A Study in Posture

Over the last few years I've shied away from terms like "frame", "headset" and "behind/in front of the vertical".

These phrases, popular in certain disciplines, suggest a very narrow mindset when it comes to how we think about the horse's movement. It's not that they are "wrong", persay - it's simply hyperfocused on one aspect of a much larger picture in addition to thinking about that one aspect as something we need to address directly instead of seeing it as the end result of a cascade effect through the horse's entire body. 

They also don't take into account the other half of the equation: the rider.

What am I rattling on about? Let me show you.

This is Soni and I in June of 2020 visiting with Harry Whitney in Tennessee. Soni is pretty nicely shaped here: he's lifting through the base of his neck and withers (something he struggles to maintain, it's the first thing to disappear when he's holding some worry). He appears quite happy in the bridle and is moving fairly balanced - note how his head appears to be hanging softly from the end of his neck and his left forefoot is about to fall right in line with his muzzle were you to drop a plumb line down from his nose. You can also clearly tell Soni is "thinking through the turn" here - his jaw is flexed ever so slightly to the left and you can see the silhouette of the top of his outside haunch which tells me he was off my inside leg and shifting his ribcage to the outside while pushing with his left hind. He could be reaching more with his right hind, but knowing him this is a good effort given his left bend is much harder for him to maintain evenly and his right hock is the stiffer of the two. As for me? I've marked up this photo below to show how my posture is pretty much in line with his. However, I need to lift more through my upper body to help him stay upright through the bend as we turn onto the straightaway. You'll see the cascade effect this had in a minute...

Here's the next phase:

He's managing to stay pretty level - perhaps even a wee bit uphill - and he's definitely pushing off his hocks, but despite me straightening up a bit and picking up with my inside rein to say "hey, don't lean on me, here", the base of his neck has dropped. My inside leg has also come forward and I'm pinched through my hip flexors, not leaving him a whole lot of room to come up under my seat - I am chronically tight through my hips and have dealt with pelvic floor dysfunction most of my adult life so that fine balance of keeping my lower body in the right place without holding is always a work in progress. Soni is making a good effort to stay with me: he's softened his jaw in response to my inside rein and is flexing nicely through his left hock as we start to straighten, but it's not quite enough to save the softness he carried through the turn initially.

Welp. In Soni's defense, he's trying really hard to stay with me (note his ears in this photo and the previous one as compared to the first picture) but I'm not helping him much. He's now well ahead of my seat as I became more pinched and started to pitch forward with my upper body. He has dropped more through the base of his neck to the point where he's now heavy on the forehand. I actually really appreciate how much he's still attempting to push from behind but there's nowhere for it to go except to drive him more onto his front end.

Notice I didn't once mention the position of his head and neck in and of itself: it's always in relation to his overall balance or something happening somewhere else in his body (or mine, as it were...) The position of his head and neck is a byproduct of what is happening posterior to it. Correct "headset" is unique to each horse and molded entirely by the proper, uninhibited flow of energy from the hind end, not by anything the rider does with their reins. Our reins are simply the receptacle for that energy. I could easily have asked him to "frame up" in that last photo, but it wouldn't have done anything to address the fact that despite staying lifted in the top two thirds of his neck, he was locked in the bottom third and all the energy coming from his hind end was creating the equivalent of a twenty car pile-up on the freeway. It wouldn't have mattered anyway, given the fact that my position is in no way helping him regain his balance.

These seem like such small, subtle things and to a certain degree they are. The more I ride (and live, honestly) the more I find the small, subtle things make the biggest difference when it comes down to muddling through versus doing it well.