stallion went berserk, he was uncontrollable. It happened again the next day,
The Master was there and he kept calling out ‘You are holding him too much. You are holding him too much’. Franz managed to get the stallion back and dismount. The master mounted and ‘dropped his weight’, which has nothing to do with how much you weigh, it has to do with how strong your seat is and that includes your core muscles. The stallion could do nothing more than canter on the spot, he could not take off. The master dropped his reins and said ‘See I told you, you were holding him too much.’
So a couple of anecdotes from me.
When you drop your weight you don’t do anything extra with you reins.
That lesson was on my mare, after riding 8 dressage horses a day for a year. My sports physio student, when I went to her, said I had the most toned butt out of anyone she had ever met and that included footballers and gymnasts.
When I started riding her my mare, had been trained to medium and half steps, in a former life and I was bringing her back into work, she would break out of trot into walk, she would break from canter to trot, my boss would tell me I was not using my seat. I was trying my hardest and in my opinion I trained my work horse with my seat the past year.
I do not wear spurs. I did not pick up a whip, instead I stroked her neck and said, 'Thank you, Girl, for telling me I am not using my seat, I will try again.
That happened day after day after day after day, until the one month mark. On the next day all I can tell you is that magic happened, she stayed in trot, she stayed in canter, it was so … easy.
From that day I can only tell you that magic happened daily, yet I felt no different from the day before.
You do not know how much your riding has changed until you go back and ride the horses you rode before. I hope you all get that chance.
Bravo was a medium trained percheron x Arab. He was so big and heavy and couldn’t get out of his own way and I used to ride him in a double bridle.
After the one month mark, ‘Sue can you please get on and ride Bravo, he had a grass seed in his mouth and we don’t want him going over backwards on a student do we?’
I hopped on Bravo with a snaffle bridle and OMG, he was as light as a feather, he was glorious to ride. He started doing a canter pirouette, which I still have never done as I dropped the reins. I had to dismount and give him to the student.
After the lesson I asked ‘how did it go’?
‘He is just so big and heavy and can’t get out of his own way’.
I would have said what you all said before, bridle weight in your hands, yada, yada, yada.
That is not what Pepper thought.
Pepper was my first horse, what you would call my heart horse, we went from losing everything to winning everything. We won a One Day Event by 66 points. We were a team.
I was riding him on a loose rein, we went around the short side and I picked up the reins… we were back before the first corner. I dropped the reins. Because the rider is so much slower to learn than the horse, I did the same thing again, with the same outcome. It was then that I picked up the reins much lighter, so as he did not react. Again I would have told you I was not picking up the reins any differently from before. Pepper told me I was wrong.
And that brings me to Tristan, a Norwegian Fjord, not trained in dressage. He was my trail riding guide horse who I rode daily. He was a lovely ride but he would NOT walk home. He jogged home, every. Single. Time.
One day I had been determined to make him walk home and I tried over and over and over. I had to stop as one of us was going to get hurt and that someone would have been me.
So with the magic now with me, I took him out for a ride. On the way home he started to jog and I dropped my weight.
What a tantrum ensued, he spat the dummy. He was like a little kid lying on his stomach hitting his fists on the floor, then he went left, he hit a tree and came back to where he was, he spat the dummy, he went right, he hit a tree and came back to where he was and spat the dummy, he went back and hit a tree and came back to the middle and stood.
I said okay Tris you may walk home. I laid the reins on his neck and let him forward with my seat…
HE WALKED HOME. THAT WAS PURE MAGIC.
I went back years later and asked the guide if he ever jogged home. She looked at me as if I was mad.
And the last anecdote. Andy, a tb, I went out with binoculars around my neck to look for a lost beast. Bad idea, when he cantered the binoculars swung everywhere. Each time I asked for walk he went into canter. Desperate, I dropped my weight and he walked home.
And I will leave you with the saying, ‘Learning to use the reins, means learning to not use the reins.’
And another saying in sitting trot, ‘keep the bounce’, you don’t want to ground the horse with your seat.
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I have said this so many times and it proves a point. Sorry this doesn’t have anything to do with contact. But I often wonder, do they feel a fly land on them? What we see is a muscle twitch or tail swish, which could be reflex. They don’t otherwise react to flies - note how unprotected horses often have dozens of flies around their eyes and don’t seem to notice - unless they are being bitten. Back to the topic
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They will also turn around and use their muzzle to remove a fly that has landed, shake their head and stamp their feet. In Australia flies are the bane of us all, but they don’t bite.
Horses also go berserk with botflies, who don’t bite but spray their eggs on. And a win for us, we have been here for over 20 years = no bot flies and no eggs. YYYAAYYY.
