I can't believe you could stay on your horse when you lean forward going down a slide like that. I don't consider myself a very good rider (in the classical sense), but I have riden in a lot of tough terrain and we quite often had to go down river banks like that (the terrain was very similar in SWA) when time was pressing on follow ups.
Tom
In those pictures you are not really leaning back Tom (although it felt as if you were), but remaining upright, which allows the horse to enguage their hindquaters under them. I agree that I don't understand the idea of leaning forward (on the horses neck) and how it helps the horse. Remaining centered and in balance allows a degree of movement fore and aft with the riders upper body, but not to an extreem. With that siad the "gallop" is a different matter completely as weight does shift to the fore hand so the hind quarters can drive.
I can't believe you could stay on your horse when you lean forward going down a slide like that. I don't consider myself a very good rider (in the classical sense), but I have riden in a lot of tough terrain and we quite often had to go down river banks like that (the terrain was very similar in SWA) when time was pressing on follow ups.
Tom
In those pictures you are not really leaning back Tom (although it felt as if you were), but remaining upright, which allows the horse to enguage their hindquaters under them. I agree that I don't understand the idea of leaning forward (on the horses neck) and how it helps the horse. Remaining centered and in balance allows a degree of movement fore and aft with the riders upper body, but not to an extreem. With that siad the "gallop" is a different matter completely as weight does shift to the fore hand so the hind quarters can drive.
Jim
Jim,
thanks for correcting me! You are right it is more like being erect. I always tried to ride with my horse and help him, especially with all the gear and weapon you had to carry. I always had the feeling this position was more comfortable to him when going down a slide, it was just important to leave the reins long and just guide him with my legs and weight.
Some other observation: we never packed the cantle packs that high (well we carried most of our gear on the man if possible) but the high pack the Portugese were using seems extreme to me, the load being top heavy.
Then note the use of the double bridle (bit and bridoon or Pelham?), but this belongs to the other thread I guess.
I'll try to find some illustrative photos. Indeed, I might have copies of the originals posted here somewhere, which would help illustrate the late Ft. Riley method.
I must admit that I remain erect when going down steep hills, although I have been told to maintain the same posture as if level. That is really what the guys are doing who appear to be leaning. For the better ones, if you tilted the picture, they'd look like they had a level seat.
The key is to have a horse with sufficiently developed underline muscles to allow him to collect himself and work down in that posture. Without the muscle tone in the right spots, the horse will always end up running down hill as a sort of rolling start-to-fall-and-catch-himself maneuver. He can't stop or do much adjustment like that. Think about running down a steep slope as a child. You had to keep running to make it down without falling.
The shift in posture with change of gaits has to do with keeping the rider's weight and balance coordinated with the horses balance point. This changes as he changes or extends his gait. therefore, it helps him as much as helping you stay on and able to react. I don't know just where the balance would be going down hill. Perhaps staying in position really would be good. ROY, do you or anyone else know for sure?
I must admit that I remain erect when going down steep hills, although I have been told to maintain the same posture as if level. That is really what the guys are doing who appear to be leaning. For the better ones, if you tilted the picture, they'd look like they had a level seat.
The key is to have a horse with sufficiently developed underline muscles to allow him to collect himself and work down in that posture. Without the muscle tone in the right spots, the horse will always end up running down hill as a sort of rolling start-to-fall-and-catch-himself maneuver. He can't stop or do much adjustment like that. Think about running down a steep slope as a child. You had to keep running to make it down without falling.
The shift in posture with change of gaits has to do with keeping the rider's weight and balance coordinated with the horses balance point. This changes as he changes or extends his gait. therefore, it helps him as much as helping you stay on and able to react. I don't know just where the balance would be going down hill. Perhaps staying in position really would be good. ROY, do you or anyone else know for sure?
I agree with all you said Joe. I just can't see where staying in position would help either horse or rider. Now with that said, I am always open to another way of doing things, so if someone could explain the positive advantage of this I would surely give it a try.
