Author: Jean Luc Cornille

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”.

Riding is physics, energy, tensegrity, elastic energy, forces and leading the horse to mastery of forces is an intelligent journey.

Everybody believes they have a partnership with the horse but their partnership is nothing more than nice obedience.

Classic authors understood that greater upward forces were necessary for collected and more elevated gaits such as passage.

The horse will submit to gestures like a slave but his comfort zone is at the subtler level of energy created by nuances in muscles tone.

Schools of thoughts integrating new knowledge to old theories are setting up humans and equine athletes for failure.