101 Ways to Improve Your Riding:
Seat Posture & Balance

10 Best Tips to Improve the
Rider's Head

2.     Horse cutting corners, falling in, lost line?
Is one earring lower to the ground?

In 'high performance' sports like polocrosse, campdraft and games although a lot of the actual competition is 'twisting and turning' to develop good muscles both horse and rider must ride a considerable part of their fitness training on very straight lines to develop equal muscles down both side of both the horse and the rider.

Kinking your head off to one side makes the horse go crooked on centerlines & jumping, and it can even make a horse drag one hind toe on the ground. 

Try it yourself...ride down a straight line, and hold your head off to one side, and just watch what your horse does!

Uneven on both sides

In higher level movements such as flying changes, it is important that the left and right sides of the horse have the same length of stride.

If a rider holds their head off to one side, often things like tempi changes are shorter on one side than the other.

Quick tips & remedies:

Q.  Look in the mirror: Which earring is closer to the ground?  You don't even need to do this on the horse...you will probably see it in your bathroom mirror.

Q.  If you were wearing a surgical collar, which ear would 'lean' on the collar, and which ear would be above the collar.

There's more tips to come...click next:

Copyright © 2005
[Colleen Kelly. Improve Your Riding ABN 76799531257].

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When you hold your head off to one side, you have more weight on one side & your hands & legs don't feel the same to the horse

demonstration at
Equitana Asia Pacific
Here I ask Dr. Liz Owens to tilt her head to one side...notice how her beautiful mare 'Class Action' as also dropped the same ear - a grave fault that will be seriously marked down by judges.