Crooked

This post has been sitting for months, it was one of the ones I used to procrastinate my thesis. I keep writing and rewriting it after I teach lessons and new ideas come up in them about crookedness and how horses can be crooked and how riders can be crooked. I had this whole post written up and then thought nah there's a better way to explain this so here we go again (and again).

Hey let's pick on younger Megan and her straightness problems!
*all pictures are of me so I can critique myself*
Here's Megan tipping left off of her right seatbone as if this will
help Rico turn

One of my favorite things as a rider and as an instructor is digging into alignment and straightness. I would also say that it's likely my weakest area. Not because I'm bad at it- I've been working hard with BNTs for the last few years to really learn to ride as straight as I am capable of. It's because in my opinion, crookedness (or straightness, but let's not get ahead of ourselves here, how many people can truly ride a horse straight anyway? Like six people?) is one of the trickiest problems to deal with.


I think it's tricky for a few reasons:

1.) Riders can be independently crooked
- Riders can have health problems that make them crooked or they can just be all out of whack. My left hand on EVERY horse wants to go rigid. It just does.

2.) Horses can be independently crooked
- Obviously horses have weaker sides and can be crooked without the rider helping out

3.) Crooked riders can create crooked horses
- When I get on my fourth horse of the day and the horse overbends right and doesn't bend left just like the rest of them have, I'd be stupid to think that it was just a coincidence (it's like that saying- if you're surrounded by assholes, maybe you're the asshole? If I'm surrounded by crooked horses, maybe I'm the crooked one)

4.) Crooked horses can create crooked riders
- Guess who has a weak right hind, causing my left hand to do weird shit on every horse I ride? The horse I rode for ten years.

5.) A crooked horse changes the way a rider sits to make the horse feel crooked in a different way than they truly are.
- This just INTRIGUES me. Let's say your horse pops his outside shoulder, imagine what that looks like from above, where is the ribcage pointing, like if you were to sit on that ribcage and look straight ahead? You'd be facing outside the circle. That is why it's so tempting to pull on the inside rein when the horse is popping the shoulder, because the rider is facing the outside of the arena and it feels like the horse isn't bending or turning at all. Fascinating. What we feel is not always what is going on, and it's not because we're delusional, it's a change in perspective caused by crookedness.

Here's Rico leaning on the left rein (which slightly younger Megan
is going to shake him off and then get yelled at by Tracey)

For this post I want to talk about crookedness and I want to talk about symptoms of crookedness because they are not the same thing.

What is crookedness?

First though, let's define straightness and crookedness. Definitions taken from the judging glossary as usual.

Straightness
Aspects of straightness:
1. Proper alignment of the horse’s body parts from tail to poll (e.g. not a popped shoulder or twisted neck).
2. On straight or curved lines, parallelism of the horse’s longitudinal axis to the line of travel, with the hind hoof prints in line with the front hoof prints (e.g., haunches not left or right of centerline or circle line).
3. In two tracks/lateral work, parallelism of the horse’s longitudinal axis to the line of reference (e.g., haunches not leading or trailing in leg yielding).
4. Directness of line of travel – the horse not deviating or wandering left &/or right of the desired path of travel (e.g., as in weaving).

I like that they broke it down, because I've always seen alignment as baby straightness, when really alignment is only a part of straightness. I'm learnding.


Crookedness
Aspects of crookedness:
1. Misalignment of the horse’s body parts from tail to poll (e.g. popped shoulder or twisted neck).
2. On straight or curved lines, lack of parallelism of the horse’s longitudinal axis to the line of travel (, e.g., haunches left or right of centerline or circle line).
3. In two track/lateral work, lack of parallelism of the horse’s longitudinal axis to the line of reference (e.g., haunches leading or trailing in leg yielding).
4. Lack of directness of line of travel – the horse deviating or wandering left &/or right of the desired path of travel (e.g., as in weaving).


What causes crookedness?

In my experience, nine times out of ten, crookedness is caused by one hind leg being stronger than another. And that one hind leg will cause a multitude of problems. Take one of my favorite horses for example and try to guess what hind leg is weak due to the symptoms.

To the left, he's quite easy to steer but hard to bend. He falls over the left shoulder and into the left rein and struggles to step into the right rein. He also gives you this feeling of always leg yielding out, but never taking the right rein connection. 

To the right, he is quite nice to bend, like you glance down and see that he is bent, BUT it never feels like enough so you may actually think that the horse is hard to bend but no one else agrees with you. He's tricky to steer sometimes, busting through the left rein and often getting really heavy on the outside rein. Sometimes the outside rein crosses the neck to compensate.

