All about contact...

You have heard the term many times, right?

Bu what is contact?

Simply put, contact is a feel of your horses mouth. Through contact we can have a subtle conversation with our horse and this becomes connection.

Contact should be a straight line - elbow, hands, and reins to bit. If we break this line by either lowering our hands or lifting our hands we interrupt the conversation with the bit to the horses mouth.

Quite often, contact and frame get confused for one and the same thing. You can have contact and your horse isn’t in a frame. You can have your horse in a frame and not have contact.

Contact also shouldn’t mean control - but some riders can feel like they are out of control when they don’t have contact.

It is important to ride your horse both in contact and without contact. Riding your horses in contact is important horse getting them to hold themselves together and in balance as is required for the athleticism demanded of them for the different disciplines we ride. Riding without contact is important for getting our horses working with us without “controlling” them with the bit.

If you don’t feel comfortable letting go of their mouths you are only get part of the conversation.

If this is you, and you feel you need more support with contact, feel and getting comfortable letting go of your horses mouth, join our free workshop “Riding with Heart”, which focuses on uncovering how to begin developing feel and connection in the saddle.

What is Bridle Lameness and how do you avoid it?

Have you ever had a situation where your horse perfectly sound on the ground, but get in the saddle and their stride becomes irregular, short, choppy, hindquarters not tracking up and even lame?

This is possibly something known as Bridle Lameness. And it is becoming increasingly common in the equine world.

When we are working our horse through and into contact, part of the process is showing our horses how to move freely within the restraint of the aids.

If our horses feel contact and are not yet accepting or working into contact our contact can create restrictions in the range of movement. It grounds the movement as our horses brace into their body to balance against the bit pressure instead of feeling the bit pressure and lifting into it.

When we are getting our horses to work into contact, what we are doing is getting our horse to feel the freedom of movement within the restraints of the aids.

Let’s be honest with ourselves: bridle pressure, whether bitted or bitless, is not natural and inhibits our horses’ balance.

Add to that the human on the back which they have to carry, which isn’t necessarily always balanced itself and changes the horses center of gravity and how they have to carry themselves.

Our horses instinct isn’t to softly follow and accept the contact. Its instinct is to pull into and against the contact to balance itself. If a horse is working with unsteady hands it can also try and “find the quiet” by going above or behind the bit, or even pulling in to the bit to try and hold it steady in its mouth.

When our horses “balance against the bit”, they use parts of their body that impede their true balance from their core and center of gravity. They do this by twisting at the pole, dropping the shoulder or the hip or bracing their underneck. All these actions affect our horses ability to move functionally and “work over the back”. Ie work with good posture and freedom of movement.

So if you have had a horse in and out of work because them constantly seem to be coming up lame, it could be the way they are using themselves when working under saddle.

We have a couple of things at Equestrian Movement that we do for this:

• Rein back over a pole. Rein back over a pole - when done correctly - shows them how to lift through their legs while rein pressure is being applied (again, whether bitless or bitted) so that it encourages them to engage their core and not ground their their legs to balance

• In hand work. I like to do in hand work to show the horses how to work in to contact and find their own center of gravity and balance with bit pressure before adding the rider and asking them to also balance the human

• Timing and feel. The biggest inhibition to your horse moving freely under saddle in contact is the timing of your aid. If you can’t feel what their legs are doing you are potentially grounding the movement just by when you apply your leg and rein aid combination.

Are you having problems keeping your horse sound, working over their back and accepting contact?

Enrolments for our course Green to Self Carriage are opening shortly, where we address and go deep into detail on how to work your horse correctly for a working frame and self carriage so that it enhances their quality of pace and makes movement feel good.