Are you prone to sawing side to side on your horse’s mouth at dressage, or to using both hands to wriggle the bit to get your horse ‘on the bit’?

‘Sawing’ on a dressage horse’s mouth means to alternatively squeeze and release with the hands, and you ride the pony front to back when you do this. To all appearances, your pony is on the bit with his head down and his nose vertical, but there is no true front to back connection.

Actually, the 1 piece of your horse that’s impacted by your sawing is his jaw. A moving bit leads him to chew, and when he does chew, his jaw flexes.

In essence, this suggests nothing less than this: when you saw you are basically manipulating a jaw that’s flexed. And you may still have no leverage over plenty more body that your pony will have left over.

Flexion might lead you to believe the horse remains on his bit, and you are rather surprised about his disposition to go off his bit when asked to do stuff like transitions.

The reality you might not realize till too late is that your horse wasn’t on the bit. And obviously flexed jaws are of no use at all.

Get your horse truly on the bit by using ‘connecting aids’ close both your legs so that power from behind is added. You need to act like you’re calling for lengthening. When the horse reaches your outer hand, make a fist of that hand so that you can capture and contain the power and recycle it back to your horse’s rear legs. Keep this up for roughly 3 full seconds.

Finally, you have two reasons to squeeze or vibrate the interior rein:

1. The first is to keep your horse’s neck straight. Your objective is to prevent him from twisting his neck outwards by way of response to your closed outer hand. This way, you in all probability won’t be requiring the interior rein when riding with his soft inside since your pony will not be making an attempt to look outside if you should close the outer hand.

2. You can move the bit by making him chew and flex in the jaw.

You need to remember that you ride a dressage horse front to back by wiggling the bit on both sides. What this implies is, don’t do with both hands when you can make do with one. Keep the second hand free for the essential task of power recycling to the horse’s hind legs.

Horses are Heather Toms passion and she enjoys sharing her extensive knowledge through her 100s of articles with other horse lovers, like all things about reinsman