More on Tight Serpentines

A couple of months ago, I talked about an exercise where you bent your horse in a series of tight serpentines, walking a snake trail:

Ray Hunt and Buck Brannaman have a couple of different exercises they have had us go through to really focus and bring horse and rider together. One is to ride very tight serpentines at a walk, overbending in each direction so that they are more like s-shaped snaketrails rather than serpentines. When you start, one 's' might be 30 feet long but you slowly tighten it up so that by the time you get to the end of the arena, an 's' might be 4 or 5 feet long. If you can do this with a soft rein, asking less and less each time to get the same bend, by the time you hit the end of the arena, your horse will be listening very intently to you. The idea isn't to overdo the suppling but to progressively refine how subtly you are communicating and how carefully your horse is listening back to you.

 At the clinic in Chico last weekend, Buck emphasized how important it was to have your horse walking unified, having all four corners reaching equally, as you do the snaketrail exercise.  Here are a couple of sequence pictures showing my filly Emma and I doing our serpentines:

As you can see, we weren't quite reaching evenly in the last picture.  We still have some work to do.

Extreme Example of Working At Liberty

MountainHorseGrrl found this interesting video the other day:

   Advert for Nevzorov Haute Ecole

He sure didn't get all that working overnight. That took some effort and understanding :)

If you read his site or listen to his narrative, it quickly becomes apparent that his message is a load of extremist bunk designed to promote himself and his school by appealing to people whose hug-impulse is stronger than their intellect and self-esteem.

However, if you look at him like another Parelli (someone who has considerable ability with horses and chooses to use it to further their personal agenda but is a little bit disingenuous about it) then it's easy to step back and admire the things he is able to accomplish with his horses without buying the baggage along with the beauty.

Like Stacy Westfall's bridle-less wins in the NRHA reining competitions, he helps show what is really possible if as individuals we are willing to apply ourselves to understanding and working with our horses.

After all, the point isn't to ride your horse without a bridle. It's to ride your horse without NEEDING a bridle, whether there is one or not. 

The Gentle Horse

MountainHorseGrrl has produced a new video, explaining with examples the distinction between halter broke, rideable, green broke and gentle.  Her thesis is well founded and the difference between a horse that can tolerate humans and one that welcomes human interaction becomes very clear.