More Collection

I received this email response to one of the entries here. This is pretty auspicious since I was going to write something about collection today for the blog. So, I thought I would answer it for a wider audience. I’ll have to write about what I wanted to say today later.

I was able to take a quick look at your blog and was interested in the
entry about collection. This is something I have been making a matter of
study for some time so it caught my eye. I am not a proffesional dressage
rider by any stretch, but classical riding and Haute Ecole have been a
personnal passion for many years. I have studied mostly the french and
spanish schools and find little to nothing of true colletion in modern
dressage riding.
I am by no means an expert in anatomy or biomechanics, so sometimes i
have to admit what I read goes right over my head and I can get confused.
I have been reading alot of Dr. Deb Bennets writings but I am also
increasingly a fan of Dr. Claytons. I recently purchased her "core
training' dvd.
I would love to get more of your opinion on Dr. Debs understandings, it
seemed from your post you maybe don't agree with her, or were you saying
you felt their was some truth in all three of the theories? I know deb
talks alot about raising the base of the neck and freeing up the
forehand,and I know a couple of her students that also study the work of
Dr. Clayton and I havven't heard anyone complaining that they couldn't
reconcile both.
Like i said though this stuff can go over my head pretty quickly and I can
sometimes think 2 people are agreeing with each other only to find out
later they don't agree, soooo if in all your free time (lol) you would be
interested in sharing anymore of what you have found to be similar and at
odds in these two theories I would love to hear from you.

Collection is probably THE most misunderstood aspect of horsemanship. If you haven’t gone to the website www.animalsi.com and read the chapter from my next book on collection (it’s coming out in the IASI Journal) I encourage you to do so, I’m going to write here assuming you have.

Before I start I want to assure you that I am a very big fan of Dr. Deb. I’ve been following her work for 30 or years, since she was writing for this Arabian Horse newspaper that I can’t remember the name of. I still think her three volume set on confirmation is the best, but disagree with her use of “woody” to describe equine movement.

The theories, or schools, of collection have three components to them:

1. when in the horse’s training they take place

2. how the body looks and acts

3. how to train the horse to arrive at collection.

(It seems like the latest part of training is the appropriation of the misguided idea of “core” strength from the human athletic training and applying it to the equine. I’m saying “misguided” because I’m not a believer in the core strength concepts and as such may be leading the parade of the misguided!)

One of the main problems with understanding collection is, as you point out, reconciling all of the confusing viewpoints and terminology that’s used; rounding the rear, pushing from behind, round frame… It’s like that telephone game where people get the message completely scrabbled by the time it reaches the end of the line. I contribute this to the westerner’s inability to listen. I have this problem in spades, I’m a visual learner so when someone says “round” that may mean one thing to them but a completely other one to me.

I thought that collection and round was the same thing, until I rode a collected horse! I used to take dressage lessons during the winter when I wasn’t conditioning my endurance horse on the trails. (From Dr. Deb’s confirmation books there is a description of how to attain “round” that I used to think was the way to collect a horse—squeeze into closed hands, like a toothpaste tube with a cap on…—but I now know this is inaccurate.) The feeling of riding a collected horse is one of power coming up through the withers. Do you agree? Not, of being pushed from behind.

To remove some of this confusion people have resorted to using bio-mechanical terms, which if they don’t understand them or if their audience doesn’t understand them, can result in more confusion. (I’m developing an online course which will explain some of the more commonly used bio-mechanical terms as well as the kinesiology.) Understanding physics, (statics and dynamics are called “mechanics” in physics) is a pre-requisite for fully understanding bio-mechanics.

To answer your question more directly, I think that the top line theory and the bottom line theory both have merit and problems.

The top line theory is what could be called “classic” where the idea is that the horse “pulls” the forehand back onto the rear end. (This looks quite a bit like a speed skater bent over while racing.)This was tested by Dr. Clayton’s lab with Paul Belasik riding the horse into a Levade. Obviously an upper level movement, which implies the horse, was in training for some time. Which insinuates; that many horses may have not been able to make it to the end of the training to where they could do this maneuver. There lies the rub for me in the top line theory, the dropout rate due to injury to horses in training.

The bottom line theory, I call it this only to contrast the two and in response to something Dr. Deb wrote that there is no top line muscular development required to achieve… This theory is based on supposition of a “ring” of muscles that encircle the thorax and cooperate to bring the rear end under the horse. There are two problems with this, one is the coordination required by the horse’s nervous system to achieve this and the actual inclusion of the psoas muscle as part of the ring. (The psoas is postulated as a prime stabilizer of the equine spine in this theory; I see it as a flexor of the femur and a reset mechanism for the spine’s rotation. So, this is where I have one basic disagreement.) Again, with this theory there is a lack of training methodology and long term general success.

Both of these theories seem to neglect some bio-mechanics, motivation for the horse and some basic musculo-nervous physiology.

The last theory is the thoracic sling theory that has been put forward by me since 1994, long enough ago that I don’t know who I stole it from, and by Dr. Clayton’s labs’ work, as documented in 2003? (I don’t have my references in front of me, or even behind me.) This theory, as I propose it not necessarily Dr. Clayton’s view, is that the thorax is propelled upwards and backwards by the rhythmic contraction of the thoracic “sling” muscles… I’ll let you read about this in the chapter that’s online at www.animasi.com.

In some sort of conclusion, I think that thoracic sling theory is the unifying theory for collection of the normal ridden horse and if training methods are used to free the shoulders that we will see more horses make it to the level of Levade. That both the top and bottom line theories describe places on this path of training, with the bottom line coming before the top line in the training cycle.

While this discussion is fun for me, I am not a trainer of dressage horses and don’t offer any real suggestions on how to train. What I am more interested in is how do the therapists that I train use this information to make intelligent well thought out interventions to help the horse. Freeing the shoulders is incredibly easy to accomplish and should be incorporated in all horse training.

Thanks for spending the time reading this and for sparking the discussion.