Maybe It's Not the Horse...

In the beginning of my classical training, I had a lot of bad habits to fix.  One in

 particular was using too much leg. 

My father, who also rode and started most of our horses, had read some of the classical masters like Museler and Podhajsky and in his limited understanding picked up on the importance of leg aids.

And so, in typical over-achiever fashion he applied leg. A LOT of leg!

Being his daughter—and riding the horses he started—I followed the same pattern.  Before long, I was riding with spurs all the time. Not as a refinement, but as a constant aid.

I was not happy using a lot of leg, but it was all I knew.  When things didn’t happen—sideways, frontways or backward--I squeezed and pushed with my leg. This successfully got me through quite a lot of competition, but I eventually hit a wall, especially with my big red horse, Royce.

It was when I began learning the lateral movements that my limitations in understanding balance and position really became evident. I was constantly pushing with my leg to move the horse laterally. The result--awkward, painfully slow lateral movements that stalled out.

My mentor would come into town for three days every few months to teach and he constantly corrected me, “relax the legs, give with the back”.

Despite my best efforts to relax the leg, I would eventually resort to my old ways and try to push with the legs.

He would just laugh and say, “Kirsten, you work so hard!”

Finally, frustrated at the lack of my progress, he insisted I go to his farm for “bootcamp”. I arrived and found that his horses were not only ‘allergic’ to too much leg but that in fact they began to shut down the more leg you applied. My “go-to fix” did not work on his horses.

The instructions every day were the same, “let go of the leg, relax the back”.

After a week and a half of painful, glacially slow lateral work, I was cooked.  Tired and frustrated, I finally gave up.

One morning, I just positioned in the saddle and said, “okay, you want no leg, here is no leg”, and I pulled my legs completely away from the sides of the horse.

Suddenly…the horse went forward. Released from an imprisoning grip, the horse was free to move.

I was stunned. I softened even more, releasing my back, doing less—and the horse took bigger, freer steps.

Something was happening and I wasn’t doing anything.

After a few more days of revelatory riding, I headed home, wondering: Would my own horses respond in the same way? After all, they had been “trained” with leg.

To my utter surprise when I went for my first shoulder-in with Royce, he glided easily into position and then flowed forward, reaching laterally with a freedom in his shoulders that I had never felt before. Even the trot shoulder-in had great impulsion, all with the softest of aids.

I couldn’t believe it! I had a “new” horse and all I did was go away and train myself. He had not changed. I had changed.

Now, this story is not just to expound upon the overuse of the leg and value of letting go of it, but to make a point about our own riding development.

Are there horses trained with leg that perform perfectly well? Absolutely!  The point is that I was stuck in a paradigm that had limitations for greater mastery and I had to change my idea about how to ride in order to change the results of my riding.

As you proceed down your riding journey, you will come across many obstacles. Some solutions will be dependent upon helping the horse with training, physical development or even rehabilitation.  However, the majority of the time you are going to be the source of your problems and solutions.

I know this is not a popular answer. But, more often than not the horse is not the problem. The horse is merely revealing the problem.

Riders want to look for quick fixes and the next best training aid. In reality, the thing holding them back is themselves.

This is not a criticism. It is actually the most encouraging part. Because when the rider changes, everything changes.

For a long time, I believed that progress meant doing more—more leg, more pressure, more insistence. But that experience with Royce showed me something different.

Instead of doing more, I needed to do less—and understand more.

That shift didn’t just change one exercise. It changed how I approached everything.

Because once you begin to see that the horse is responding to you—not resisting you—the work becomes clearer. Simpler. More honest.

And from that point forward, the question is no longer:

“What is my horse doing?”

But:

 “What am I creating?”

**This idea—that the rider becomes the source of both the problem and the solution—is part of a larger structure of training that I’ll be sharing more about in my next newsletter. Stay tuned!