Let's say you're tracking right, ie on the right rein, and
it seems to be going good. Then you track left and it
feels like you've got a board underneath you - not only is
your horse's nose not to the left, it's over on the right
somewhere! Why is this?
If you look closely at how the horse is traveling to the
right, you'll notice it's not actually 'bending' through its
body. (Whether or not a horse actually bends is an
whole 'nother topic! so I'll skim over that for the
moment...)
For the sake of simplicity, consider that a
horse is bending properly on a circle when a smooth arc can
be drawn that passes through the sacroiliac joint, between
the withers, and between the ears and this is the same arc
the horse is traveling on in forward movement. (The
'ideal' picture.)
In the
horse that is stiff to the left and 'supple' to the right,
the middle point for the withers will actually fall to the
left of the arc. And rather than smooth 'bend' from
hip to wither or wither to poll, there is likely to be two
'boards' connecting at the withers but jackknifed to the
right. ie the tail and the head are to the right and
look like a jackknife closing to the right. In essence, the head can't go left because the
shoulder is over there. The shoulder is over there
because the right hind is weak. (there's a whole host
of stuff going on, actually, but these two aspects are the
more salient two for this discussion.)
The solution is to put the withers in front of the hind
end (hmm? where have we heard this before?!) with a
shouder-fore. The left shoulder is 'caught' with the
outside rein which acts like a guardrail while the inside
leg has to do a little more work than it's used to.
This strengthens the inside leg. (you may need
more inside leg yourself, but be careful not to overpower
your outside rein as that probably contributed to this
problem!)
I usually see results in half a circle but continue on to
do two circles to make sure. By the end of two circles
the horse feels pretty fluid and 'booking.' really
moving well.
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