Here are some of the commands I have heard teachers shout to students whose horses were showing various degrees and types of crookedness and imbalance:
more outside rein/relax your outside rein
use the inside leg to engage the hind leg
lift your inside hip
tile your pelvis more forward or further back
straighten your elbows
don’t tilt your head and look up
The list seems quite endless.
Each command is intended to correct something that the horse is not doing properly. It’s to address a physical imbalance a horse is exhibiting under saddle. It could be falling through the outside shoulder or dropping the inside shoulder. It could be to correct bending with flexion in the wrong direction or overbending. It could be to rectify incorrect tracking in lateral work or hyperflexion. All horses carry some degree of crookedness and imbalance and have straightness issues. And all riders try to counteract this problem by adjusting their position and use of the aids.
What I have not heard many teachers shout when working with students trying to correct straightness problems is, “Help your horse let go of its emotional worry and stress.”
I have worked with countless horses with chronic crookedness under saddle. At a guess, I’d say 75-80% are primarily due to emotional anxiety. When the internal worry is dissolved, almost all the crookedness goes away with it. Anxiety is by far the most common cause of crookedness.
But I want to be clear that I am referring to horses that are not impeded by physical health or conformation problems. If you don’t know whether your horse’s crookedness is caused by physical or emotional trouble always have them checked out to try to pinpoint which it is. Of course, some physical problems can cause emotional stress, eg, chronic pain will lead to chronic anxiety. But in this article, I am referring to horses whose crookedness cannot be attributed to a physical malady. I am talking about horses whose crookedness stems from a training issue.
When a horse feels anxious it results in muscle tension and resistance. Emotional tension causes physical tension and physical tension causes resistance and crookedness. You can’t fix emotional tension by simply addressing how a horse uses its muscles. Emotional tension derives from a horse’s mind, not its muscles. The brain controls muscle tension, not the body. The brain both creates and releases it. Therefore, by encouraging the horse’s mind to relax we encourage the body to relax and we help create straightness in a horse.
Some people think it is the other way around. This is why there is so much emphasis on physical manipulation of the body with aid pressure, rider position, and gadgets to enforce straightness. But as long as there is emotional tension a horse will always display resistance and be prone to crookedness. While a horse is emotionally anxious I know there are many ways we can make crookedness uncomfortable enough to force its body to work with a fair degree of straightness. But I don’t believe that when a horse is emotionally anxious it can find straightness itself - we have to impose it. A chronically troubled horse will always be chronically crooked.
