For those who don’t know, proprioception is the awareness of where the body is in relation to the external environment. So think along the lines of things like how we/our horses can walk around without staring at our feet, know how high to pick up a foot for a step, get the food to meet the mouth, etc, etc. Very handy in life.
Sometimes however, proprioception vs. reality do not meet up. If you’ve ever been like me and poured water down your shirt instead your mouth, or bumped into a doorway on your way through, then you’ve experienced a momentary blip in your proprioception. But it can also be calibrated a little off in a more steady way. If you’ve ever had a riding instructor tell you to put more weight in one sitrrup or seatbone, but you’re thinking “OMG, if I do that, I’m going to slide right off that side” your calibration is off. Or if they tell you to sit back, and you think you’re like, laying down on your horse’s butt… but the video shows you still tipped forward, well, your proprioceptive calibration is off.
When it comes to developing good proprioceptive sense in terms of less “blips” (aka, not being a klutz), use it or lose it is a big thing. With horses, this especially means exposing them to a variety of footing and terrain, both in their work and day to day living.
In terms of good proprioceptive “calibration” it can be really helpful slow down and explore non-habitual movements (after all, it tends to be the habitual ones that let things shift slightly over time). Now, by non-habitual, I don’t mean needing to contort yourself into a totally new and wacky position… just a different pattern than your typical movements. For example, I often lay on my back with my feet against a wall, then explore pressing into various areas of each or both feet and feeling how it affects my hips and back. This helps recalibrate my left-right balance by taking my bodyweight out of it.
Soooo, some 23,000 words later, that brings me to my answer of the original question “What’s up with that single pole straddle?” This easy-looking, but deceptively challenging exercise is a powerful proprioceptive recalibration for the horse. The pole isn’t forceful, but given how solid it is, it doesn’t really allow for cheating. It’s asking for true squareness in the horse — legs and body — which is actually pretty rare. Even horses willing and able to stand up square will have weight shifts (not to mention that many horses can’t easily stand square in the first place). Again, to use the example of riders, an instructor can stand behind their class and find not many to be truly centered in the saddle. If you get up on a stool and look down some horse’s backs, most are not straight through their spines. If you watch them walk away from you, not many are on a true “two-tracks” where the front and hind legs of the same side land travel and land on the same line. The pole allows them to find that “middle line”.
What you see when your horse stays there “zoning out” and perhaps showing releases is the “integration.” This basically means this new, cool, input to the nervous system is being processed and “uploaded” into the brain and body. It’s a key part of this type of slow proprioceptive work, as well as many bodywork modalities that aim to “talk to” the nervous system in a similar way (such as Equi-Bow and Masterson, among many others). Allow this… try to avoid “snapping them out of it” before they are ready. (But I hear ya on the cold 
).
And to whoever said it’s a stretch… yes, a huge number of horses are overly tight/contracted on either front or hind (or both) adductors (muscles that pull the leg inwards). So while this isn’t a streeeeetch in the sense of bringing the legs out as far as you can, it’s definitely asking the leg to be farther out than their “normal” which definitely can initiate releasing of those contracted muscles (sometimes even better than a classic “stretch” because the horse is more relaxed).
And I guess that brings me to that final part about why this type of exercise and bodywork elicit similar responses. I could do another 23,000 words, but dinner is ready, so I will say (1) Parasympathetic state (2) Relaxation of tension patterns, and (3) Input to the nervous system
We take it very slowly.
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