Balanced Horse Training

05/28/2026

05/27/2026

“The long way is the short cut…”

Fixing the short cut is longer than the long way anyhow.

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1712297916790630/?fs=e&fs=e

04/25/2026

We're amazed how often we see signs of horses showing signs of physical and or emotional stress that are dismissed - and the consequences. We have one horse in our business who had such dangerous PTSD other professionals openly expressed concern about our safety.

We tried every method to address her physically and mentally we could reasonably offer. Acupuncture, chiropractic, massage, MFR, comprehensive blood tests, stem cell, a custom saddle and bridle, in hand work, always breathing exercises small asks and praise. Calming supplements, chakra balancing, monthly Adequan, time off, slowly starting over. Reiki, essential oils. Treats. More praise. And always respecting her very telling sensitivity and dangerous hyper vigilance for any other horse in the barn that was ill or with undiagnosed cancer or other as yet unknown terminal illness.

All the remedies we tried with her worked,. Cumulatively. Six years. Always letting her tell us where her recovery brought her thus far, always respecting where that was. Sometimes one step forward, many steps backward to give her time to process, settle and begin anew.

She is a gentle, very loving, kind horse who suffered deep grief after losing her favorite sibling, her breeder, then all her siblings in a short period of time and having bought her from a rider who used force and rage.

We learned to respect how horses know and tell about the health of a herd member despite the compromised horse doing his/her best to hide their issue from any possible predators.

Horses bodies always tell if we're open to seeing. Horses mental states always tell but we're not always open to see nor to alleviate whether through lack of knowledge, access to expertise, support and funds.

This mare was purchased by a first time owner. She's not an accomplished rider. But she has a depth of character and patience to have saved a horse that has offered few rewards required by most horse owners. Til now. Her horse shed the layers of grief, of fear, of prey triggering. Her physical beauty is now matched by her calm, gentle loving soul who decided not not give up on herself either because of the constancy of support given to her.

As her trainers and mentors for her owner we developed our depth, skill and patience. We were rewarded with a rare and extraordinary example of the commitment of a woman who had a dream, a desire to experience the joy and beauty of having and riding a horse, and who instead committed to the individual sentience and needs of her horse, to the process of her healing, recovery and discovery of a different, deeper reward. We are grateful for Kimberly and Hanna.

Six years.

04/24/2026

https://thehorsesback.com/equine-arthritis/?fbclid=IwZnRzaARYsodleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA8xNzM4NDc2NDI2NzAzNzAAAR7Ru-7XCi3PwSqirh2oU6Muk3CMImeqgt2W_hycdJp5imldSH911IDskyiLLg_aem_16Twm9uPMh3Fu1CvfXSDsA

Equine arthritis of the elbow is found in the majority of worked horses, according to this research by Dr Sharon May-Davis.

04/24/2026

This link offers a lot to think about. While not specifically saying so, it offers recommendation for in hand and body work. It also begs the necessity for a trainer who can see, hear and feel the horse both while standing and in motion and have a depth of knowledge of movement to address the compensations using all these tools rather than “packaging” the horse under saddle which will absolutely make a horse lame sooner rather than later. This is how we understand and use classical training and rehab in our barn. Throw out the clock, the timeline and work with the horse in front of you that moment.

Beyond Behaviour (Part 1): The Internal Factors Driving Horse Performance

If you’ve been following along with my Collectable Advice series, you may have noticed I disappeared. Not dramatically. More in a “somewhere in Western Australia, covered in dust, horses, and catching up with good friends” 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.🤓

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.🤔

That sounds like improvement.

It isn’t always.😎

Around the same time, I came across Tami Elkayam, who helped shift how I see the horse’s body.❤

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.😕

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 “naughty” or “difficult” 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.

04/24/2026

I was taught the lunging triangle.

Horse on the circle as the base, the lunge line one side, the whip the other, and me standing still at the top. That was what correct looked like. I went through the exams, learned it, repeated it, and for years that’s exactly how I lunged horses, because that was my education and I had no reason to question it.

And if you’ve been taught the same, this isn’t a criticism. It’s simply where many of us started.

But the moment I began to strip things back, to take off the side reins, work in just a cavesson, and actually observe what the horse was doing rather than what I’d been told it should look like, that’s when it started to unravel. The picture didn’t match the theory anymore. Horses weren’t holding the circle, they were falling in, falling out, speeding up, slowing down, drifting towards me or away from me, and no matter how still I stood in the middle, it didn’t improve.

That was the turning point, because it forced me to look at what was actually happening rather than what I thought should be happening.

The whole triangle idea relies on the horse being able to organise its body around you without you truly helping it to do so. It assumes the horse can hold balance, alignment, and coordination on a circle simply because we’ve placed it there, and that by staying still and sending energy from the hind end, everything will somehow come together. In reality, that’s not what happens at all.

A horse on a circle is dealing with balance, asymmetry, coordination, and gravity all at the same time. Most horses are already crooked before you even begin. They don’t carry weight evenly, they don’t step evenly, and they don’t naturally bend in a way that supports correct movement. So when you stand still and drive the hind leg forward into a body that isn’t organised in front, you’re not improving anything, you’re just adding energy into a system that can’t manage it.

The horse then has to solve that problem somehow, and the way it solves it is through compensation. It might speed up, fall further in, drift out, brace through the neck, or become reactive. That’s not bad behaviour, it’s the horse trying to find a way to cope with something it physically can’t do in the way it’s being asked.

This is also the point where side reins tend to get added, because the horse doesn’t look steady, doesn’t look consistent, and doesn’t look round enough. So instead of questioning the process, we add more restriction to try and control the outcome. We fix the head and neck into a position, hoping that the rest of the body will follow.

But all that does is cover up what the horse can’t actually do.

The neck is one of the horse’s primary tools for balance, and when you restrict it, you take away its ability to organise the rest of the body. The horse can no longer lift, lengthen, or adjust where it needs to in order to stay balanced on that circle, so it finds another way. Usually that means more tension, more use of the underside, further dysfunction and more compensation somewhere else. At that point, you’re not developing correct movement, you’re training a more contained version of dysfunction.

And all of this stems from the same starting point, which is standing still and expecting the horse to shape itself around you.

Standing still is not guidance, and a fixed triangle is not communication. If anything, it removes your ability to influence what actually matters. The front end, the shoulders, and the alignment of the neck are what organise balance, yet the triangle system encourages people to focus on pushing from behind instead. When the front end isn’t aligned, the hind leg has nowhere functional to go, so driving it forward simply magnifies the imbalance.

When you step away from that way of thinking, lunging starts to look very different. Instead of controlling from a fixed point, you begin to move with the horse, adjusting your position to support it. You step towards the shoulders when they need guidance, you step away when the horse needs space, and you start to influence the front end first so that the hind leg has somewhere correct to connect into.

That’s where the real change happens, not through forcing a shape, but through helping the horse find one it can actually maintain.

Lunging itself isn’t the problem, and it can be one of the most useful tools we have when it’s done well. It can improve balance, coordination, posture, and communication, but only if we stop expecting the horse to organise itself while we stand still in the middle and start taking responsibility for guiding the movement in a way the horse can understand.

Because horses don’t struggle with circles for no reason.

They struggle when they’re not being helped.

04/07/2026

Educating our eyes to see correct biomechanics outside and effects inside that we can’t directly see.

12/19/2025