Supple. Horses AND humans..........

Working with a new competitive minded rider the other day, halfway through the session they started to laugh. I glanced across, questioning and quizzical and they exclaimed, “we were told you were expensive.”

Not, as they hastily explained, for value for money for the session time itself but because about, I am reckoning, a good 90 per cent have a saddle that simply doesn't fit (so, yes please, buy another saddle that does), and usually the horse is as crooked as hell besides so in my opinion, what's the point of running a marathon if you can't touch your toes - ?

In the past I've been crunched big time by horses, plus one major skiing number and almost three years back a whiplash number on a wet veterinarian's office floor. I thought I was pretty clued up on getting back to functioning but that day's soft tissue injuries opened a whole new bag of, er, a learning curve which, sideways, can be applied to horses too.

With movement comes core strength and elasticity, without it, one displaced rib or hip alignment just compounds into everything going out of whack.

So yes, I advocate chiro work but not the kind where you go back, week after week, month after month. Nope, my girls (the horse fixer and the human one too) get it in one or two sessions, max, and then after that it's conditioning work.

The Colorado clinician Mark Rashid (his book HORSEMANSHIP THROUGH LIFE runs totally along the same line of thought, you end up with a different – and supple – human being after he takes up the mental and physical discipline of martial art training) seems, uncannily, to run and write along similar railway tracks of parallel thought sometimes to my own. Ah, the old synchronicity thing again.........

Chiro work, saddle fit and if you click onto his website at www.markrashid.com and then onto his blogs, there he is covering my thoughts almost exactly, onto issues on slaughter and the latest, about teeth and TMJ and jaw flexion.

Nowhere near mountain fit or any type of competition fit level, my appaloosa The Fox has hit major I-am-very-happy horse-time. Conformation wise back at the knee, finally again his feet are balanced just right. He had chiro work done about two months back because he'd 'braced' himself for so long because of the jar and displacement correspondingly in his shoulders and tightened up in the stifle big time. And, finally decided he likes one bit after six years of trying nearly everything under the sun! He rides on rein pressure as light as feathers, he's tracking up, punch! from behind and the shoulder and stifle are smooth and supple on the circle with 'self-carriage' – ie, self balancing. THIS is the basis of great classical foundation work, wherever you end up riding.

And, on that note, a great classicist who follows along the line of the great Master Nuno Olivero, is giving a talk/seminar at Weedon Hall. His name's DOMINIQUE BARBIER and for a book of insights – and stunning line drawings – please, treat yourself to his just gorgeous DRESSAGE FOR THE NEW AGE.