The rider’s hands directing the horse’s front feet through the rein aids, while the rider’s legs direct the horse’s hind feet as the seat drives those hind legs forward. The visual representation of the rider’s hands speaking directly to the horse’s feet through the reins is important to understand because proper timing of these aids is paramount to creating lightness. Imagine this rider attempting to pull the horse’s feet off the ground. It would be impossible. But we can influence the placement of those feet once they are in travel off the ground. The “gears” of the seat encouraging and riding the horse forward are instrumental in all other communication with the horse’s feet through our aids. Only through “forward” can those aids be effective.
In a perfect world, when the horse is right where we want him to be, our aids are quiet. The horse learns to seek that quiet place of relaxation as the correct response to any direction given. It is our better understanding of body language and how to communicate with our horse that has changed how we think of our aids in riding. Rather than being tools that we use to control our horse’s movement through simple cues, our aids become part of the vocabulary of the word- less communication with our horse.
We very rarely use our aids individually. Most of the time, we are communicating with our horses through all our aids. Talking about the aids one at a time is like discussing the alphabet letter by letter to understand a new language. We will discuss them here one at a time for simplicity, but understand that individually the aids exist almost without function however, when delivered as a sentence, we can begin to craft a story in function and form. The more subtly we use the aids together, the prettier the picture and the words change from a list of commands to poetry or musical lyrics. Let’s discuss the pieces of our language with our horses that allow horse and rider to create art.
