There are a few trainers out there who managed to learn the skills and not be destroyed mentally by him (not for him not trying - he seems to be insanely jealous when someone actually learns what he teaches.) It’s probably safer to find one of them. But definitely not all of his past students have a clue. His skills are not affected by his insanity, just his dealing with people and business practices. It will make a great story once he’s gone. Lots of unbelievable stories around that guy.
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I didn’t read the whole thread so I’m reacting to the no stretching aspect of this person’s training method. I’m totally unfamiliar with him and his methods.
In my experience, horse people who don’t appreciate the need to warm up and warm down as well as to properly condition their horse are often people who have never worked out or played a sport outside of riding. I think it’s unfair to demand an immediate and perfect trot the instant you get on. When I ran I needed to start slow and maybe even take a walk break before really hitting my stride and getting into a good rhythm. Sometimes you just get a lactic acid build up that you have to shake off. I would imagine it’s similar for horses. I don’t know that for sure but seems logical. I have ridden plenty of horses 3 years and up and I also get that forward has to be the primary thought but you can achieve forward without being unkind.
I feel part of good horsemanship is empathy for your horse.
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This is a complete misdirection of what JLC teaches.
There’s a whole philosophy around his “no stretching” but it’s not as it’s made out to be here. He does not advocate any sort of long and low while riding; this is because of studies showing the tension put the cervical and thoracic vertebrae as well as the nuchal ligament. However, he does advocate many breaks during the riding session allowing the horse a lengthened neck, at a walk.
As stated above, he has some fantastic knowledge and there is a lot to be learned from him. The snippets taken from his public pages are many times very misconstrued. Of course he leaves the in-depth conversations and teachings for his paid courses, lectures, and clinics…he’s running a business and shouldn’t be expected to give away all of his knowledge for free. His personality and lack of business acumen leave him an easy target, but if you can ignore that, there is a wealth of knowledge and experience to learn from.
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Honestly there are enough instructors out there with coherent methodologies, even for French classical dressage, that I see no point in struggling with an instructor that lacks basic communication skills. I’ve tried to read his articles. I am able to read highly theoretical text for my job, I have an understanding of horse biomechanics, I have read a lot of translation of French theory in other fields which has a distinctive combatitive polemic quality to it and I might even agree with him on some things.
And I found his writing incoherent, contradictory, and often just wrong. I realize not everyone can write well, but I see a red flag when people don’t recognize this about themselves.
As I’ve stated before in regard to him, a certain subset of learners in all disciplines are at a stage where they know they don’t fully understand the discourse. It can be impossible for them to accurately distinguish writers or experts who are coherent, but just above their current own knowledge base, from those who simply do not make sense, but have some impressive passages. And from those who use incoherence to bluster their way through.
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Anyone could have written the same of Jacques Derrida, (and lamer people tried to do the same of Michel Foucault) and yet many, many American academics were willing to put up with a whole lot of his unhelpful personality (and writing that could be described the same way, if I had to pick just one adjective to describe it), in order to use his ideas and Deconstruction.
And lots of academics (plus more non-academics) used the opacity of their writing and ideas to justify dismissing them altogether. Should that really be the criterion? “If I can’t understand it and the guy’s a egotistical dick, his knowledge must be crap?”
In all honesty, I don’t think anyone in any academic field got anywhere without encountering and putting up with some expert who had a shitty-big ego that one had to just tolerate and “work around.” Why would dressage be any different?
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So, I read Foucault for fun before I went to grad school and found him lucid and compelling. Derrida’s writing never quite gelled for me, but I went to a couple of seminars with him (he was older) and he came across as a modest and rather luminous person. Just saying.
To the extent that much of Derrida’s early work is a gloss on Heidegger, and I hit the wall with Heidegger, I was ok with not engaging with his work in my own research. Foucault is a gloss on Marx, and Lacan is a gloss on Freud, and I find both Marx and Freud easy to understand so the deconstruction or riffing on them was fun to read. But I realized that to usefully engage with Derrida (in text or in person) I’d need to actually grapple with Heidegger and honestly Heidegger isn’t that interesting to me. So I never went to office hours with Derrida, and then he passed away suddenly. If you had a foundation in the continental philosophers Derrida plays with my guess is he wouldn’t be that hard to understand.
I agree that the 1990s produced a great deal of bad writing where people did not fully understand their theoretical sources or used the Coles Notes reductive versions.
It’s from being in the academic trenches then, triaging useful criticism from reductive blurbage that obfuscated simple questions and answers, that I now feel professionally able to spot theoretical obfuscation.
