Episode 17: Are You Helping or Interfering With Your Horse When Riding?

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Podcasting from a little cabin on a hill. This is the Stacy Westfall podcast. Stacy's goal is simple to teach you to understand why horses do what they do, as well as the action steps for creating clear, confident communication with your horses.

Hi, I'm Stacy Westfall, and I'm here to teach you how to understand, enjoy and successfully train your own horses in this week's episode. I'm tackling the subject of active or passive riding. Do you know? Are you an active or passive rider? One of the shortcuts when I'm trying to figure out how to explain this is are you doing too much or are you not doing enough? In a lot of the illustrations that I give when I'm trying to explain things to people. I try to put a picture into their head and let's go ahead and use a teeter totter. And on one end of the teeter totter, let's put doing too much. And on the other end, we'll put not doing enough right in the middle. We're going to put what we're going to label a neutral position or as I read in an article I'll refer to in a minute, a non disturbing connection inside of this active vs. passive rider conversation is hidden. The subject of connection and connection is something that you'll read a lot about in dressage or western dressage, but you'll also find the term floating around out there. And the shortest version or maybe the best pitcher of connection would be if we're talking about having a connection to that horse's mouth. There are also the words elastic connection or elastic arm or an arm or a connection that follows the horse's mouth. And all of those give you the feeling of, as I've described before in another podcast, the feeling of holding hands.

So it's this comfortable connection with your hands. Now, this is also possible with your seat and with your legs. It's possible with any and all of your cues. But inside of that, listless. Back off to that teeter totter again and say we can be doing too much or we can be doing. Not enough. The most extreme versions of this that I can picture are if you put a rider on that really doesn't know how to ride. There's a pretty good chance they're not going to be doing enough. And a lot of times if you can imagine popping a friend onto a horse and that friend never ridden, and then let's just say you're for fun, that you're leading that horse and you start trotting with that horse, that rider up there. A lot of times a rider, new rider put in that position is going to hold on the saddle horn. Their heads are gonna be kind of flopping forward and backwards. Their seats gonna be bouncing up and down. Their legs are kind of flopping all around or maybe curling up a little bit into a fetal position. And they're basically just trying to protect themselves. But they're not really they're not doing enough because they're basically just in a protective mode. On the other extreme of that teeter totter, we would have a rider who was doing too much.

So maybe they're using all the aids all the time to the point where the horse doesn't feel the release. Now, be careful when you're picturing that, because when you watch very high level training, let's just say dressage. You can actually have connection and releases inside of that connection without having this full release, kind of a version of of a release. We can talk about that a little bit more, but when we're talking about doing too much. A lot of times one of the clearest views of that is the horse will look very unhappy about the whole situation, because if they don't feel like they're getting a reward inside of different things, you can be doing too much. And in it can be, you know, you're not even able to stay in the end of the arena that you want to be in. Or you can be doing too much and you can be doing high level maneuvers. It's more about the clarity of the AIDS than it is the actual results. When we're talking about doing too much now, let's get back to that neutral or non disturbing moment in that middle of that of that teeter totter. The reason I want you to think about doing too much or doing not enough, how active or how passive you are when you ride is because it's going to change a lot of things for you when you think about the fact that in that neutral position, you're not truly doing nothing.

Again, back to the picture of that friend that you plopped up on your horse and then took off leading them at a trot. They're in a disturbing kind of a connection, like they're not in a neutral non. Irving, they're not doing enough and they're actually kind of flopping around up there. So they're they're not doing enough, but it's all they can do. But what we're trying to picture is how do we get to that middle neutral, non disturbing? Well, if we take that person who was out of sync and flopping around, the interesting thought here is that to get to that neutral position in the middle of the teeter totter, you actually have to have a version of positive tension in your body. Positive tension would be that idea that your arms aren't flopping in rhythm with the horse trotting your arms have figured out how to stabilize themselves. But that actually takes some muscle work on your part, as you can imagine, doing the game, egg and spoon or somebody handing you a cup of water. The reason that you're going to be able to walk on a horse and carry that cup of water without spilling it is because you've got some form of this healthy tension in your body as opposed to being limp like a ragdoll. And this is an important thing to picture because this is the place that we need to return to when we want to give the horse the rewards.

