Our hypothesis-testing experiment

We worked with equine osteopaths, because we had no research laboratory and, above all, had found no tools with which to test our intuitive hypothesis. We had to develop new techniques so that the rider could let the horse perform without parasitic gestures, in order to bring out the full beauty of its movement.

While training our horses we decided to work with luggage scales, in order to measure the variations in tension of our own actions, and we recorded them. This was in the early 2000s, and such work was far less commonplace then than it is today.

We established that if we made only vertical movements, with our hands always together, the horse never leaned on the hand — and yet the control of the gait was so effective that the airs of high school such as piaffe and passage became self-evident for our horses, and the transitions became effortlessly fluid. The horse had to be worked in verticality and not in horizontality. Verticality gave greater freedom to the shoulders, and therefore more expression in its horizontality.

Since verticality gave us a new balance, we could no longer turn by catching hold of the mouth. We had to understand and discover another way of turning without breaking that verticality. The horse being balanced like a dancer on her points, the slightest movement of the torso set off a loss of balance that was difficult to manage.

After some questioning, it seemed to me wiser to separate the control and braking of the horse from the way of turning it. Being on the locomotor system with a stable balance, I found it interesting to observe that the torso took on a tenfold force, and that this was the direction I should explore. Since the horse moves easily through a lateral loss of balance, the idea came to me of pivoting my spine and using my shoulders as a lever, bracing the torso.

The results were not long in coming, and with my judo background this movement resembled a judo action called « taï sabaki », which pivots the whole body to the side to avoid a blow, or to avoid being seized by the clothing. After a few months of work the technique took shape, and today we teach it with very good results. After a few clinics our pupils were easily able to put the horse into verticality and to keep that verticality through tight volts with no loss of balance whatsoever.

After years of practice, this method creating no painful constraint for the horse, we were then able to raise the intensity and to train horses that respond instantly and follow the indications of their rider-partner with the speed and the relaxation of a dancer.

We also used a thermal camera, to see the stresses we were imposing on our horses. If we wished to become a part of our horses, we had to act with them, never against them. We had to change paradigm: we were no longer to communicate an order or a demand to our horses, but to commune with them. If that were so, then we would never push our horses into overheating.

We were confident, amused like children, despite our obvious desire for the proof to come. That day, we discovered the power of verticalisation. It allowed us to train difficult and powerful horses without having to fight; we had the means to control the horse without thwarting it. Verticalisation allowed us to manage the balance, which made it easier to build power in the horse's gaits.

Verticalisation and balance on one side; the separation of speed control from direction on the other: together they gave us the tools to reach the highest level of dressage. We had managed to separate the steering from the brakes.