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Love this. Tried to really visualize it today during a lesson. Too much and the fish tears free. You follow it and coax it along WHILE being connected. Too little you don’t know what’s there. It made a great exercise for me. Wonderful soft happy connected horse. Thank you !
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I have a horse who is currently teaching me…not to be “strong”…but to be flexible. We are working on canter departs…sounds simple, but we are working on starting flying changes. He tells me when I lean forward…He tells me when I hold a micro-second too long in my waist…He tells me when my posture sucks. He is not an easy ride…but he is holding a mirror to my equitation.
I will have to dust off Mairinger’s book…thx for the reference.
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What made sense to me about the fish analogy is the give and take while being lightly steady. You don’t throw it away or pull. You’ll lose the little dance. Between coaxing something in and legging it to reach (swim) to ideally “keep it connected on the line” I guess with upper level horses perhaps they’re more able to be right in the sweet spot. With most horses it’s a subtle consistent dance of give and take. Quiet reminders to live in the space where they use themself properly. Not above. Not below. Connected. My coach often tells me most horses can be right there for x amount of steps. At the trot or the canter then they go somewhere else so you send the little reminder to stay in that place. To stay on the line. Simplistic description I suppose. But it makes sense to me.
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Well, at least as little as possible, I don’t like it when riders are pulling their horses’ heads from side to side.
I have a tendency to hang on one rein, so I end up blocking the horse in the change so while I get clean changes, they can be one stride behind my leg aid. When I just keep the horse straight, changes are from my seat mostly with some leg.
YMMV
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No, I just want to be quieter and not look like I’m shoving my arm into 5th gear.
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Many horses need weight in the reins when developing and finessing connection. Many horses demand to be ridden a certain way. Very few of us are as good as Manuel and very few of us are riding horses trained to the level he has. I also love the idea of a fish on the line (I think of very small blue gill) because for many horses, to maintain connection, you need some degree of weight. For example, if you are riding young or inexperienced horses, generally (not always), if you only have the weight of the reins, you do not have a true connection and you have thrown away the reins. I see riding with the weight of the reins as an end goal but there is a whole lot that goes on before that.
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We agree.
I believe I said upthread that one has to do as much as is needed but as little as possible when using any aid…rein aids included.
I recently took a lesson with someone who had me throwing the reins at a young horse and I was confused. How do you expect him (again, a young horse) to learn a crisp transition if you’re not asking him to sit back/down? I understand that way more of it comes from the seat, but you can’t have an outright loop in the rein either, I don’t think. You need some degree of connection.
Same with a half halt. The instructor had us careening around trying to get this big young horse to slow just from seat aids. I am not advocating pulling on him, but if he doesn’t respond to the seat with a light rein aid, [me personally] I would begin using figures to enforce the idea. But we went round and round and round just waiting for the horse to guess the right answer.
Different strokes for different folks, but I won’t be taking lessons from this person again. It did not make sense to me.
Side note: They also said the horse needs to be longer on the INSIDE than the outside on a circle. What? For a young horse they’re either straight or eeeeever so slightly longer on the outside? Whatever. The whole thing was scrambling my brain so bad I didn’t want to ask “what are you talking about?”
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Agree that if the instructor is confusing, then not a good instructor. How does this person ride? Do you like how the horses go for this rider?
I chose my long-term trainer when I saw her ride. I had never seen riding like that. I don’t know how to explain it. It was light…it was freedom…she just sat there…and the horse did amazing things. Like piaffe to gallop, to pirrouette back to piaffe…then long reins and free walk.
I said to myself, “Self, I want to ride like this.” Fast forward 40 years and I’m still learning. She and I still have conversations, but I have never met anyone that has the intuition, balance and tact she has.
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Right now I’m kind of just trying to get saddle time. The person is a very non-confrontational rider which is superb, but after riding with her, I realize that non-confrontational does not need to come at the expense of not presenting the horse with any age-appropriate challenges. Any contact with the horse of hers that I was riding resulted in them careening down a gait (careening because there was no real balance!).
The goal for the horses wasn’t hunter or western, it was eventing/working equitation. Contact should be worked on right from the get go - obviously not a death grip but a hand-hold type “I’m here, follow me”.
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Your post brought back cringy flashbacks of lessons in my youth where I had an instructor touting the “control the pace from your seat” line where in reality, a rein aid was absolutely necessary, but little did I know at the time. I just automatically assumed I was doing something wrong. Even if you are riding from the seat, generally you are still going to do something with your hand, whether that be an ever so slight closing of the hand and then a hand that follows the mouth. I agree, you shouldn’t be throwing the contact away. If you do, how are then to quickly re-establish connection and prepare for your next move/aid?
