AH! It hurts when you try to use your reins.
Have you taken any medication? I think you mentioned some medication that didn’t help.
Did anyone give you any exercises? Did they help? Usually, they give us riders great exercises, but not sufficient repetitions or sets of those exercises. I’ve often had to work up to 3-4 times more repetitions and sets to get a PT’s exercise to help me!
But see, if you can answer those questions, you can help the doc figure out what it is! That is really the first step, that you can communicate what this is. I am SURE the doc can find what it is then.
This is the problem with pain, that we experience it in the moment, and can’t put it into words. I’m really glad you drew the picture but keep thinking about it, please, and keep trying to put it into words.
Anything that we can express accurately in words, we can fix. I guarantee you. It’s the communication that’s important.
if you CAN’T describe something in words, chances are, it means you’re adapting or compensating, and shutting out some of the sensation you’re feeling.
That may be why you can’t exactly say how or when the horse pulls. You’re shutting out a lot of sensation from your immediate attention. Both animals and people do this when they are sensory - overloaded or have pain.
Horses can get really strong when they have been jumpers, or if they can get very straight in the neck and lack suppleness. You might have to work alot on suppleness, not by doing exaggerated bending, necessarily (occasionally as a very last ditch correction only) but by using leg yield to get him looser through his body. Often they ride jumpers in Myler or some of those other bits that then cause them to get strong in the usual dressage snaffle and flash. Usually in dressage, we get fixed on specific bits and say, if the horse’s lips or bars are used to a jumper bit, they may not be reacting to the bit as desired. But what people usually do in dressage, rather than getting to a thinner or harsher bit, is try to get at this using cavesons or other aids.
You might consider a gag bit temporarily, which works more on the lips, and almost does a kind of half halt up in the corners of the horse’s mouth FOR you, which can help a horse that pulls. Some people will ride a horse like that with a gag rein and a snaffle rein and switch back and forth as needed.
Another thing some trainers will do is tie a light thin string to the girth, run it forward to the bit, feed it thru the bit ring (inside to outside of bit ring) and then back to your hand. You can get a better opening rein this way. You can also drop the string from your hand if there is a problem.
Another technique is to longe the horse with sidereins and use one side rein shorter (putting him say, going to the left if he falls in to the left and putting the left side rein 2-3 holes shorter ), and use the whip to push the horse out on the circle and get him to bend his body and not fall in on one side and stop weighting that side more.
Sometimes I’ve seen people do some pretty incredible things to get jumpers more ‘broke’. Some jumper trainers don’t fix things, they just sort of figure out how to have the horse jump without fixing some things. Some things can even get WORSE during jumping, especially with this kind of trainer. Sometimes jumpers don’t HAVE trainers- just a series of catch riders, and oftne they are VERY good at ‘making do with what is there’, and they specifically don’t fix things, they just work around them.
You might have to do a lot of schooling with your jumper.
OFTEN a power horse that jumps can be constantly using his muscles in one way and get very stiff and fixed in how he uses his muscles. A jumper uses his neck alot, like a balancing rod, and to do that he has to ‘set’ certain muscles and hold them steady.
SOMETIMES a horse is harder on one side because he’s leaning too much weight onto that side. He may not actually be TRYING to be harder to bend on that side, he may have so much of his weight leaning on that side that he CAN’T bend well. Bending him and moving him away from your inside leg with a kind of leg yield position might help.
I’ve seen people put one hand way up and tip the horse’s nose in a little and get a lot of flexion right at the poll to try and loosen up muscles that have been fixed in one position literally for years.
I’ve even seen people bend the neck and then lean forward and slap, punch and massage the muscles in the neck. One European trainer did that alot and told me if you keep up slapping the muscle, it will gradually let go and loosen - a light slapping sensation seems to ‘distract’ the muscle.
Sometimes the horse needs to do a ton of counter flexion, going around and around and around, sometimes even with quite a lot of positioning, to stretch and start to supple muscles.
Sometimes a rather deep position helps jumpers to start to loosen their muscles. And sometimes you can bring them very deep, and bend from one side to the other.
Sometimes leg yield is really your friend, and you can exaggerate it, do it across the whole arena with leading shoulders and trailing haunches (an ‘incorrect’ and very powerful exercise from schumacher!)
Sometimes counter canter with a counter bend is your friend, or just plain old counter canter.
Sometimes if one rein is hard you just need to give on the other rein, and sometimes if one rein is hard, you try to take the other one!
Muscles can get VERY, VERY strong, and yet not supple. They get fixed in one position and get very stiff. And very likely, what’s happening to your shoulder is because of just how stiff and fixed the horse’s muscles really are!
