Developing an Eye for Movement in Horses and Riders

Those are pretty short videos to judge on.

I'd go back to flat work with this horse. I'm not a jumper by ANY stretch....let me preface my comments with that.

The horse appears to be resisting both riders. The girl needs to lift her hands to get a reasonable half halt to prep him for the jump.

Bob, what you did with your upper body and hands kinda make me cringe for that horse's mouth. Both you and the horse were bracing on each other like crazy. I don't know anything about him or his habits, but in my world, we'd go into an arena and we would work on rollbacks and whoa and backing up until he was really in between the my hands and feet and waiting for me. His brand of resistance comes from unforgiving hands quite often. He's bracing because he expects to get chucked in the face or having too much of a hold on his face with no softening when he gets it right.I know jumping isn't quite like that, but he gets so upside down in his frame that it's a wonder he gets off the ground in time. I was surprised he could even see the jump well enough to get his spot.

An after thought. I believe it is easier to develop an eye for horse and rider movement looking at errors, which is why I posted these videos. Perhaps I think this because I have spent my life looking at far more errors than great riding. I don't know. But either way, it is useful to look at less than perfect riding and horse movement. I hope people will post what they see, and if my comments seem incomplete, ask again please. It's about learning.

Jacki, I have known some vets who were not riders but were very good judges of lameness in horses, and come to think about it, I have known vets who ride who were awful at seeing lameness. Instructors, vets, instructors and horse trainers need to develop and eye for biomechanics. Riders need to develop a feel for biomechanics, which I think is mostly feeling footfalls and the direction of a horse's energy as it moves through the horse's body. Riders need feel because they cannot see the horse move as they ride.

Your take on Beau's approach is very good, I think. He is very braced and he is "dancing" with his feet. If you watch or ride many highly athletic horses, they regularly do things with their body that are mixed, wrong and ugly perhaps out of excitement or indecision. The odd thing about this athletic type of horse is somehow they make it all come out right when it counts. With time, I think they just get bored, then they relax and that leads them into a more conventional efficiency in their movement.

I will offer a contrast to Beau as a type in Kevin, the Mustang tricolor paint, who had very little athleticism, but solid balance and a cool head. He was almost always correct in his movement. For example, he always did lead changes, not because of his training but I think because he was so muscle bound and simplistic in his biomechanics that cantering a turn on the wrong lead was simply too difficult and uncomfortable for him. His range of motion often would not permit an incorrect lead, and because of this if you could keep him cantering (he liked to go down to a trot if he entered a turn on the worn lead) he would change leads. With horses like Beau, their athleticism allows them to do a pretty balanced turn on the wrong lead or to go back and forth between leads in a turn.

Rhythm, Relaxation, Straightness, Impulsion are the ingredients of a good approach. The other rule I use is "a jump has three parts, the approach, the jump itself, and the landing". The rider is responsible for the first and the third part and the horse is responsible for the second part. When we train jumpers we hardly every get a horse that does all three equally well in the beginning. This forces a choice. Do we use a linier method, saying I will not do the second part until I get a very good first part in the horse? In the second video you see a trainer who has made a choice to focus on the second part of the jump first. The reasoning that lead to this decision was a combination of Beau's chronic immaturity that put him behind in the training schedule and his ability. Some might say the decision is one of rushing his training by not first establishing a good approach to a jump. That would be a reasonable and correct evaluation of Beau's training in the video. As a counter point to that reasonable evaluation, it could be said that Beau had sufficient preparation in learning a good approach, but his mind when faced with a new type of jump or a bigger jump, abandoned his methodical approach training.

Given that circumstance, IF the trainer feels Beau can do the second part well, he/she can move on past the anxious approach and let him do his excited jump approach so he can experience that his anticipatory anxiety is only a self generated myth. It's a judgment call for a trainer. Beau could have plowed that jump. He could have got hung up on it. There were several not so good potential outcomes in letting him go to that jump in an anxious approach, not the least of which would have been a dangerous landing.

Making the decision to let him do the approach in his anxiety goes back in a very odd way to the square zero idea. In a jump, square zero is the take off area or the box as it is sometimes called. If you trust that if you bring a horse like Beau to the box in reasonably correct way and that he will fully use his athleticism to move out of square zero into square one with sufficient athletic power and grace, you are setting him up to move as correctly and it will work. That's training. If you make this kind of leap frog judgment in flat work, the consequences are minimal, meaning if the horse fails, it is because you were wrong, so you do it again with better judgment. But if you use this same degree of judgment training a horse to jump, the consequences are greater for both horse and rider, and just doing it again can be more difficult or impossible. It is a calculated risk but it is the same in that you set up the horse for a movement so he can learn, thus moving him forward in his training.