We can't completely remove ourself from the horse when we're doing a lot of riding exercises. Well, let's hope not that Devoto just won't go up. And so when we're doing these riding exercises, we need to turn to this neutral state. And that means that if we completely collapse all of our AIDS, that we're actually releasing so much that we're interfering more like that rider that we threw on there that doesn't know what they're doing. And we can obviously be doing too much and interfering. Now that I've got that kind of planted in your head, I'm going to read to you a small section from an article that I linked to over on the Web site, and I going to attempt to pronounce the author's name Rachel. Severity. I'm gonna go with that. And in the article, Rachel says, quote, Active AIDS are meant to produce a specific response from and change in the horse regulating AIDS are intended to prevent, limit or regulate the speed of changes to the horses current situation. Passive aids are in contact with and attentively follow the horses, barrel back and mouth passively. I know there was a lot. But you can skip back 15 seconds on most of your players and listen to that again. What I love about it is that active aides are actively trying to change the horse.

So when we look at that rider that we're just going to put way out at the other end of the teeter totter, that's doing too much. They're trying to change a lot of things all of once and they could be overly active if we take them to that extreme. And just like I said earlier, we could go overly passive and not doing enough. And now we've got this limp rag doll kind of a rider. And that means that they're not actually doing what she's calling passive in the middle or what I'm calling neutral. Is this more balanced? Aides that are in contact with and attentively following the horses barrel back and mouth passively. I love this illustration because we've got to get back to this neutral in the middle so that when we are trying to be an effective rider and. Communicate with the horse by using our aids. That would be an active aid to, let's just say, turn to the left when the aid becomes active. We need to know how to get back to that neutral middle and not necessarily feel like we have to drop everything in our body. Drop our posture. Drop our hands. Drop our legs. A full release doesn't have to mean that we take away all of the aids from the horse, because in a way, if we take away all of the AIDS, we actually take away all of their support.

We take away all of the communication. And if we end up too far on the other side of the teeter totter, we almost interfere with that horse because we're no longer even following that motion. This last week, I started a Facebook group based around Western dressage. And if you're not on Facebook, I'm going to be popping stuff up on the blog and YouTube and other places that have to do with Western dressage. But one of the earliest questions that came in there was about doing a free walk and in a free walk, the horse is supposed to be marching forward. So let's just picture this horse going across the arena at a diagonal out of walk. And you're supposed to be walking from one letter in the dressage arena straight towards another. And the question was, how do I keep that horse marching straight and forward while letting that horse have its head and stretches its neck down and forward? And my answer was, you're really going to have to pay attention to your aides, because whenever I ride that maneuver, whenever I ride this free walk where the horse needs to be the lift, the reins are lengthened and the horse is supposed to follow that connection and reach down and walk marching purposely forward. Whenever I start feeling a problem there, it almost always reflects back into my body because I need to make sure that in my mind, when I'm giving that horse freedom in its head, that I'm not collapsing the rest of my support system.

If anything, as I let that horse stretch that head down, out and forward, I need to make sure my seat is following and is either following in that neutral way that does have some tension and or might even need to be going back and forth between active and neutral, active and neutral. And if I feel the horse drifting one way or the other, I can actually adjust my pressure with my legs and my direction with my seat. And jokingly, it feels like my eyes have lasered because I am staring at that letter because that's what it's taking right now for me to put that intention into my body because I'm not using the reins to guide that horse as much. But I've got to make sure that when I release that one aid, which is more the rain that I need to make sure that the other one's at minimum stay in that neutral or what I'm going to call positive tension. Where this is kind of interesting to me is that I grew up riding in the state of Maine, my mom and I. Trail Road all the time, and we rode bareback. Most of the time when I did eventually get a Western saddle for my horse, I would ride it occasionally, but my knees would always hurt every time I put the saddle on and went on a trail ride.

