When did this become a thing? Seeing it a lot with the younger H/J set. Used to see it in the Western Pleasure/Quarter Horse world. I don’t like it and think it inhibits lateral bend but the younger riders seem very enamored…
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You don’t know what you don’t know.
Many years ago, I was helping a kid at a show for a friend, and I told her: If your hand is touching your thigh, either your hand or your thigh is in the wrong place. And it’s probably not your thigh. Lol.
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Ack. I immediately thought of the WP riders when I saw the first part of the post.
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Wide can be very useful with a wiggly horse, but low is not, it’s too much like trying to turn your hands into side reins to achieve “headset.”
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Remember seeing this occasionally in several disciplines since back circa 1970, nothing new…or effective…about it. IMO. Heard several theories explaining why, none made sense. Think it is mostly monkey see monkey do with no thought or understanding.
Have ridden a difficult horse or two using wider, lower hands for a few strides but not like what you sometimes see. Always wonder what would happen if a horse spooked or bolted while rider was all hunched over with arms wide out at their hips and 3 feet of instant slack appear when horse sucks back and drops a shoulder as they go around. Interesting to see…
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I do it a lot on horses that have been taught to go around hollow and braced on the bit… which is a lot of the H/J schoolies I’ve been on the last decade or so.
Full disclosure - I did move from the H/J ring to the WP ring in my 20s. 
The challenge I try to address is finding the release of being UP in the back and driving from behind. In my experience, it’s easier to show this release zone to horses with a wide, low hand - similar to using side reins in a round pen. I don’t want to fight with their face and have them bracing through their neck while I’m asking them to lift and engage their core. Once they understand the concept I’m asking for and start developing correct movement - hands and cues are refined and generally go back to normal.
Granted, I think there are a lot of riders out there without much actual clue on the mechanics of training each part of the body or any real rationale as to why they’re breaking things apart and how they plan to put them back together, so I have no idea what the OP has seen. YMMV.
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I have MS with many hand and seat problems. I ride lesson horses who seem to never have been educated about the proper response to the bit, who by reflex tend to invert &/or suck back from contact.
It occurred to me that these horses had never been taught the proper response to the bit and contact. These horses are also sort of paranoid about my hands because of all of my problems from my MS are not exactly the normal problems people have with their hands on horseback.
I found that then I extend my hands to the side so that there is a straight line from my elbow to the bit when I look down at my hands from above, the horses relax and respond to my driving leg aids by reaching out to the bit and that the horses relax their mouths, polls and necks and their automatic evasions mostly disappear so long as my fingers are relaxed and supple.
I got the impression from these lesson horses that as long as they could see my hands clearly that they lost a lot of their fear of my hands. With my hands spread these lesson horses can see where my hands are and what my hands are doing, and then these lesson horses do not get any unpleasant surprises from my hands.
This irritates my riding teacher, she wants to see my hands up in the “proper” position but on the other hand she really likes seeing her lesson horses relaxing and taking proper relaxed contact with the bit. Gradually, as the lesson horses learn to trust my hands (as in my hands are not going to hurt their mouths) they relax and their heads come up some while keeping proper contact. Eventually the horses trust my hands enough that they will take proper contact from the beginning of my lesson even when they cannot see my hands, at least until the next time my MS messes up my contact.
This is how I have cured lesson horses who go around inverted all the time with other lesson riders, it all goes down to the horse learning that he can trust MY hands. I love it when a horse whose mouth usually feels like it is made of iron becomes relaxed on contact and my rein aids can be from just twitching my fingers at the proper time in the horse’s stride while on contact.
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All of this.
“Pizza” hands as my old coach called them (ie wide and a bit lower) can really help with a wiggly horse by giving them a bit more space to figure out what feels right. It can be easier to maintain a consistent feel while the horse with making weird shapes through the body if the hands are wider, and a lower hand may help with the ones that want to brace. This isn’t a technique that belongs in the warmup ring IMO - it’s for really green or really poorly trained animals you wouldn’t generally be showing! Once they get the idea, you start putting your position back together.
But like a lot of trendy poses we see in the saddle, it looks cool and fashionable to the undereducated - good riding is invisible, and invisible riding is hard to copy. A hunter perch or crazy wide hands or completely sideways canter (looking at you, WP warmup ring) can be emulated despite not knowing the mechanics and thought process behind them.
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Or they go into the warm up ring, get wide-eyed at banners flapping in the wind, and start going around like Gumby. Riding these horses with a bit of a funnel can help them while they’re going every which way. Then once they get over being noodles and start going like grown horses you pick your hands up and start riding like a person again.