64. SLIDES. In taking a slide the horse should be kept well under control by use of the reins and legs which make him start down the slide straight, and prevent any attempt to turn aside at the instant when his fore feet have started down the slide but the hind feet have not. The reins are normally held in both hands, but they may be held in one hand if the other is required for the use of weapons or other purposes. The rider's legs should remain closed against the horse, and his body inclined forward and kept there. This position allows the rider to go down the slide with his horse without danger of straining the jockey muscles. If the body is inclined backward when the horse slides, the legs are either pulled forward and up from the sides of hte horse with the danger of losing the seat, or a terrific strain is put on the muscles of the legs and thighs, which is liable to strain the jockey muscles. The forward position also frees the horse's loins and allows free play of the arched muscles in the loins, which come into play when the horse brings his hocks up under him in sliding. There is less shock to the horse at the bottom of the slide if the rider is forward because the shoulders are attached to muscles which can adsorb the shock easier than the bony structure of the hindquarters.
When the footing is bad, such as mud, ice, soft or rocky terrain, hard roads, the horse should be kept going straight ahead at an even pace rather than being slowed up. So long as he continues on straight and free (no chugging up), there is little danger of slipping and falling. The same is true of jumping on slippery terrain.
Page 264 of Jim Ott's "American Military Horsemanship", which is the appendix copy of the Cavalry Equitation manual.
On the steep down hill issue, I just can't bring myself to hunker down over the horses neck, as is seen in those cavalry training films. Maybe I'll try it again.
<i>Originally posted by John Fitzgerald</i>
John;
Theory is a fine thing, but this position is so counter intuitive that it was one I needed to prove to myself through experiment. And I did quite a bit of it for several weeks, as well as exploring the accepted doctrines of cowboys and Italians on the subject. I'm a little rushed right now but I'll try and compose my thoughts and conclusions on the subject through the day and get back this evening. To start things off though I'll leave the discussion with a thought, or distinction, which I never found mentioned in any of the literature pro or con. To wit: there is a difference in kind between a steep steep hill and a true slide that approaches 90 degrees. They are usually confounded by both sides in discussions on the subject. Perhaps folks can chew on that for awhile and I'll jump in later if there's anything left to add. And yes, it does take a little nerve the first few times.
Sandy
Well now, that does make more sense. I will have to start doing it. No doubt that the animal needs freedom of the loins both to coil (collect) and to move the limbs in an unusual position. Also the point about forehand shock absorption is quite true. You know, the connection of the forelimbs to the skeleton is very flexible. Their shoulders are not like ours. Rather, the scapula slides alongside the ribcage, bound in by muscle tendon and cartilage.
Joseph Sullivan wrote:Well now, that does make more sense. I will have to start doing it. No doubt that the animal needs freedom of the loins both to coil (collect) and to move the limbs in an unusual position. Also the point about forehand shock absorption is quite true. You know, the connection of the forelimbs to the skeleton is very flexible. Their shoulders are not like ours. Rather, the scapula slides alongside the ribcage, bound in by muscle tendon and cartilage.
I always assumed that leaning forward, would put too much weight on the horse's forehand. That makes sense. Though it still seems counter intuitive. The position may help the horse. But, what about the rider? You're tipped forward, and when the horse hits the bottom of the slide, I would think that it would be very easy to come flying off. I've had to use that position on a few hills where I had to go under a tree branch, in addition to a hill. I was always concerned with not stopping at the bottom, when the horse does.
Boy, Jim, thanks for the invite and great segue. And very interesting comments by all. By all means Joe, give it some practice if you can find a good place.
I believe it is important to differentiate between steep hills and true slides. Like others here, I ride steep hills in an upright balanced position: so that you are plumb over your seat, or your heels, or somewhere in between as the case may be. Steep hills can be walked down and the horse is able to stop himself. In a slide his hind quarters are locked and well under him and once started he has no option but to follow gravity all the way to the bottom. This is partly due to slope and partly to footing: wet grass will turn a steep hill into a shallow slide, for instance. A definition is tricky and some hills turn into shallow slides half-way down- in that case I wouldn't disturb the horse by switching positions.
In my opinion there are at least three advantages to negotiating a slide in a SLIGHTLY forward position with the upper body braced against the the mane and with the legs slightly in front of the girth. All three reasons proceed from the fact that in the steepest slides a balanced upright seat (plumb) puts you further away from your horse than does a 'forward' seat. This is not to propose that using an upright position always constitutes an insurmountable handicap, nor even a very great one, but I have found that there are circumstances in which it is nice to be in the front seat because:
1) You can see where you're going. This seems an uncontroversial good.
2) Control. You can steer, better. Horses usually go down a slide straight; but not always, and some of the exceptions can be pretty determined to get themselves sidehill. Steering with your legs is good thing but a leading rein is the most convincing aid you have and works on the front end. In deep footing, of the sort that moves down the slide with you, getting sidehill is a likely tumble of the most dangerous kind. In that situation it is good to have recourse to an equally determined leading rein. This rein is accomplished most effectively and with the least extraneous disturbance to the horse's equilibrium from a forward position.
