04/24/2026
Beyond Behaviour (Part 1): The Internal Factors Driving Horse Performance
If youâve been following along with my Collectable Advice series, you may have noticed I disappeared. Not dramatically. More in a âsomewhere in Western Australia, covered in dust, horses, and catching up with good friendsâ kind of way.
So let me make up for it by a longer post with some important ideas.
This is something I believe is one of the most overlooked aspects of horse behaviour and performance.
Three years ago, I bought an Equestic Saddle Clip (see first comment for details). I come from a research background, so I like measuring things. It allows you to test assumptions, experiment and explore observations.đ¤
The clip analyses a few aspects of motion but for this post I want to focus on its ability to examine trot symmetry. It can reveal the rhythm, landing force, and push-off between diagonal pairs.
I assumed riders would make horses more asymmetrical.
The data showed the opposite.
Horses consistently became MORE symmetrical when ridden.đ¤
That sounds like improvement.
It isnât always.đ
Around the same time, I came across Tami Elkayam, who helped shift how I see the horseâs body.â¤
Horses are not designed to be straight. Asymmetry is normal. The goal is not straightness, but function, adaptability and ambidexterity.
This is where compensation comes in.
Compensation is not a flaw. It is how the horse maintains balance and avoids discomfort.
But when the cause remains, compensation becomes a pattern. Load shifts. Strain builds. Movement becomes less efficient.
What starts as a solution becomes a limitation and can eventually snowball into injury.
The clip showed me something I could not unsee and Tami helped me appreciate and respect it.
How a horse moves when it has choice, and how that changes when we take that choice away when we ride them.
This example is one case. One horse. One snapshot.
The horse did not appear lame. The concerns were behavioural, particularly contact and canter.
On the ground, the horse showed a clear difference between diagonals in the landing phase of trot. Around 19 percent, which is significant. The clip developers recommend any horse with a difference greater than 8% to seek veterinary assessment.
Under saddle, that difference almost disappeared.
The horse has produced a graph that is more symmetrical.
But the horse did not suddenly become sound.
The horse became constrained.
On the ground, the horse organised its body in a way that allowed it to cope by compensating.
Under saddle, that choice narrowed.
The rider introduced load and restriction. The horse reorganised because it had to.
The result was the horse forced to move with greater symmetry.
But not necessarily comfort or function and hence the deterioration of behaviour under saddle.
This is the blind spot.
Most people assess their horse under saddle.
But the moment you sit on a horse, you change the system.
You reduce its ability to compensate.
Movement becomes more organised, often more symmetrical.
But what we are seeing is what the horse can produce under constraint, not how it actually functions.
The bigger the difference between those two states, the more pressure is placed on the system.
And that pressure shows up as behaviour.
Spooky. Sensitive. Rushy. Reluctant. Inconsistent. Resistant. Difficult.
Not attitude.
Coping.đ
This is why it can vary day to day.
Surface, workload, fatigue, gut comfort, and environment all influence what the horse can tolerate.
The window shifts.
The behaviour follows.
Sometimes, without meaning to, we create the problem.
We guide the horse into a posture that is technically desirable, but not yet tolerable. We reduce its ability to compensate and increase the load on areas it has been protecting.
And then we call the response a behaviour problem.
I want to be clear - Good training matters. Clarity matters. Reducing external tension matters. This is a big part of helping horses.
It is what I do.
But it is not the whole picture.
If there is an internal issue, training sits on top of it.
It may help, but many times it is not enough because it may not remove the cause.
This is where we get it wrong.
We focus on what we see and overlook what the horse is experiencing.
Then we mislabel the result.
A horse that is restricted and compensating becomes ânaughtyâ or âdifficultâ or "sensitive".
It is neither.
It is coping.
So when the supplement, the pole work, or the latest gadget does not fix the problem, pause.
Those tools are not necessarily the issue.
But if the root cause remains, adding more DEMAND will not solve it.
It will often make it WORSE.
Before you add something new, ask:
What is the horse already managing?
Because real change comes from understanding the WHOLE system.
Inside and out.
Because sometimes riding a horse and forcing it to move more symmetrically is magnifying their struggle.
Collectable Advice 198/365. Please hit SHARE or SAVE. Please do not copy and paste.