This is the other reason I’ve used this technique. It seems to parse as a comfortable middle ground between elementary controls and a soft contact for a horse who doesn’t yet understand how to have a relationship with the soft contact and tends to go up and backwards into it. Particularly, with this kind of horse, I pair the wide hand with a lot of changes in bend so the horse’s body is always moving and they have all kinds of reasons to stretch and change their shapes and feel the bridle one way, then another way. My horse responded really well to this and I continued to use it in his warmup for a while, again picking up the hands and riding in a way that befits an equitation armchair quarterback once he got loose and was ready to go forward in a working posture. The thing is that the wide hand shouldn’t be so low that it loses contact or attempts to pull the head down- you still want a line from the elbow to the corners of the horse’s mouth. If there’s no actual relationship between the hand and the mouth you’re defeating the purpose and you may as well put your hand forward and ride on the buckle like you’re out for a jog in the grass.
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Well yes - good point 
. I guess maybe “consistently” should’ve been there in my post. I’ve definitely done some unorthodox things in a pinch when one misplaces the brain cell.
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Renn, that is a great description of when this might be something you pull out of your tool box for a few minutes.
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I use the low/wide hand on my horses all the time. Granted, they are all in various stages of green, but as others have said, it’s an incredibly useful technique to teach straightness, relaxation, and contact (and relaxing into the contact, lol). Giving them somewhere to go (ie. the ‘funnel’ concept) really helps them figure out the leg to hand connection. I use it on made horses too to encourage stretchy work. And I see no reason not to use it sometimes in the warm-up ring, especially the hunter ring. I get the frustration with uneducated riders and bad habits that become trends and then spread like wildfire, but I’m also a fan of functional riding and training - sometimes what a horse needs to learn (or be reminded of) a concept isn’t best conveyed through classical, picture-perfect form. It’s akin to a teacher finding a different way to explain a concept to someone who is having a difficult time ‘getting it’ the conventional way. Once the concept is more or less understood, by all means pick up your hands and ride ‘correctly.’ I’ve only recently reached this stage with one of my mares. A few weeks ago the light bulb fully flickered on and I found that I can carry my hands and she maintains a soft, correct connection without inverting or evading. This was after a long time of consistently using the low/wide hand during our rides.
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Low is pressing down 9n the bars of the horses mouth. Never mind the pain, and the evasion it teaches, what you arent teaching is how to push the horse into the bridle with your seat and come through with impulsion. You’ll have a horse evading the bit, curling under, and on the forehand. So, why?
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Using it to school is one thing.
It’s the show ring where it makes me cringe.
Like here:
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Ohhh, well … that’s sure something.
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YUCK!!!
Yes, I do use low and wide contact BUT I always, always, always make sure that the horse’s face is in front of vertical, checking with my riding teacher to make sure.
Of course a lot of these riders’ hands in this video are really HIGH, not low.
Even on the most inverted or BTV horses I have never held my hands that far apart either.
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Oh I had something much different in my head when this thread came up. I do long and low hands when schooling one that’s wiggly or uppity and needs that “channel”–but if a horse is that far behind the vertical, I will literally chuck the reins until it gets back in front. Nothing productive happens in a schooling session with a horse behind the vertical more than 50% of the time.
What’s in the video appears to be a very particular aesthetic. I know nothing of arabian shows so maybe there’s more to it.
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Wow. That was… something.
I will just make the observation that while slow motion can be a fun feature for some animal videos, like seeing a dog defy gravity and leap into the air to catch a frisbee, the slow motion feature is not always an improvement.
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This is just my own particular viewpoint about that video.
These riders look like they are scared that their horses will take off running uncontrollably.
When I got to ride Arabians, either my own Arabians or the Arabian lesson horses at Debbie’s stable I never had that fear, even with my problems from my MS.
Arabians are conformed to carry a good bit of weight when they get to hold their heads where the individual horse wants to carry its head. They are also quite sane as long as they feel that their rider is not torturing them with hands, legs or seat. There is absolutely no NEED to make their horses proceed around the ring in this fashion.
Poor horses!
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Gads, thats awful. But the low, wide hands are the least of whats going wrong here. Total insult to the art of the bosal and the long tradition of getting a horse straight up in the bridle and that term has nothing to do with what you see here.
Did learn something by watching though. It is possible to get 4 beats in that slow crawl of a jog.
Too bad, those are really nice horses.
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