For classical enthusiasts who are truly and passionately involved in the sport of dressage, the notion of “straightness training” comes hand and hand with the notion of classical training. A quote by the well known classical author, trainer and rider Paul Belasik caught my attention. It made me smile and pushed me to delve a little deeper into the notion “Is the horse straight?”
Belasik wrote: "It is an odd thing to be training by classicists. Once the hook is set you are caught for life. You find yourself, years after the masters have gone, at some party where people are marvelling at the newest dressage sensation. They look at you and say 'isn't s/he wonderful?' In your mind, you curse your old teachers. How they ruined it for you! You want to have fun with the "glitterati." You fumble to be polite, for respect was also part of your training. You, by now, have been made legitimately humble by the strict lessons of certain horses! Yet inside, you know that, beyond that rider's handmade saddle, beyond the golden brow band, the tailored coat and the custom beaver hat, no it is not wonderful. The horse is not straight!”
So are we marvelling at the wrong image? Is the brilliance often clouding the underlying and very real weakness in training, that our horses are not straight?
According to Paul, straightness training is really addressing handedness, and he says that for a long time scientists believed handedness was only present in humans, and it might be caused by the split brain anatomy. “The consensus now is that handedness is much deeper and is present in organisms and things that don't have a brain, its cause might be chemical," he wrote.
Paul remembers early on in his career being constantly frustrated by veterinarians who would be doing a pre-purchase or lameness exam and have no regard for asymmetry in horses. “One day I took two identical pads of paper and two identical pens, and I asked the vet to draw two circles one with her left hand and one with her right, one looked round and neat while the other looked like a child beginning to draw jagged and crooked, I looked at the pictures and looked at her and I said, you might be neurologic, she got the point!”
We all realise this very early on in our riding careers, that when we go one way, the horse seems to bend naturally, while when we go the other way, we have almost the opposite feeling.
Paul notes that even a novice dressage rider is forced to address the natural asymmetry of horses in their first lessons, as the horse seems to pulls on the reins and is stiff turning left , and yet to the right it is easier or vice versa. “Proper dressage aims at trying to rectify these differences through gymnastic training," he added.
So, if we all know that one side is different from the other, which the majority can feel, why then do so many people to feel how to get and when their horse is straight? “Because it is very difficult,” Paul stressed. “One of the greatest French riders L'Hotte's epitaph could be "calm, forward, straight," and one of the greatest German riders Steinbrecht's epitaph could have been "ride your horse forward and make him straight". A lot of riders could teach tricks but these great riders already told us what was really important.”
To have a horse that is naturally straight is extremely rare. Paul relates it to an ambidextrous person, who seems to have equal facility with either hand. “I’ve only ridden one or two horses in my entire life, with the others it takes years of training like a dancer, and then the horse gets pretty close to doing things equally well in both directions, with a fairly equal feel.”
In order to properly achieve straightness in training, it is also crucial that people are aware of what that looks like from the ground. “It's easier to see if you can watch both sides, but basically if a horse is not straight the body will stay slightly hooked one way even when going in the opposite direction, the hind legs may swing out on the stiff side rather than accommodate the curve, the horse may lean over like a bicycle, the neck will show an S curve instead of nice stretching," he stated. "In addition a crooked horse will show a disparity. One side looks better than the other and more importantly is the feel for the rider, it feels vastly different, one side seems to have a parking brake on it, it's not working through, it’s blocked!”
The first step in achieving the greatest possible degree of straightness in training, is to understand the fundamentals behind it, but Paul adds that without proper understanding, you can go right to Grand Prix, and never put your horse straight.
“Yes I have seen Grand Prix tests at the highest competitive level where the horse was bent to the right in it's neck and body for the entire test," he said. "This is why we have asymmetry in our tests from the beginning, as we want to see you go both ways. This makes it pretty apparent if one side is different to the other, but this is often overlooked because of politics.”
So is straightness training an element that must be incorporated into training, or is it a product of correct training?
“It is both, the interesting thing is you can't make a horse straight by just riding it in straight lines for example, you have to work on bend and not just bending the neck, that is an uneducated response to a complex physiological phenomenon. You have to work on the exercises which strengthen and make the horse flexible, the amazing thing is in the few classical exercises like shoulder in, renvers, half passes , the old masters have left us with a fantastic remedy, the art is in arranging the choreography to address the particular problem of each horse. This is what separates trainers, some build horses, some break them down. One thing I tell my students, present me with a symmetrical horse, but don't expect that it will be symmetrical effort after just a short while, it might be much more difficult in one direction, but if you keep working at it, it will get easier.”
Basically Paul’s advice is that if you want to be in the sport of dressage or you want to get the most from your training, you must get used to the concept of “straightness training."
“Steinbrecht and L'Hotte weren't kidding," he concluded.
by Sarah Warne