Compared to 30 years ago, today’s competitive dressage is dramatic and sensationalist, focusing on flashy, spectacular performances.

It is spectacular to watch, but problems arise when we try to impose these sensational styles on our own and our horse’s natural physical design.

As a physical activity, riding is fascinating because – unlike most sports – it actually deals with three different entities.

First, there’s you, the rider. 

Your body, just like every other human body, has its own idiosyncrasies.  Your bones are put together in your unique way; your tendons, muscles, and ligaments all connect and work in ways that are specifically yours.

But riding instructors usually aren’t trained physical therapists.  They try to shape your body (and your horse’s body) without understanding how it works.

 Your natural physical one-sidedness plus your daily stresses and traumas make demands on your sensory-motor system, which responds with a limited set of reflexes. Repeatedly triggered, these reflexes create habitual muscular contractions – contractions you can’t voluntarily relax.  This causes stiffness and discomfort – as anyone who’s felt the soreness of tension in their shoulders and neck can attest.

 These habitual physical patterns become so ingrained that they feel normal.  Unfortunately, when contraction and mis-alignment feel normal, then correct alignment and posture, in contrast, tend to feel strange and wrong.

If you’re right-handed and I ask you to write with your pen in your left hand, it feels awkward and impossible.

 That’s how it feels for a rider who’s used to sitting to the right – as you can see in the photo.   

Without understanding the ways the human body is put together, riding instructors prod and poke this crooked foundation to fit an imagined ideal. This adds a new layer of crookedness onto the old.  It’s as if you bought a house with a cracked, unsound foundation and tried to fix it by reslating the roof and cleaning the windows! 

One-sidedness develops over the course of years.

Happily, it’s easily unlearned.  The Bentley Correction in Motion technique is a simple, effective way to dissolve your habitual patterns and behaviour. You stop doing the wrong thing, and the right thing does itself!

Then there’s your horse.   

Just as every human body is unique and has its asymmetries and quirks, so too does every horse’s body.  

When a horse is crooked, his forehand and hindquarters are out of alignment.  One diagonal pair of legs pushes, and the other diagonal pair of legs is forced to support.  

A horse that drives more strongly with his left hind leg drags to the right like a broken supermarket trolley.  Most saddle fitting problems are a result of this – and they drive riders and saddle fitters mad!  

The third entity:  the horse and rider together.

Twenty years ago, following on my studies of equine biomechanics and human anatomical structure (specifically F.M. Alexander, the creator of the Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais), I realised that when a rider mounts his horse, a whole new physical entity is created.  When we look at this entity as a unit, instead of as two separate parts, many things about soundness and apparent schooling issues become obvious.

Horse and rider together, with their physical quirks, asymmetries, and faulty sensory perceptions, inflict even more layers of crookedness upon each other. 

 
Natural crookedness in the horse is generally tackled in lateral work.  This is great if the rider is supple and schooled enough to absorb rather than block the horse’s movement, and if they have the necessary sensory appreciation.  But most riders haven’t been taught to understand how to really feel what’s happening in their horses.  And the rider must lead by example, performing in his own body what they expect of the horse.  

Most don’t know how. 

Right-handed riders, including many Grand Prix riders, are set in a right-hand bend.   When they’re unable to release their own hollow side, they can’t help the horse stretch his.  Eventually, inevitably, unsoundness results.
 

What does all this mean?

F. M. Alexander, internationally-respected veterinarian Dr. Gerd Heuschmann, and the great classical masters all agree:  the basis of good posture and soundness happens when the neck is free and allowed to lengthen up out of the shoulders.  Then the head moves forwards and up out of the shoulders, while the back lengthens and widens in an opposing stretch down to the ground. 

What does this mean for us as trainers and riders – and what does it mean for our horses? 

When you understand how your individual horse moves, you begin to understand the effect of your crookedness on each other – and on this third entity that’s created from the two of you together.  

This is why the common practise of treating your horse in isolation from you is rarely successful.   As Dr. Heuschmann discovered in his exploration of bridle lameness, the horse’s unsoundness is affected by your unsoundness, and vice versa.  

In the case of the rider above, both were hollow on the left and stiff on the right. This double whammy creates a vicious circle.  

In all cases I see, horse and rider need Correction in Movement therapy in partnership. 

Using lateral balancing, rather than longitudinal forcing, Correction in Movement educates the horse’s posture into straightness and self carriage.   Similarly, applying Alexander Technique posture correction to the rider helps the rider come into alignment with himself – and thus helps him support and strengthen the horse’s natural movement.

Then riders begin to experience – not just understand intellectually – what happens when, as I’ve described, both you and your horse are asymmetrical to the same side.  You start to realize, as my workshop participants exclaim, “Oh!  That’s why I always slip to one side, and I have to keep pushing down in the other stirrup to straighten my saddle!”

Even more exciting, you start to feel, in your bones and body, what it’s like to be in alignment with yourself and with your horse.  You begin to know when you’re truly straight, because the horse goes naturally into self-carriage and takes up his natural rhythm on the bit. 

And you experience the almost-magical changes that happen in your horse and in your relationship with your horse.

"At last, after a lifetime of unanswered questions, misguided tuition, lame horses and an aging body….in only three lessons with Joni, I have found the skills to retrain my body to become symmetrical (even though it thinks it already is), which miraculously is straightening my horses without gadgets or force, giving the feeling of true harmony. What a find!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Never lose hope, I nearly did!" Kathy Young, Buckinghamshire

Today’s world

Dr. Reiner Klimke, winner of six gold and two bronze medals at the Olympic Games in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, as well as multiple individual and team championships in other competitions.  His Olympics wins are a record for equestrian events. He is an exponent of the FEI rules alive today. 

Thirty years ago, Dr. Reiner Klimke won virtually every dressage competition there was to win.  

Nowadays, we see a completely different picture in the ring.   

Today, the emphasis is on pushing physical and mental boundaries, answering a perverse need for more and more spectacular, flashy showmanship.  

Unfortunately, these changes aren’t all good.  Dr. Heuschmann said to me, “Today’s riding icons don’t say I’m wrong when I talk about biomechanics and adhering to the classical principles.  They just think I’m old fashioned.  They say training has developed and changed and the training of the rider has changed.” 

But is that true?  The FEI rules haven’t changed, and this new style doesn’t relate to the FEI rules at all!  

There are many opinions about how dressage should be, and this causes endless heated discussions and negativity.  What I like about Heuschmann is that he deals with facts rather than subjective opinions.  

When my students see Heuschmann’s DVD, they look at training with new eyes. They become open to rebalancing the natural crookedness in themselves and their horses – as a team.  And their horses raise the forehand and go on the bit as a gift to them. Correction in movement therapy allows this simply and easily without having to perform lateral work. When you are both schooled enough to perform lateral work you do so without being haunted by the ghost of natural crookedness injuring your success.

As competitors, we’re responsible to ride according to FEI rules, keeping the classical forms of dressage alive and vital. 

We’re also responsible to protect our own and our horses’ bodies from serious damage. More and more horses are developing injuries from today’s style of riding.   As Heuschmann says, “It’s your pulling that builds our fine clinics!”  The rising number of equine veterinarians and hospitals is just one sign of this problem.

It’s a high price to pay for moments of glory in the show ring.  And it’s the horse, not the rider, who’s paying the real cost.

Getting out of our heads and back into our bodies, feeling the purity and delicacy of our connection with our horses, acknowledging the unity that can occur when horse and rider become one amazing entity – that’s where the future of riding truly lies.

I invite you to join me there.  You can find more articles here and  videos here – and sign up to attend one of my workshops here.