It's all in the head.

There are several connections between classical riding and the Alexander Technique. One of these is the head, both from a psychological but also physical / mechanical perspective.

The hand is the primary aid in classical riding, “because the horses head comes first” according to de la Gueriniérè or as an Alexander teacher would say - "the head leads and the body follows." It can be described purely mechanical / physical, the head of both horse and man weighs its courageous kilos. In a full-size horse approximately 30 kg and 4-6 kg in humans.

To give you an idea of what the weight of your head really feels like I suggest you fill a bag with about 4.5 kg. Then take the bag and let it hang from the hand alongside your body. Notice how you perceive the weight. Then lift your arm with the bag straight out in front of you. How do you percieve the weight now? Notice what's happening in your body when you stretch out your arm. Does your body need to compensate for the weight in any way? How did you feel your balance was affected?

If we let the head fall in front of the body's center of gravity (I call It a vulture’s neck) the muscles of the neck, shoulders, back and calves make up for the weight shift that occurs in our body, otherwise the law of gravity will do its job and we fall over.

A horse can be compared to a table with four legs with a weight of 30 kilo attached on the far end of a stick that is nailed to the table-body. If the stick is raised, the weight of 30 kg is shifted towards the rear end of the table and if it is lowered it brings the weight on to the front end of the table. So by shifting the weight of its head a horse can get ready to make a roll back by lifting its head or stay heavy on the front legs (and be less moveable) while grazing.

One facet of the psychological gemstone in humans is our thoughts and ideas. Every move we make has its origin in the brain. Either we are aware of the nerve impulse or we are not – the latter it is often called reflex. When we learn to ride (or anything else for that matter), we are egaged in creating and establishing new nerve connections that will manifest themselves in the body as motion. At the beginning of learning our movements are many times both briska and jerky. That is because we are busy analysing what’s going on, what we are doing and how well we manage to meet the assignement.

After a while, we have streghtened the neural pathway enough so that we can begin to rely on a reflex like response. We begin to develop our skills. We begin to "ride every step", we are starting to detect if the position of the horse is correct before we even start the specific movement and if need be we can provide help accordingly and adjust the position.

If the horse is thinking or not I leave unsaid, what I do know is that a horse needs to involve the brain at the beginning of its learning process and build the neural pathways that will facilitate its body to perform what we ask of it - and they certainly get tired of the work . Good training helps both rider and horse to quicken the time of response and it helps to establish a reflex like response to clear questions (from both ends of the rein!).

So there are no specific equestrian bodies, the important thing is the riders head! Equestrian tact and feeling is positioned in the head, both in how you carry it physically and how you use the inside in your approach to learning and indeed how you view the fact of beeing right and wrong in that process.