07/03/2022
BEND EQUALS MENTAL GUIDANCE. Until you have your horse bending in the direction of travel, everything you ask is going to be pretty much a surprise to him.
Why do we ‘bend’ the horse? The usual physical reasons are to allow the horse to work in balance… To equally load all four legs of the horse’s body within each direction change, meaning fewer ‘worn out’ parts… To allow a horse to see where he is going…
To bend him is to keep a horse from leaning… To equally develop both sides of the horse… To establish leadership by teaching the horse to ‘wait’ for the turn… To increase his ability to stay on his feet in all sorts of athletic endeavours... To allow for better, more precise turns and approaches to jumps… To show that where there is flexibility, there is no tension.
Asking our horses to bend should never be difficult. If the rider simply remembers that the hand on the "inside" of the bend, whether it’s a natural or counter arc, is the one carried slightly higher than the "outside" hand, the horse or pony will keep his corresponding shoulder up and will position himself correctly.
This is not easy, or natural, for most of us!
While we can clearly understand that we will ride towards where we are looking, human nature has us collapsing the entire upper body to the inside of a curve. We’ll lean in, which has most riders raising the outside rein, instead. The inside hand drops, allowing the horse to fall in on his turns and circles, aka ‘dropping his shoulder’.
A correct bend requires us to bend our elbows!
I like my horses to bend around the inside leg without me using anything but a softly pulsing energy at the girth. If keeping the correct bend—that is, just seeing the lashes on the inside eye—is hard work, the rider is usually not maintaining the inside hand's position. The outside rein is used with feeling, simply encouraging the horse to stay round and soft.
Keep it light; keep it simple.
Here, young Lauren supports Henry on the correct bend, as they half-pass right in trot, while riding western and using only one hand (with romal reins). The horse shows his relaxation through the poll by keeping his ears and eyes level, all with a lovely step-over mirroring his front-end effort from behind.
It’s not quite so easy as these two make it look!
