My QH drops his right shoulder. I have worked with him on it for a while and he is MUCH better but I would like some other ideas of exercises to try to help him more. It is mostly to the right and really bad on circles at the lope. At the walk and trot he will only do it occasionally.
Any suggestions?
Indirect rein in front of the withers. At the walk and trot, in the corners, hold your outside rein steady and bring your inside hand up and across the neck in front of the withers, and ask your horse to move to the outside a few steps in an arc. Use as much inside leg as gets it done. When you ride the short ends, turn early, then side step as above over to the rail. Continue with a figure 8, first direction with a direct rein to the inside, then cross the center, move the inside rein over the neck to become an indirect rein in front of the withers, inside leg hard at the girth, and move them around the second circle in a counter bend. Practice this until the circles of the 8 are the same size - first bent with the circle, and the second counter bent. Both directions.
When you can do the above, canter and practice moving horse into the center of the ring and then outward with an indirect rein. Spiral in and spiral out. Every time the shoulder drops, pick up your inside rein across the neck, (keeping good contact with the outside rein) and move your horse to the outside to lift the shoulder. If horse cannot do that by then, go see the vet.
The exercises are good. The explanation of the indirect rein is lacking. The hand should never actually cross the neck. It should stay on it’s side of the center line. The whole horse must be put in such a position that the rider FEELS like the action of the rein is diagonally across the horse, connecting the inside foreleg with the outside hind. So your horse should first do good turns on the forehand and move away from your inside leg or you will be fighting the whole time. A spiral can be used to teach the same thing with no awkward manipulation of the reins, but you need a good instructor who understands the biomechanics to teach it to you.
longride1, I would agree with you. This is best first worked on with help. In the spirit of ‘Ask, Tell, Make’, my initial ‘Make’ version with a resistant horse often has both my hands 6" or more to the outside of where they should be (i. e, inside rein hand definately over the neck). Later it gets more correct with the ‘Ask’ version.
To the OP, dropping the inside shoulder at the canter is bad and can lead to a tripping fall. Since I am a chicken in my older age, I always make sure a young or strange horse will pick its shoulder up and move it to the outside when I lift my inside rein. I check this out at the trot before thinking of cantering.
My horse drops his inside shoulder when I let any of 3 things happen.
When I don’t keep a steady outside rein, he wanders around trying to find support and leans in to find it.
When I have slightly too much outside rein, he turns his nose a bit out and then drops his shoulder.
When his balance has shifted forward (because I haven’t kept the forward going, no matter how slow we are moving), he drops both his shoulder and nose as his front end falls.
In my opinion, riding slow, collected, balanced, and on a loose-r rein is much more difficult than the forward you have with hunt seat. You can cover up much with forward. Every little balance shift shows up more western.
When I don’t keep a steady outside rein, he wanders around trying to find support and leans in to find it.
Yep. Try for more inside leg to outside rein.
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