He's quite weak on his right hind, which has been backed up by a vet. What did the rider say to me, the instructor? "He pulls on the left rein." So that's why as an instructor, I always try to watch for a bit, because the symptoms (heaviness on the left rein) aren't always what is actually going on (weak right hind falls away from body rather than engaging, propels horse into left shoulder/rein).


So I put them in a shoulder-fore in the canter to the right. This drives the weak hind leg under his body. I have her ride him slightly straighter in the neck than normal, using the outside rein to half halt at the top of the canter and bring his body back over his hocks, then keep him there with her seat. Quicken the canter to get the outside legs off the ground sooner so he stays off his forehand. Inside rein keeps him flexed right because even though he is heavy on the left rein, he needs to stay on the left rein so that she can put him over his hocks.

And poof, horse has a collected canter where there was an unsteerable canter-like gait earlier in the ride.

Hey sitting on your outside seatbone isn't necessary, right Megan?
And twisting in the tack while pulling up your inside leg is obv
the best way to get a crooked horse to turn.
Hey Rico, where's that left front leg going?

How do we fix crookedness? 

First, diagnose the side.  Horses tend to toss the weaker hind leg out behind them and/or to the side. It's hard to get that hind leg under the body.

In the leg yield, the weak hind leg is usually the one that is on the inside of the more crooked leg yield. In shoulder-in, it's the inside leg of the side that is harder to get the angle (but easier for bend usually). It's often the outside hind leg of the lead that the horse struggles with.

Here's teenage Megan curling over her left leg and here's young
Rico not bending through his body and overbending in his neck

Okay now we know what the weak side is- what to do to fix it?

What I do first is install lateral work. Whatever level. TC was doing turns on the forehand and leg yields at the walk to fix his crookedness when I first started with him. Rico would do half pass and haunches-in.

Given that all lateral work is installed, shoulder-in and haunches-in are my favorite. Especially on the circle. Tracey gave me an exercise once that involved both:

Start on a circle and ride shoulder-fore for half of it, haunches-in for half of it (being careful of the size and shape of the circle), then stretch circle for a full circle. Rinse. Repeat.

Nice ear tilt, Rico, clearly bulging through left
side. See a pattern? You can also see my
twist & tilt (look at my stirrups) 

After I have a horse who understands lateral work, it's a matter of isolating that weak hind leg and driving it under the body to straighten the horse. Let me reiterate this in a different way: we do not want to push the weak hind leg so far across the body of the horse that we throw the other hind leg away from the midline, we want to straighten the horse, not re-crooked-fy the horse.

It's harder than you'd initially think, it certainly is for me- we get so caught up sometimes in trying to get the horse to go sideways away from the heavy rein that we then surpass straightness and create a horse who is crooked in a completely different way. This then creates fishtailing and a horse who is highly reactive to lateral aids but won't go straight. So after I prove to the horse that I can move them around in lateral work, I work on straightness itself, usually in transitions.

My favorite straightness exercise (disclaimer: I do this usually with pretty broke horses, I've had it cause *lightness in front*):

Walk on a square or rectangle, horse on the bit, as straight as you can. Try to get the horse even in both reins without you having to bend them and engage that weaker hind leg without pushing the horse laterally (think first position- a little miniscule shoulder-fore, but without the flexion).

Now trot.

But WAIT! These are the rules: the horse is not allowed to trot by speeding up the walk, the horse is not allowed to trot by twisting or getting crooked in some way, the horse is not allowed to trot by throwing the shoulder one way and the haunches the other way. You've got to be quick and you've got to be dedicated. Prevent the transition if they do it wrong, go back to the walk and fix the straightness, then try again.

Do that in every transition. Walk to trot, walk to canter, trot to canter, etc. Do it in downwards too, the instructions change slightly (horse needs to come back to a balanced and straight walk, not too forward, and not heavier in the hand), but it's basically the same. Stay on those straight lines and stay slightly off the rail.

Hey young Megan, way to let your horse fall out through the left
rein and pop his shoulder, also- nice twist in your body (left
shoulder forward and collapsing)

The takeaway

There are so many other things to say about crookedness but I feel like the post would be SO long if I went on and on about it. The biggest things I try to remember are:
1.) What I'm feeling isn't always what is ACTUALLY happening due to sitting on a crooked horse, get my alignment right before trying to figure out what is going on
2.) The symptoms don't tell the whole story, DON'T correct a horse that leans on one rein by trying to shake the horse off of it or pull on it
3.) Don't create crookedness in the other direction when correcting for the current state of crookedness