Lately I’ve been discussing with other horse people various methods of training and riding.  These debates have really stepped up my mental processing and I believe I have finally come to a full disagreement with riding “on contact.”

Prior to this discussion, I was growing to dislike constant contact with the horse’s mouth on the principle that many horses don’t care for it.  As an English trained rider, I believed some contact, at least light contact was necessary when training a horse, so you could teach the horse how to move between the “corridor” of your aids, how to balance himself, and how to use his body gymnastically.

Recent studies have shown horses’ stress hormones go up when they are forced to move into bit contact, even when they don’t show outward signs.  One of the studies gave horses the choice to either move into the pressure and get a treat, or avoid the pressure and not get a treat.  The horses chose to avoid the pressure even if it meant they wouldn’t get the food reward.

I’ve ridden many horses that seemed to accept the pressure I applied with the bit just fine.  It’s been the sensitive ones that I can’t get to accept even light bit pressure that have flummoxed me, and I’ve felt many of them were poorly trained in their past, were ridden with heavy hands so they developed a bit aversion, or that the bit was a wrong choice for them.  This has been on acquaintances’ horses.  But my own super sensitive Arab has never liked bits, even though no one has ever used heavy pressure with her and she’s only once ever had a bit more severe than a simple snaffle in her mouth.  I’m not sure why I always believed the other horses that disliked going on a constant contact were the fault of the rider or trainer when I allowed my own horse a strong opinion about it.

Yet there are new reasons I’m learning to disagree with riding “on contact.”  This includes any type of contact that is consistent, even the kind done by riders who have what are considered good hands, following hands, and an independent seat.

The first and possibly most important reason is that by riding on contact you are actually teaching a horse to ignore pressure.  When you train the horse that they must accept a constant pressure from the bit, no matter how light, you are saying, “This pressure you must ignore.”  We are asking a horse to ignore pressure until it becomes greater pressure, at which point they must respond.

Now you are asking the horse to differentiate between some nebulous degree of lesser pressure versus a higher pressure.  How much easier is it for the horse to understand “no pressure” versus “some pressure?”  I believe this is why we have issues with horses that push through pressure.  We ourselves are very, very poor at measuring pressure.  If you ask a rider how many pounds of pressure they believe they are exerting on the reins on a given day, and then measure how many pounds they actually are exerting, it seldom matches.  So many things will change the feeling, such as the balance of the horse, the balance of the rider, the speed of the horse, etc.  It’s similar when people feeding horses are asked to estimate how many pounds of hay they are feeding.  They will usually be off by a few pounds when you actually weigh the hay, and even people who think they have a good “feel” for the weight of hay will be quite off when checked for accuracy.

Yet we expect a horse to differentiate between our 1 lb of pressure versus 1.5 lbs of pressure on the reins.  We want the horse to ignore 1 lb of pressure, to collect and push through 1.5 lbs of pressure, and to slow down at 2 lbs of pressure (random numbers to illustrate the point).  Then we put other riders on the horse, with a different “feel” for pressure.  So we basically apply whatever pressure works at the time.  This is not training the horse to respond to the bit pressure, this is making the entire idea of bit pressure and what it actually means very fuzzy to the horse.

I am beginning to understand that riding a horse on contact teaches a horse how to push through contact.  It teaches horses to learn what amount of contact they can tolerate.

I don’t believe anymore that I as a rider have a responsibility to balance a horse, and now I believe my goal should be to keep myself from upsetting the horse’s natural gaits and balance instead.  This means I can release myself from the idea that I must teach a horse to accept contact.  I no longer want to train horses to depend on the rider for balance, because a rider’s reflexes are much poorer than a horse’s, and I believe entangling their balance with ours only degrades their balance.

Sharing Balance

No matter how independent a rider’s seat is, if the rider keeps contact with the reins it changes the rider’s balance.  If a rider was truly independent of what the horse was doing, he could drop the reins and not have to rebalance himself.  But a rider “on contact” cannot do that, because he has to use his core strength to keep up that contact with the horse’s mouth.  This means that if the rider involves his strength in the contact with the horse, the horse’s balance must become involved with the rider’s as he pushes into the bit.

I’ve seen so many people riding poorly in both english and western disciplines.  Unfortunately, living in an area with a heavily western influence, I saw more people riding poorly in their western gear and became biased that more people in english disciplines had the right ideas for riding and horsemanship.  I’m beginning to understand that some western trainers may have it the most right when it comes to bridle training.  What can be better than teaching a horse that contact with a bit means to do something, and that once the right behavior is done, all pressure will be released?  This allows the horse to move with freedom and to also never get confused about bit pressure.  You’re not going to teach a horse to run through pressure if that pressure always means to slow down, switch down a gait, or stop.  All of that is simple and non-confusing to a horse.

Western disciplines have many things going on that are not in horses’ best interests as well.  A big name trainer who is very popular uses techniques that put his horses so far behind the vertical you can’t distinguish it from Rollkur.  As usual, it seems best to take the good things we can learn from all the disciplines and reject the rest.

For some reason, most of the hot bloods are trained to move into pressure, and these horses should logically be the ones that are most important to train by these methods!  To me it seems more logical to train an Arabian, for instance not to move into pressure since that horse can gallop for a few miles when feeling “fresh,” versus a Quarter Horse that might peter out after a quarter or half mile.  Not to mention all the off the track Thoroughbreds that have learned to lean into pressure at the track.  I rode one the other day, and every time I released a half halt her nose flew up since she expected the pressure to continue so she could lean into it.

I’m interested and hopeful to find out how this change in training will help the horses I work with in the future.