Agreement With Center

Hands and legs in agreement with your center -

If you want to ride softly, and to have a centered horse, it’s essential to understand how to get your hands and legs working in congruence with your center.

Meaning, when you want to steer, slow down, speed up, for a start, on to more advanced aids like half halt etc, your body should make it possible for the horse to find. If your hands and legs are working against your center, you will inevitably be over aiding.

It doesn’t matter if you are riding bit less or don’t believe in using pressure - the fact remains you will be inevitably exerting more than necessary pressure on your horse, and pressure that is conflicting, confusing or meaningless. Just because you think one thing is happening doesn’t mean it’s received that way by the horse.

I work often with my students to give them examples where they can feel in real time what their aids are actually doing. It’s often eye opening to realize what we thought was a horse struggling, or ignoring us, was in fact a very conflicting series of aids.

Becoming centered in our bodies is a long push - a commitment to gaining body awareness and continually studying ourselves, instead of just saying you’re doing one thing- when in fact you’re doing another.

Most of us would be shocked to find out just how confusing our bodies are to a horse, and how much of our training and aids are to compensate or cover up for lack of clarity. We could remove the need for a lot of extra stuff if we just sat better in the first place