If I pulled the saddle off one on the same trail ride or much longer for a ride, my knees never hurt. So I used to just blame it on the saddle. Then years later, when I became a professional and I rode for many hours a day, at least eight hours a day, and never had knee pain, I thought it was really interesting when we would go for a trail ride. And within 20 minutes my knees would start hurting. Same saddle, same horse, much shorter amount of time. And this was my first clue that something was going on here that I needed to look at. And it didn't take very long, because as soon as I kind of zoomed out and thought about my overall body, what I was doing was I was kind of collapsing onto my horse because the saddle allowed me to be a little on the lazy side for about how active or passive I was being. So I was moving way to the passive side, not the neutral middle of that teeter totter, but to the further downside. So I was basically becoming partially a ragdoll. What's interesting is if I switch to bareback, that wasn't an option because bareback is going to require a minimum level of tension in my body just to keep me up on top of the horse. So that was a very interesting thing because when I was doing training in the arena in my saddle, because I was actively riding, working on different maneuvers or, you know, I had a purpose and a plan when I was in the arena, it made me an active rider, which is why my knees never hurt when I was riding at home.

I have pretty much worked my way out of that now because I've trained my body or should I say, retrained my body to be more active while I'm going on my trail rides, which I know intuitively is going to help my horses. Because if I'm sitting there and I'm not actively balancing myself, if I'm letting that saddle kind of hold me on there more, then odds are I'm just a little bit out of sync, a little bit behind the motion, a little bit ahead, a little to the left, a little to the right. And that means that's going to be a little harder on my horse because I'm not pulling my end of the bargain. What I'd like you to think about as I wrap up this episode is that one of the first things you need to find when you're writing is what you'll hear people call an independent seat. And one of the easiest ways to know if you have an independent seat is to do something like egg on a spoon or carry a glass of water if it's warm enough out that you're not going to freeze it.

And you'll find out whether or not you can have that that motion of the horse move and your hands can stay independent of that. And this is a great exercise to do on a lunge line. But either which way you can ride one handed and carry an egg and spoon thing or glass of water and find out how independent your seat can be at different gates and in different transitions, because it until you have an independent seat. It's going to be very difficult for you to develop a following hand and a following hand if you want to play around with that. You could potentially put a halter on over your regular bridle and you could use that halter because a lot of horses are going to let you handle them a lot more. Some horses are gonna be a little bit like, I don't know what you're doing with that amount of contact on my bridle and I'm not going to tell you just to put a halter on and take off and hope it all works. So you could make some kind of combination and you could put the halter on and then you could feel how that horse will let you have a lot of connection. And that even at a walk, that horse's head moving up and down is going to be a challenge for you to try to follow that, wear that that rain or lead rope or whatever you tie onto that halter doesn't go loopy and get a drape at it because you're going to follow that horse's nodding head up and down.

And it's very interesting because as a professional trainer, I realized that I play with the amount of contact that I will have with my horses. Obviously, if I'm working on upper level raining maneuvers or I'm going to go towards bridles, that horse is going to have to go on very little rain contact. But remember what I said before, another podcasts. That means I'm going to have to be more aware of what I'm doing the rest of my body, just like in that that free walk. I was just describing where I've got to have that laser focus to ride myself forward towards that letter. I'm going to have to do that. If I give up the connection with the face, I'm going to need all these other ways of communicating with the horse. Guys, I hope that really helped you. Thanks for joining me today. I love to plant these seeds in your mind and get you just thinking about it. Even if you don't feel like you have the total answer when you're done with the podcast, I hope what it does for you. I hope you go out to the barn and you ride or you pull up a video of you riding last summer or whenever.

The last time it was that you have a video of you riding and you watch and you think about the subject that we just finished covering, because that is when these things are going to sneak into your body and into your brain and they're going to affect you at the deepest levels. And I really hope that you're enjoying these and that you'll join me again in the next episode. Thanks.

If you enjoy listening to Stacie's podcasts, please visit Stacy Westfall dot com for articles, videos and tips to help you and your horse succeed.

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