Читать книгу 55 Corrective Exercises for Horses - Jec Aristotle Ballou - Страница 27

My mother once kept a skinny paperback dressage book on her shelf written by a European trainer with a long name. It was titled Free, Forward, and Straight. I recall looking at its crumbly cover and wondering how the author possibly felt the need to write an entire book about those three words. If I only knew! All these years later, having trained horses for most of them, I can appreciate just how challenging it is to create movement that is unrestricted, ground-covering, and symmetrical.

Always with corrective exercises, your goal is not to stylize movement specific to a discipline but rather to create a healthy and functional movement that is free of restriction, that optimizes the full range of joint motion, is balanced, and eliminates patterns that interrupt free-flowing and symmetrical use of the horse’s body. Your elusive aim is indeed “free, forward, and straight.”

Most horses lack optimized movement in one of the following ways. If one of these applies to your horse, prioritize the recommended exercise routines and timelines before returning to a general use of other exercises and information in this book. Obviously, a given horse might struggle with balance or optimized movement for reasons beyond these, but the vast majority struggle with one or more of these common postural challenges.