And third: You provide a more reliable weight for the horse to contend with. You are really locked in a very stable position with the upper body braced through the arms against the horses neck. I should note that it is critically important in this exercise that the plumb line drawn through the riders CG should never pass in front of the horse's CG. For this reason I like my legs to be slightly in front of the girth. This position of the legs deviates from the modern military seat orthodoxy but I think they are wrong on this one when it comes to steep slides- say, +60*. I take comfort that I am in good company in this heresy: steeplechase jockeys intuitively know that it is a greater sin to be balanced too far forward than too far back. With the legs back, too much weight is transferred to the horse's neck through your braced arms.
It is fitting that Pat has alluded to intuition for by and large horsemen are an intuitive lot. In the beginning the new rider spends time and expends much effort in overcoming his intuitive reactions, instilling new ones to respond to the various actions of his horse. 'Heels down, sit up straight, don't grip with the legs', are all counterintuitive reactions. (With that bridge crossed he then spends much of the rest of his riding career rediscovering intuitions that are good but that he ignored when they first occurred to him. I know I'm not alone in this) It is when horsemen try to analyze the physics of what they intuitively know that they often come a crupper; as their methods tend to be more Aristotelian than scientific- thinking about things rather than experimenting. So the literature is rife with faulty physics.
This not necessarily bad: dressage literature, for example, is filled with erroneous explanations about the mechanics of the horse's movement; but they are nonetheless valuable in so far as they provide metaphors that lead to correct action on the riders part. But it is confusing to hopeless if you're trying to ferret out the truth of some detail by reading the conflicting theories that pertain to it. A great example of this is a photo that can be found in both Seunig's 'Horsemanship' and in Gregor de Romaszkan's 'Riding Problems'. They use the same photo to illustrate opposing viewpoints. I think this is why riders have never arrived at a universal consensus as to what is the best way to negotiate a slide. The physics are complicated to the max*. It is super counterintuitive to go down forward; and, like so many things in horsemanship, a variety of methods work well enough to get the job done.
Early proponents of the forward seat marshaled many other arguments in favor of the forward position. I have left them out. They are familiar to most of us and I find some of them to be less than totally convincing. For example: having to gather your reins at the bottom of the slope seems to me to be not that big a deal. You are always adjusting your reins anyway, and this doesn't seem to present too much of a problem to the scores of expert riders who negotiate the bank at Hickstead, leaning back, and that with a fence one or two strides out from the bottom. Indeed, at venues like Hickstead one sees riders using both methods and every nuance in between without ill effect.
The main obstacle to playing around with steep slides lies in the difficulty of finding a suitable place to do so. You need soft loose dirt that won't burn your horse's hocks, that yet is steep. This is rare in nature and, through subsidence, they don't last long. In Utah I was fortunate to have a rock quarry near the house and in one area there was a stratum, 20 to 30 feet thick, that was composed of soft chalk which made for an excellent place to try out different methods over and over. And the bulldozers would come by every week or so and refresh things. Pretty neat deal while it lasted. Eventually they finished mining through that area and it is a point in mid air now.
Sandy
*One of the most curious arguments I've read- put forward by an early proselytizer of the forward seat and I don't remember whom- reasoned that, because gravity pulls straight down, the force on you and your horse are parallel vectors and that getting forward nearer to the horse's CG somehow facilitated your 'falling' down the slide together. (?) This strikes me as applicable to the problem of skydiving with your horse, but not a whole lot to do with the retarded descent of a slide, however steep, nor with your position.
This is a picture of my mare Molly that a friend took with his telephoto during one of our outings at the quarry, and surprised me with some days later. Unfortunately it is the only one I have but I'm glad that it is of the forward position. Please note that the reins are not bridged, as they appear to be. That would interfere with steering, as on steep slides, if you are forward, you need to keep at least one hand in the mane. It is hard to see for sure but I suspect that that is the mistake made by the trooper who falls in the film clip. A slightly forward lower leg would have helped him as well.
I wish my friend had captured Molly's hind legs in the frame- they are up near the girth. But I think he was going for art more than illustrating the horse in motion. She has not yet reached the steepest part of the slide, which can be estimated by the angle of her front legs or by looking at the bank to our right. This is a little deceiving though as the slope never stays quite as steep as that because, as you can infer by the dust welling up from the bottom, the horse is actually dragging the bank down with her. Even at that slightly reduced angle though I found that a plumb position puts your head almost on the horse's croup; blind, almost impossible to steer if you needed to, and ungainly.