Also, my immediate professors in grad school had gone through Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida to produce interesting original work that found them slots towards the tops of their fields at the time. It was clear that these sources were productive within the academic community at a high level.
Anyhow, I dont compare JLC to Derrida or Foucault. JLC is not an original thinker who has influenced a generation of riders at the top of their profession.
Academia has more checks and balances than the Wild West of self promoting horse trainers in North America. Still, it’s possible to find say a person who showed promise as a grad student, doesn’t quite make sense in their published work but sounds impressive, and hangs on as a permanent sessional who goes a bit under the radar because noone wants to look too closely at him (usually a him). I worked with one, and there were clear mental health issues under the surface.
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I do think there is some genuine skill with the guy based upon some of the riding video I’ve seen of him in his younger years. For me though the issue is one of competition, there is literally no need to accept anything less than excellence from a trainer these days. We have 23 year olds in my area who can out ride and out teach JLC. We have older trainers who have produced a string of successful GP horses, actively study human and equine biomechanics and can explain their program with total clarity. There’s no need to put in the work to understand this irksome man and his dubious program. Dressage doesn’t need reinvention, there’s nothing he brings to the table that hasn’t already been brought to the table by far more capable and honorable people than JLC.
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Well-said! And also, you think along the lines I do. No need to put up with the “wrapping paper” of bad business-, bad human relations, bad pedagogy etc. if you don’t need to. In fact, I think the consumers/ammies in our industry should (usually) demand more of their hired pros on these various fronts. There is always a thread somewhere on this site about a good-riding or otherwise good pro who drops the ball badly on some other part of the business relationship.
My response to Scribbler about a popular, somewhat opaque French academic of the 1990s was about folks’ tolerance for inaccessibility. Sometimes, as Scribbler and I both can appreciate, it’s not bullshit jargon. And sometimes, it’s just the guy not bothering to take the time to work for his customers and tailer his information to them. You have to meet students where they are, but anyone has the right to be as creative- and deep a thinker as they can.
The other point was that opacity might not be a special bad habit of Cornille, but rather an expression of the french tolerance for theory and ego if the information inside seems useful or compelling. In other words, Americans can hate a guy whose style is a PITA, but you can’t say that’s a sin of the guy in particular if this is partly a product of cultural differences. And Americans can be pretty guilty of thinking that stuff they don’t understand is (therefore) bullshit. I can provide examples if you don’t believe me.
I don’t know Cornille. I have ridden with a kinder, more patient student of his. I have a pretty long, deep and detail-oriented knowledge of horse biomechanics and I am not bad at improving a horse. I think I understand the logic of what they do, (and I suppose I should put in a long side-bar that explains what I mean by what I think they mean). But I’m not sure that such an extreme emphasis on balance and correct posture (to the point you spend a long, long time in a very slow, exacting walk) is the way that a horse wants to spend his schooling time. I am probably guilty of not trying their system long enough to see. I will say that my mare build some Hella Good muscle while we were doing this weird slow walk and trot. That is enough to intrigue me a bit.
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Oh I forgot to mention how gratifying the conversation here around Derrida was for me personally. I went to a small private school for undergrad that was heavily influenced by pomo/decon, fell in love with both Derrida and Hall and based my entire self-designed major on applying decon and encoding/decoding to advertising. Jacque’s visit to campus was way, way before my time but I’d heard he was a lot of fun and also quite scandalous, managing to shag several members of the community during his short stay.
Though most of my academic work was through the lens of how advertising shapes culture, when I graduated I naturally pivoted more towards commercial application. Spent some time at P&G who accepted me despite my lack of an MBA, because when the hiring manager saw my degree he said, “what exactly do you all do up there, it’s very mysterious.” I told him what I’d been up to and he said, “and you want to work in marketing? Wow kid, they gave you the keys to the kingdom.” Today I work in big tech, still don’t have a graduate degree and am still applying decon and encoding/decoding as a framework for building brands. So, I definitely see the value in digesting and internalizing complex theory. But, for me personally I find Derrida relatively easy to grok compared to JLC. I think the issue is that JLC has a few interesting core concepts, but they’re little more than a handful of bullet points and they aren’t going to get anyone to Grand Prix. But to sustain himself he needs to blow this out into a whole “philosophy,” which naturally entails a tremendous amount of nonsense designed to signal that his program contains more substance than it actually does.
If you all are ever in the bay area and want to get together to talk decon and dressage dinner is on me!
