Is a high head the sign of a disobedient horse?

Is a horse, carrying its head high, a sign they are resisting you?

Is that resistance then disobedience?

For a long period of my riding career exactly that. I thought a horse flexed through the neck and soft in the mouth was submission and anything else was resistance.

A horse that worked with its head up or out was being disobedient.

And then I became a trainer and rode professionally…

And I quickly learnt that a horse could still work with its head up and have submission and that initially green horses and green broken horses do need to lift their head and work for periods of time with their head up.

Whether their head was in the air had nothing to do with how submissive they were.

A horse that works with its head up can still listen perfectly to the halt aid and the steering.

In fact in my experience I have found more horses with better submission working out of a frame then in a frame.

Think about it - how does a horse differentiate between the aid that asks it to tuck their nose and the aid that ask them to stop? The aid is essentially the same - (preferrably) a light, backwards pressure on the reins.

An experienced rider will say seat, of course.

But there are a lot of riders that don’t yet know how to ride with their seat, that can tuck their horses head into a false frame and then the horse has now lost its brakes. So they put on harsher bits and nose bands to try and get the brakes working but what is truly missing is the communication.

But its not just the rider, sometimes it’s the horse.

It can take a little bit even when using the seat for the horse to differentiate between a frame aid and a halt aid, especially if they have been trained without that differentiation previously. Even if they have had that differentiation trained in, with a different ride who doesn’t use their seat the same the horse can still get confused.

So the type of riding that is typically called resistance under saddle I would say is more closely akin to limited musculoskeletal development than actually resisting and challenging the aid.

My green horses on training these days have far better submission to the aids while working hollow than the horses I trained for frame equals submission in my younger years, because submission has to do with communication whereas frame has to do with musculoskeletal development.

And it isn’t easy to get there. It doesn’t happen over night.

I remember as a kid my idealised instructor got a new horse that was green and was not yet ready to work in a frame. I saw her riding it hollow and thought well maybe she isn’t as good of a rider as I thought. Maybe it was just the horse that was not good.

It takes a green broken horse with no injuries or trauma at least 6 months to 2 years to work steadily and consistently in a working frame that positively compliments the musculoskeletal system - and that’s something we don’t talk about enough.

It’s not an easy process to develop the forwardness, engagement, swing, elasticity, core, topline elasticity and postural skills for the horse to work in good self carriage AND understand its aids well that perfectly primes it for the balance needed for the career we are hoping to follow with our horse.

This is why we developed a whole course for it.

If you are not sure what a healthy working frame, self carriage and good aids should look like so that you are ready for collection, then check it out.