Introduction
A member of our Artistic Dressage Community asked Shana and me: “I wondered if you could try to explain how you 'know' you have your horse connected and through from behind?”
Connection(s) and throughness is actually a rather large topic on which you could write a whole book because there are several different aspects to it that you can explain in great detail.
There are many different connections that have to be established between the rider’s aids and the horse’s body, between the horse’s legs and the ground, as well as between the different parts of the horse’s body. With each new connection, the energy of the horse’s hind legs can travel more freely through his body and the permeability for the aids increases. Every time a connection is lost, the permeability diminishes and the movement impulses of the hind legs as well as the rider’s aids get stuck.
A Network of Pathways
I like to picture the horse and the rider as a system of pipes or hoses through which water runs. You can channel the water so that it flows from any point in this pipe system to any other. If a pipe is clogged, the water gets backed up and can’t flow through this part of the system any more. If a pipe has a hole, the water leaks out and leaves the system altogether. Both the clog and the leak result in certain parts of the body being out of reach for the energy of the hind legs and the rider’s aids.
Another image that works well is that of a network of roads. If there is a mudslide that covers one of the roads, traffic comes to a standstill and drivers either have to wait until the road is clear, or they have to find another road that leads them to their destination. If there is a big sinkhole, a car can fall into it and disappear.
Along similar lines, we can channel the movement energy or movement impulses of the hind legs along the horse’s spine to the bit and recycle them through our seat and reins back to the hind legs so that the energy forms a closed circuit, similar to an electric circuit.
Through these pathways the energy can be sent from any part of the body to any other part with the help of the rider’s aids. The seat, weight, leg, and rein aids originate in the rider’s spine and pelvis and flow through the same pipes or hoses to the horse’s spine and legs. In that sense, the rider’s legs and reins are extensions of the seat.
When the horse is connected, and there are no obstructions and no leaks, you can reach and feel any part of the horse with your aids, you can send your weight through any leg into the ground, and you can send the energy of the hind legs anywhere. The horse’s entire body is open and accessible.
As soon as one muscle braces or tightens, the "pipe" is clogged up, and the energy can no longer flow through this part of the body. When the horse starts to bend or yield with a body part that is not supposed to bend at that moment, it's like a hole in the pipe through which the water escapes, and the connection between the energy source (hind legs) and the rest of the body is interrupted. Clogs and leaks very often occur together, because clogs can create leaks: If a joint is blocked by stiff muscles, the horse will bend somewhere else instead, just like water will flow around a blockage in the river and may flood the banks in the process. As a rule of thumb, horses tend to yield with the most accessible, most mobile part of the body first. They can protect stiff muscles and locked up joints by yielding with a joint above or below the blockage. The rider’s aids and the movement energy then gets directed into the wrong channel and doesn’t reach its intended destination. In other words, certain parts of the body will not be accessible to the aids, as long as there are muscle blockages or hypermobile joints. The rider can’t feel them or influence them.
There are several possible causes that create muscle tension and bracing, such as imbalance or crookedness in the horse or the rider, conformational problems, pain and discomfort from injuries or ill-fitting tack, etc.
Balance as a Prerequisite for Connectedness and Throughness
One of the most frequent causes is imbalance, with crookedness as a particular subset of imbalance. When a horse or human is balanced, they use their postural muscles along the spine to maintain their balance and their posture, so that their movement muscles are free to create and maintain movement. In perfect balance, horse and rider can move effortlessly with fluidity and ease. However, when balance is starting to deteriorate, the postural muscles are no longer able to maintain balance by themselves. In that case, the movement muscles of the limbs come to help. Unfortunately stabilising the body is a very different job from moving the body, a job they are not designed to do. When movement muscles are trying to create balance and stability, they end up bracing, which interferes with their real job of moving the body.
At this point, movement is no longer effortless and fluid, but hard, tiring, and stressful. It also creates undue stress for the joints and tendons. With each muscle that braces and no longer works the way it is designed to, a pipe gets clogged and a connection to a certain part of the body is lost. In the most severe cases, the horse seems to turn into a brick that is completely impermeable for any aid.
When the horse or human loses balance, they are at risk of falling down, which triggers a fear response. The fear of falling is one of the most primal fears in horses as well as in humans. That’s why they try to avoid it at all costs, even if they have to brace all their muscles. Unbalanced horses and rider are often nervous and apprehensive. When their balance improves, they tend to relax emotionally as well.
So, in order to connect the horse from back to front, front to back, and side to side, we need to start by balancing him. And helping the horse to find his balance under the rider begins with riding correct arena patterns in a steady tempo that is neither too fast nor too slow. A steady, metronome-like tempo is the prerequisite for longitudinal balance, which is why rhythm and tempo are the first step of the German training scale. Aligning the horse’s feet correctly on the arena pattern helps him to find his lateral balance. It is a central aspect of straightness. On a single track, the left pair of legs should be on the left side of the chosen line of travel, the right pair of legs should be on the right side, and the horse’s spine should form a segment of the line.
When the horse is balanced, all muscles can do the job they were designed to do. They work together, rather than against each other, which is why no energy is wasted, and the movement feels effortless.
This will remove a large part of the unnecessary muscular tension. For many horses, finding longitudinal and lateral balance is difficult at first because they have poor body awareness and don’t know exactly how many legs they have, where they are, or which leg needs to support the majority of the weight at any given moment in order not to fall down. That’s why it’s very helpful to include exercises that improve the horse’s body awareness early on.
Horses with difficult conformation or a problematic training history will still have old, habitual muscle blockages in certain areas even when they are relatively well balanced. These can be removed with gymnastic exercises that target the specific area of the body where the tension is located.
The Rider’s Share
Everything I described for the horse applies to the rider as well. When the postural muscles keep the rider upright and balanced even in the trot and canter, the rider is in a flow state where riding feels effortless and easy. Arm, hand, and leg muscles can relax and communicate with the horse. Sitting the trot or canter feels easy. When the rider loses her alignment and her balance because her postural muscles are not doing their job properly, she will get out of sync with the movement of the horse’s back, and her arm and leg muscles will start bracing to hold on to the horse and the reins in order not to fall off. These braced muscles can then no longer feel the horse or communicate with him. They also block the hip, knee, and ankle joints, as well as the wrists, elbows, and shoulders, and the rider is no longer able to sit the trot or canter, which interferes with the horse’s balance and freedom of movement. If the rider is unbalanced, she will push the horse out of balance. If she is crooked in some way, she will make the horse crooked as well. If the rider braces certain muscles in her body, the horse will brace the corresponding muscles in his own body that are connected to them.
Summary
From the explanations above, you can derive several key ingredients that are necessary in order to develop a well-connected horse that is permeable for the aids:
1) Correct arena pattern in a steady appropriate tempo
2) Aligning the horse along the line of travel
3) Balanced and correctly aligned seat of the rider
4) Finding and removing muscle blockages through gymnastic exercises
5) Closing energy leaks
6) Testing and establishing connections through actively connecting exercises
As a general rule of thumb, the first three of these elements have to be worked on more or less simultaneously. The second three elements can be worked on once the horse is moving in a steady tempo and on correct arena patterns, although sometimes you may have to be flexible with the specific order in which you work on them in order to be able to address the horse’s current needs.