I believe it is important to differentiate between steep hills and true slides. Like others here, I ride steep hills in an upright balanced position: so that you are plumb over your seat, or your heels, or somewhere in between as the case may be. Steep hills can be walked down and the horse is able to stop himself. In a slide his hind quarters are locked and well under him and once started he has no option but to follow gravity all the way to the bottom. This is partly due to slope and partly to footing: wet grass will turn a steep hill into a shallow slide, for instance. A definition is tricky and some hills turn into shallow slides half-way down- in that case I wouldn't disturb the horse by switching positions.
In my opinion there are at least three advantages to negotiating a slide in a SLIGHTLY forward position with the upper body braced against the the mane and with the legs slightly in front of the girth. All three reasons proceed from the fact that in the steepest slides a balanced upright seat (plumb) puts you further away from your horse than does a 'forward' seat. This is not to propose that using an upright position always constitutes an insurmountable handicap, nor even a very great one, but I have found that there are circumstances in which it is nice to be in the front seat because:
Thank you Sandy. Well written and explained. I believe my concerns were based on not seperating a "Slide" from going down a "Steep Hill". Horse's legs fixed (so to speak) vs. legs remaining in motion. This sheds a different light on the matter and I will give it more thought. Not sure where I might practice, however I will look around.
Thanks for the encouraging words, Jim. Just the offer to think about it will leave me walking on air 'til Monday. All my other friends shake their heads and say, "Nay- no way." By the way, if you do get the opportunity to play around with this and you manage to get over that giddy sensation one gets when cresting over the first hill of a roller coaster let me know how you accomplished it- I never have. The body still wants to go back.
In considering all of the various "theories" I wonder if the following isn't really the most important thing for a rider to do: "And third: You provide a more reliable weight for the horse to contend with." Providing that "reliable weight" (I presume meaning assuming a stable position) means the horse knows where you are and where you will be. It can then balance itself more effectively.
This is important in a lot of equestrian pursuits but even more so in the more athletic events.
Joseph Sullivan wrote:Well now, that does make more sense. I will have to start doing it. No doubt that the animal needs freedom of the loins both to coil (collect) and to move the limbs in an unusual position. Also the point about forehand shock absorption is quite true. You know, the connection of the forelimbs to the skeleton is very flexible. Their shoulders are not like ours. Rather, the scapula slides alongside the ribcage, bound in by muscle tendon and cartilage.
I have to confess, I haven't attempted this either. Re-reading it, it makes more sense to me as well, but I'd sure like to have one of the real experts, like Jim and Roy, comment.
I've seen riders going down some slides that I regard as frightening, but never with this position. It's one where some real schooling might be of assistance. Of course, most of us don't have to go down slides either, but perhaps at least understanding the dynamics of riding down one is important.
selewis wrote:Thanks for the reminder Pat. (I'm still thinking on it)
BTW did you ever hear back from John F ?
S
I emailed John, but I didn't receive a reply. He's still AWOL. If anyone is in contact with him, let him know that we've called his name on the muster roll and he's overdue to report in.
This is a picture of my mare Molly that a friend took with his telephoto during one of our outings at the quarry, and surprised me with some days later. Unfortunately it is the only one I have but I'm glad that it is of the forward position. Please note that the reins are not bridged, as they appear to be. That would interfere with steering, as on steep slides, if you are forward, you need to keep at least one hand in the mane. It is hard to see for sure but I suspect that that is the mistake made by the trooper who falls in the film clip. A slightly forward lower leg would have helped him as well.
I wish my friend had captured Molly's hind legs in the frame- they are up near the girth. But I think he was going for art more than illustrating the horse in motion. She has not yet reached the steepest part of the slide, which can be estimated by the angle of her front legs or by looking at the bank to our right. This is a little deceiving though as the slope never stays quite as steep as that because, as you can infer by the dust welling up from the bottom, the horse is actually dragging the bank down with her. Even at that slightly reduced angle though I found that a plumb position puts your head almost on the horse's croup; blind, almost impossible to steer if you needed to, and ungainly.
Sandy
Great photograph, and I appreciate your re-posting it. A photo is worth a thousand words, as they say, and having one here is really needed.
