Cari,
I like your comparison to hula dancing! It’s great. It’s too bad that an independent seat isn’t a primary goal with riders because it is the gateway into good riding. Thanks for your comment
Barbara

Here’s my take: stiff hands, arms, or any body part above the waist is the result of stiffness and a lack of movement in the seat, waist and back area. If your waist/back is not supple or is stiff or in pain, it transfers to your arms, or more accurately, to movement in your arms. I think you could even have a supple arm (not holding any tension) that would still bounce around if you weren’t supple in your seat and back.

It has always been my belief that this is what was meant by the “independent seat”. It is a seat that can move with the horse but is of course connected to and affects the rest of the body. Like a hula dancer or someone using a hula hoop, the hips move independently of the rest of the body in order to follow the horse and to absorb the movement from the horse so that the hands can remain still.

If the student believes that they need to sit rigidly (as I did for many years!) in order to appear to be a “still” rider, this will only make them stiff and unable to move with the horse.

Dan,
As usual your comment is very thorough and interesting. The only place that I found much real life discussion of independent aids and coordination of the aids in recent history has been in Pony club exams, at least in the days when C3 was the goal for every rider. (Pony Club has made huge changes in recent years). Until a person can control their own body parts on a moving horse, it just remains theory/discussion. An odd thing with riders is that in order to come to the place that they can control their body parts they have to first be willing to give up the control they are familiar with. Some days trying to teach a rider to do less seems insurmountable.

Positioning the rider on the horse and then adding the crest release has done so much to bury the idea of independent seat and aids. I think it was Helen Crabtree that commented that while she was judging she would look at Equitation riders and believe if their horses fell out from under them, the riders would continue to post along the rail, not noticing they’d lost their horse. (my paraphrasing).

All of the natural things that I admire in riding keep pointing back to Caprilli.

I’d not heard of “The Training of Cavalry Remount Horses, A New System” before and just now found a copy to down load in pdf form on google books. I’ve included the url in case other readers would like to read it. I’m looking forward to it. http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Training_of_Cavalry_Remount_Horses.html?id=YHYaAAAAYAAJ

Thank you again for your really helpful (and interesting) comments and thanks for the book recommendation.

And Happy New Year to you, too! I hope 2014 is a good one for you.

Barbara

Captain Louis Edward Nola (Of the “Charge of The Light Brigade” fame, or infamy, as it were) wrote a magnificent book that discusses what we would call ‘coordination of the aids’ and ‘independent seat’ today (“The Training of Cavalry Remount Horses, A New System” (Parker, Furnivall & Parker, London, 1852). Nolan describes a seat which essentially doesn’t rely on the hands or the saddle and doesn’t interfere with the horse’s movements.

While Nolan’s concept of an independent seat isn’t as developed as Caprilli’s, Nolan does state what we know to be obvious today, and that is while one’s hands, seat and legs are discrete elements, they are coordinated in an almost redundant fashion to support one another. Meaning, that a horse is not steered by the hands but by a coordination of the hands, leg and seat.

Caprilli’s forward seat took Nolan’s ideas a step forward – in the sense that if you apply Carpilli’s basic principles you find that you can control a horse almost entirely by seat (that includes collection)if you also understand the classical principles and avoid the mistake of balancing off one’s hands or relying on the saddle for balance (two mistakes I see too often these days), understand the five forms of rein and equine locomotion in general.

All of the aids must be applied as part of a ‘whole’ rather than independent and discrete elements which requires riders (and instructors) to understand that the various aids are like parts of a clock – they have to work together or the clock won’t work very well if at all.

One of the things that irks me to no end is when (in terms of general equitation) jumping becomes an end unto itself instead of a tool by which the rider learns to not impose artificial balance on the horse if it can be avoided. And it has to be accomplished in a way that a rider doesn’t cede all control to the horse.

This means that a rider in the beginning may have to drop the reins at times to avoid getting in the horse’s mouth but ultimately requiring that the rider be able to follow the horse’s mouth in all situations be it over jumps and elsewhere. But this requires one to understand that the aids must work together and never interfere with each other, but support and augment each other.

Rating a horse and even collection can be done literally by seat alone if one understands equine locomotion (and understands equine locomotion and that ‘center of gravity’ is a dynamic process and not a static position.

Oh, and Happy New Year, Barbara!