“Descente de main et descente de jambe”: relaxing of the hands and relaxing of the legs. Part 1: turning
Posted By Iris on March 8, 2010
Baucher said “make yourself understood and let it happen”. Ask and then let the horse do it without you interfering anymore.
Turning (or steering) your horse. How we DON’T do it:
If we want to go to the left, we do not pull the left rein! We do not put the left rein outside either. We don’t move it up… We don’t move both hands to the left either… We leave the reins alone (both)!
Anytime we do something with our rein, we interfere with the horse and he will get tense and/ or out of balance.
When we want to go to the left we do not turn our body to the left. We do not move our shoulders or turn them. We do not tilt our body either. We do not move our body anywhere; we stay straight over the horse!
Anytime we move our body so that it is not straight on the horse anymore we put the horse out of balance. When we turn our shoulder to one side, the horse gets out of balance and we will have to put one leg forward, another backwards, all to keep the horse in balance… So we do not turn our body! Our shoulders stay parallel to the horses’ shoulders.
So how DO we steer and turn our horse to the left?
Riding in French Classical Dressage, in perfection, is being one with your horse… Like a centaur… The horses’ legs are your legs. Your mind is his mind….
The feeling you want to achieve is that you are connected with your spine to the horses’ spine. Your seat bones are connected, you are sitting IN the horse rather than on him.
In order to achieve this it is important that you sit on both seat bones and have a straight line from the tip of the head, down to the shoulders hip and heels. Both seat bones are always equally weighted and the shoulders on same height of each other, like I mentioned; both parallel to the horses’ shoulders (so straight).
When you go straight, nothing changes, when you want to go left the only thing we do is look left (watch out, the body stays straight! Remember, shoulders parallel to your horses’, you keep them straight since the horses’ shoulders don’t tilt either) think about where you want to go to let the horse know. You move the lower part of your spine basically by turning the right(!) part of your hip a litlle bit backwards to go left. By that your right leg will automatically move a bit backwards. But watch out here: you don’t want to PUT your right leg backwards, this has to happen automatically! As soon as you would do that on purpose, this will tense up your leg and this will interfere with your horses’ balance and relaxation! And (to make it even more confusing) if anything; you tickle the horse on the right(! Not the left!) rein a little to keep the horse together.
For me this movement was very hard in the beginning. I had learned several ways to turn my horses (first paragraphs) in the past but this is all classically incorrect. I had to work really hard to not touch my rein and to not turn my shoulders… To feel really connected with my horse I try to visualize a connection between my tailbone and the horses’ spine. I have to turn my horse from there, this takes practice and a good teacher (both human teacher as furry four legged teacher that refuses to turn any other way 
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[...] you want to turn left (on right is even more stubborn then left). If you have read my article about turning, then you understand how we turn our horse with French Classical Dressage. (Turning left; the right [...]
[...] Also read part 1 of “Descente de main et descente de jambe”: relaxing of the hands and relaxing … [...]