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Something I have observed over time is that we don’t discriminate well enough in discussions of aids between the different roles of the aids as “signals” and as “support”. Both roles are coming up here in this thread, and both are important to the role of contact in training, and in the training of effective contact.
You teach a horse to be responsive to seat aids for transitions by transferring the “signal” from rein to seat, which frees up the rein aid to do more subtle shaping and balancing of the transition. Endlessclimbs description of endless seat aids demonstrates an ineffective approach to teaching this relationship…
The shaping and balancing are more about support initially, until the horse can maintain his own balance well enough for them to become signals themselves about boundaries. Hence, don’t throw reins away in transitions. And probably more than a few of us have been chastised for throwing away an outside rein after doing “all that work” to get the horse connected!
You can make a horse artificially light in the bridle without them ever learning to reach for and follow contact and if they don’t learn that then you are missing out on a significant tool in the toolbox. So, personally, I don’t think much about the weight itself as much as where we are en route to feeling like I can “push the mouth away”. I get the following the hand feeling much more often/easily than the pushing away feeling, so it’s a journey.
Certainly heavy contact is not desired, but I feel like reducing contact to a question of weight skips over all of the interesting parts of the training…
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What is “artificially light?” Why does a horse need to “follow contact?”
The philosophy of the riders I admire is that the aids provide a language to communicate with the horse. Once the horse understands, you ask, then the rider gets out of the horse’s way to allow the horse to respond to the rider’s request…to piaffe, half-pass, canter or whatever.
I don’t see what is the point of “following contact” …which is the current conventional teaching in dressage circles…thus why I started this thread.
I think of “following contact” in the sense of stretching a horse over its topline; you lengthen the reins and horse in seeking the contact stretches in an ideal world.
I agree that once you’ve shortened/lengthened the reins you stop asking.
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A few years ago, I took lessons from someone who advertised themselves as a Dressage trainer. Over a period of 6 months they bounced from many different schools of thought. They were into riding really long and low for awhile. Then they got into vaquero type horsemanship, then really into what they called French Classical. Things were always changing so it was impossible to learn from them after a while.
But I remember they had this horse that they had started themselves and they had me ride him a bit as a 4-year-old. I remember seeing them bump on his mouth (as well as using spurs on him.) He was extremely light in the contact and I remember them being very proud of that. But I remember feeling that it seemed like he was scared of the contact when I was riding him. He was a very withdrawn horse and he seemed like he learned to just stay in this “box.”
I stopped training with them after that.
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IMHO - following the contact means I can change the frame/balance of the horse at will - meaning I can ride the horse more up and then give release by allowing the horse to lengthen down and away the neck. I think it is the idea to prevent a horse from simply “assuming the position” and being stuck there. YMMV
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If you think of a horse that naturally evades by ducking behind contact or “dropping the bit”, which can be a matter of mm’s of flexion at the poll, you can train a horse without those natural inclinations to behave that way by overemphasizing “lightness” to contact “in a vacuum”. This is more or less what I mean by “artificial” because you can teach an evasion you don’t want. Been there, done that.
What I want from lightness is that the horse has learned that I will provide the freedom to use his own neck in balancing himself, which is what creates opportunity to me to provide very precise and refined aids to influence his balance in precise and refined ways with very small signals. The latter is enabled by the former.
One example of the role of “following contact” that should not be controversial is that the horse needs to learn to extend the outside of the neck on a bending line. By teaching the horse that you will make room for them in bending, they are better able to learn the role of their neck in balance in turns. This is a precursor to self carriage, and also is required for throughness in lengthenings and extensions. When the horse is taking ownership of his own balance in this process, you give and they “follow”, the “pushing away” vs. “following the rein” feeling is different based on how through they are across the entire topline. I am oversimplifying this obviously, but hopefully it resonates.
I have inklings of getting this right, and lots of experience getting it wrong. The difference is small physically but significant to training. The more I get it right, the more I think about training in terms of what is needed in the moment, which is small instantaneous applications of the “big” principles. The elastic, living, breathing qualities of it when it is right are a wonderful feeling. I don’t know how to translate that into a weight because that sounds static. It is light, maybe even often weight of the reins, but a living communication channel, so there’s a lot of variation.
FWIW, the “conventional” lessons I have had have tended to want a harder, less following outside rein. There may be a role for that at times, but the correct relationship between giving and taking is what builds the communication you are talking about.
I would also not confuse the ways people misuse exercises like long and low with the absence of value in the philosophy of the exercise.
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