23/05/2026
The rib cage is not a cage. The name is the first mistake.
A cage is rigid, designed to contain. What the ribs form is a spiral structure, capable of rotation and lateral flexion, transmitting the oscillatory wave from hindquarters forward and redistributing force across the whole thorax with every stride. When it is free to move as it was designed to move, the rider feels it as swing. When it is not free, the rider feels nothing, and mistakes that stillness for stability.
Stillness in the barrel is not stability. It is the beginning of compensation.
When a horse has lost its organisation, lost its tensegrity, the rib cage is where it becomes visible, a barrel that travels without swing, a body working hard to look smooth. Spinal blockages and rib immobility destabilise the joints of the limbs over time. The compensation chain spreads.
Restoration does not follow a single gait. I begin with the horse standing. Hand placed on the spine, waiting for pulse, reading what is available, what the system is offering and what it is withholding. That initial read tells me what I am working with before a single step is taken. Then walk, briefly, not as a rehabilitation gait but as a diagnostic one: is the horse comfortable enough to continue, and what does movement reveal that stillness could not?
Most people are surprised when I move to trot before walk has done much work. Walk is the gait we reach for in rehabilitation because it feels cautious. But a horse that has lost its tensegrity cannot always maintain the slow, continuous organisation that walk demands. Trot offers something walk cannot: suspension. That brief moment of diagonal transfer, when one pair of diagonal legs pushes free of the ground as the opposite pair prepares to land, the spine is momentarily free of the stabilising demands of constant contact. In that suspension, the lateral swing through the barrel can reappear. The thoracic sling re-engages. The spinal wave, which was fragmented or absent at walk, sometimes returns at trot before it returns anywhere else.
So the sequence often is: stillness, then walk to check comfort, then trot to find the oscillation, then back to walk to locate and release the remaining blockages. Canter arrives after, when there’s enough tensegrity to support it, and it brings its own gift: horses that have been hiding low in the neck begin to rise. The longitudinal engagement that canter demands asks the system to find a different organisation, and often it does.
The full architecture of this sequence is in my book Living Movement: Organisation, Oscillation and the Education of Horse and Rider. It is nearly here.
