Author: Jean Luc Cornille

When nature is perceived as a web, its vulnerability is obvious; if one thread of the web is pulled, the whole tapestry may unravel.

Tensegrity, integrity, elastic energy, force transport, are the new words of the equestrian art.

The “aids” are just the vocabulary of a language. They are part of the language, but not the whole language.

I remember a trainer telling me, “You cannot love the horses and win.”

The thought of “liberating the shoulders’ is over exploited. Properly placed, the saddle does cover, without nuisance, the caudal part of the trapezius.

Equine athletic training and riding techniques need to evolve from making the horse do it to understanding how the horse does it.

We have the knowledge for a sophisticated dialogue but the practical application of new knowledge demands a fundamental shift.

Horses are comfortable at a highly sophisticated level of perception. They are annoyed and often pushed to resistance and revolt when their senses are overloaded by the shifts of our body weight and other gestures.

Elastic energy is the power and the spirit of the equestrian art.

The system traps riders and horse owners into an artificial world where the value is winning at all cost.

Looking at equine locomotion and performance in terms of dynamics verses kinematics deeply modifies riding and training principles.

The principles of riding and training that created the problem cannot be used to resolve the problem. This is the paradigm shift that responsible riders and trainers, as well as horse owners, have to face.

Chazot sees many of his species betrayed by their confidence in humans. “One major issue is genuine ignorance, which humans often label as ‘tradition’.”

Straightness enhancing speed responds to the same fundamental principles as straightness enhancing balance, control and collection.

The back epaxial muscles, which are the muscles situate on and around the upper half of the vertebrae as well as dorsal spines, create the “flexion”, “lifting’, “roundness”.