30/07/2023
When I learned riding in riding schools in Germany as a child, one of the worst things that could happen was forgetting my gloves. It meant that my fingers, that place between the little finger and ring finger where the rein is kept, would be raw and get blisters. It was not because of the horses, but because of the way I was taught to ride: with a lot of “contact” on the rein and by constantly pushing the horse with my lower leg. Today, I would not call this contact anymore, but by what it is: pulling. When I think about that now, I feel terrible. If my fingers got wound, what about the poor horses’ mouth? Over time, those horses got less and less sensitive on the bit and became quite hard in the mouth. Which led to more pulling on the student’s part.
When I was a teenager, I started questioning some of these practices. I felt that I needed a lot of strength in my arms in order to ride the way I was supposed to ride. And still, my riding instructors would tell me that my reins have the length of driving lines, which was their way of telling me that I have to make them a LOT shorter. At some point it stopped making sense to me: Why should I pull with all I had in my little arms on a horse’s mouth, a horse who anyway didn’t want to go forward and had to be hit by the whip to do so, and then push him with my little legs? When I got off the horse, I often felt exhausted and sweaty, and the horse was certainly happy that it was over, too.
Today, I never ride with gloves, unless it’s too cold and otherwise I will get frozen fingers. I want to be able to feel through my fingers and into the rein, feel what is happening in the horse, and if there is this subtle conversation between us. When you tense the muscles in your fingers and arms because you pull on the rein, you can’t feel.
Moreover, when I got to know the academic art of riding, I was so happy to learn that in the academic art, the head of the horse is not forced into a certain position, but the way the horse carries head and neck are a result of how the rest of the body works. Basically, we leave the head alone and work on lateral balance and educating the hind legs. Even more: I want to be able to see whether what I do helps the horse, or if he got rather tense from it. I treat the head and neck as a barometer: A barometer changes because of the weather conditions, but you can’t change the weather by changing the barometer. Sure, you can pull down the horse’s head, but that will not lead to correct posture.
On the contrary, the more I learned about correct biomechanics, the more I understood that there is a direct relationship between the forward step of the hind legs and rein tension. The more you pull, the shorter the forward step.
Pulling on the rein leads to compression of the neck and thus inhibits the correct transmission of swing. The horse gets on the shoulder, the rib cage doesn’t rotate correctly anymore, and the hip doesn’t come forward as much anymore. We basically constrict the natural movement of the spine. If we push the horse forward with our legs then, the horse becomes a so called “leg mover”: the spine is not swinging correctly, the horse stiffens the back, but the legs make big steps. In today’s dressage riding, this is even used to get more points in competitions. Spectacular steps are more rewarded than correct biomechanics.
This is not ethical. We have to inform ourselves what the consequences of our actions are and let go of old practices. Just because it has been done in the past, or because it is a custom, it doesn’t make it right.
Do you need gloves to protect your fingers from blisters when you ride? Please re-evaluate what you do and how your horse feels about it.
Photo Céline Rieck Photography
