Resistance of force and weight

This week I want to write about something that I perceive is a central idea in French classical riding: how force and mass affect the horse's movement and co-operation with me as a rider.

All movements, both in horses and humans, is controlled either by muscular force or the impact of gravity on our bodies, or more likely a combination of both.

When you lose your balance it is suddenly gravity that determines how you move. Movements like this that are initiated and controlled by your weight (and not your muscles) are more or less out of your control. This also applies to horses. There are two clear examples of occasions when the horse allows its weight to control its movement.

One is the racehorse. When the racehorse is going at full speed (and it is insanely fast! I have tried at the local race track) she uses her weight to obtain and maintain momentum. You could say that she throws her weight forward and run to catch it again. So no matter how tired the horse is when passing the finish line, she has first to gain control over her own weight and then she can stop, which might be half a lap later.

The second example is the young or uneducated horse that puts her head to the outside when she turns. When the horse does this, she "loses" her weight in the direction of motion. When turning she will have to run after her own weight, she is out of balance.

When the horse's movement is under a strong influence of her body weight, the movement is thus to a great extent uncontrolled by the horse herself. Looking at movement in this way, it becomes logical to train the horse not to use her weight to bring about movement. A horse that uses her weight to move is often heavy in your hand and you have a hard time controlling speed and direction. What you as a rider need to do is get the horse not to hang on the bit. For this reason you apply the proper half halt where you raise your hand so that when you lower your hand, the horse is rebalanced and is light in hand.

A horse that rebalances herself in this way raises the neck and head, and by doing so transfers more of her weight to her hind legs.

The horse moving mainly due to muscular force is therefore what we strive for. But to not make the challenge of riding too easy horses can also use their muscles in a way that does not make it easy for us to ride. A horse can tense its muscles and, for instance, not bend to the right when you ask her to. The horse can have tense muscles due to stress. Tense muscles may also be because the horse has the habit of moving with tense muscles when riding. For example, if you use your hand backwards to give signals to the horse, the horse will most likely tense in order to protect herself.

What can you do if the horse is calm but still has tension in her muscles? You can lightly vibrate the reins to make the horse yield the jaw, or train the horse to taste the bit as if it were a piece of sugar when you take light contact with the bit. This is what I wrote about last week and what the French call "cession de mâchoir".

These thoughts, to define in what ways the horse can make it difficult for the rider to have a precise influence on its posture is called "resistance of weight" and "resistance of force" in English.

Thanks to Mark Stanton of Natural Horsemanship Magazine for proof reading! Any remaining mistakes are all my own.