Balance
is one of those terms in the horse industry that
is so misused that it’s become mythunderstood.
All it really means is that the horse is distributing
his weight equally on all four feet. We want him
carrying as much of his weight on the ride side
of his body as on the left side. We want him to
carry as much weight on his two front feet as
he does on his two back feet.
That
seems pretty simple. But there’s a catch.
A horse has this long neck with a big heavy
head hanging out there at the end of it which
naturally has a tendency to shift a little more
of his weight onto his front feet. When he’s
just hanging around being himself, a horse typically
carries about 60 percent of his weight on his
front feet.
This
natural balance is going to vary quite a bit
from horse to horse. One young horse may look
like he’s carrying about equal weight on
all four feet when he’s standing there.
You can look at another horse and it looks like
90 percent of her weight is on her front feet.
As horses grow and develop, their hind end grows
first and pretty soon they’re standing
downhill. Then you’ve got to wait for the
front end to catch up. Some horses never completely
catch up and stay built downhill, or what we
call on their forehand, their whole lives. Because
one side of his body stronger or more dominant
than the other, a horse also tends to carry
a little more weight on one front foot than
on the other. When you’re training a horse,
it’s your job to get him carrying his weight
more or less equally on all four feet.
When
we’re working on straightness, the previous
level on our training tree, we start helping
the horse develop the muscles and strength he
needs to adjust his balance laterally so that
he’s carrying an equal amount of his weight
on his two front feet. Until the horse becomes
straight, becomes equally comfortable using
the muscles on both sides of his body, he is
going to be carrying more weight on one shoulder
or the other. He will feel “stiffer”
and less accepting of the rein on one side compared
to the other. Once he’s straight, once
he’s accepting the rein on both sides,
we move to the next level and start asking him
to shift some of his weight from his front feet
to his back feet to balance longitudinally.
As
we’re developing the horse’s muscles
and his ability to carry himself in longitudinal
balance, remember that horses have rear wheel
drive. All of their power comes from their hind
end. They don’t have front wheel drive
that’s pulling them along. Their engine
is in the rear. So we’ve got to build up
their engine muscles to play the games they’ll
eventually play whether it’s to get over
a bigger jump, to get a longer slide, or to
do a better canter pirouette.
Developing
balance means that we are asking the horse to
bring his hindquarters more under his center.
If his back feet tend trail out behind him and
we use our aids properly to ask him to step
more under the center of his belly, he’ll
lift his back and start carrying more weight
on his hind feet and less weight on his front
feet. So his hindquarters need to move up under
his center of gravity in order for him to be
more balanced. Cavaletti work and transitions
are some of the exercises you can use to help
a horse develop longitudinal balance.
Training
means systematic mental and physical development
of the horse. The training tree gives you a
sequence of concepts that you can picture step
by step. This is very important because it gives
you something to go back to when things aren’t
working. That’s a big hole in a lot of
trainer’s programs. They don’t have
a step-by-step system that, if something goes
wrong, allows them to go back through the sequence
to find the source of the problem.
Take
a spin, for example. Some trainers just put
the horse in the shape of a spin, reinforce
with leg to get him to speed up and hope that
the horse will figure out how to do it. A really
athletic horse will which is why so many trainers
get away with doing things this way. But then
they get horses that don’t have natural
athletic talent. Something is wrong in the spin.
Maybe the horse is crossing his outside front
leg behind his inside front instead of in front
of it. Or when he pivots he puts his weight
on his outside hind leg instead of on his pivot
leg. If you have a horse logical sequence like
the training tree to develop the horse’s
mind and his body, you’ll always have a
place to go back to in order to fix something.
You can fix the problem within the problem and
then, when you ask the horse to spin the next
time, he’ll get it right.
Meredith
Manor International Equestrian Centre.
http://www.meredithmanor.com