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No one is expected to give out their knowledge for free, however, I agree that they do present as cultish and they charge exorbitant fees even just to assess your horse from video. I have read many of his Facebook articles and I am not a stupid person but his dialogue cannot be comprehended. He doesn’t break anything down!
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I’m late to the thread but oh well.
I first read his work many years ago and found it to be mind numbing and totally unapproachable. I’ve worked with some extremely gifted veterinarians and they each had an ability to communicate complicated things in simple terms. The convoluted, overly complicated communication style seems completely unnecessary IMO, especially coming from a teacher.
A recent thread on the forums made me look back into his work on FB. What did it for me was when he cited another person’s work as his own without crediting the original author. I would have been oblivious had the original author not mentioned it in the comments. He’s also been flat out rude and condescending to several other posters on FB. Not necessary.
And while I don’t really like to critique other people’s progress with the their horses, he uses a tall gray TB gelding as an example quite a lot. However, I really have not seen substantial progress with this horse despite him having owned him for many years. It seems his theories aren’t conveyed by practice. One video was supposed to be exhibiting how much impulsion the horse had and I thought the horse profoundly lacked it.
I think he was likely a talented rider in his youth but as we all know, not all great riders are good teachers.
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I can tell when someone isn’t as all-knowing as they would like people to think by the language they use to share ideas. For the most part, in my experience, the only people that try to sound as scientific and over-your-head as possible are the ones that don’t know much of anything but want to sound like they know. If you truly know a subject, you try to explain at least parts of it in a way laymen can understand. Anyone that tries to sound super smart, I immediately am skeptical of what they are saying. And I say that as an aerospace engineer, I’m around some pretty dang smart people.
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I believe the gray TB (Chazot) passed away sometime last year. Not that I disagree with you re: some of his examples and lack of progress, but don’t look for any progress going forward 
To my knowledge he doesn’t have a new horse - or if he does, he hasn’t posted about any of them. Chazot was his only one that was of “working” age - the other ones he has (if they’re still alive) are all retired and well into their 20s.
Edit: OK well literally as of 10 minutes ago he posted about a new weanling he’s going to be training lol
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I love this. If one can’t explain something in fairly simple, relatable terms, they don’t know what they are talking about.
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100% agreed. Former aerospace engineer here, now lowly architect for the energy transition in mining and construction.
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If the goal is to improve the horse, the horse needs to stretch. They do not believe in the horse stretching.
Tension to what limit load? JLC assumes the neck ligaments do not have the elasticity to stretch at all. Does that even make sense? How lovely it is to condition and strengthen a horse first long and low and then developing collection with a lovely strong topline! My horse was subject to this precision walk for two months. I was totally confused. They were selling straightness. When I gave notice and called the vet out, I received an inch thick set of written theory. Totally uninterested in more unproductive, counterintuitive, unscientific training data.
Edited for typo!
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How NP.
This!
I know JLC. I have ridden in at least 7-8 of his clinics and found him to be a very good instructor, but not for beginners. The work I learned form him did help to keep my KS and very difficult horse sounder than he might’ve been otherwise. I learned a tremendous amount. That horse eventually just stopped progressing and eventually could not cope with that type of work and became dangerous to work with. When I had new rads taken, it was revealed he had ECVM and worse KS than I had previously known.
JLC and the vets he works with are of the opinion that ECVM is a normal variation of the C-6/C-7 vertebrae and therefore JLC’s methods are the best way to deal with them. For them, the real problem is the pressure put on that area from bad riding producing cervical arthritis, and recognizing ECVM as a congenital malformation simply let the rider/trainer have an excuse to give up on the horse. Nothing about that is true, and there is now a lot of published data about ECVM and there is ongoing research showing it to be a more widespread problem than was known previously. One of the wonderful things that better imagery can tell us. But that doesn’t fit into the paradigm they are promoting. It’s a fatal flaw of tunnel vision and it bothers me that anyone would be selling false hope. There are just some horses that aren’t going to be cured or get better. That’s not taking away from the ones that can be helped, but it’s also important to help people see the realistic limits of their horses.
Chazot did pass away in 2021 I think. He does have a chestnut OTTB that to my knowledge he’s never backed, and a couple of new horses he acquired recently. The weanling mentioned belongs to one of his students that he’s been training and collaborating with for some time.
He recently announced that as of this month the core course IHTC that he’d had going for years was going to a subscription model and those of us who had been members for more than 5 years would have to pay the subscription fee in order to continue. I opted out at this point. But I don’t necessarily regret the knowledge I gained for the time I followed him.
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