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About thirty years ago, before any of us knew what having a
horse "on the aids" was all about, someone first showed
me leg yielding. "You just put your inside leg behind the girth,"
they said, "and you push the haunches over." We couldn’t
do it very well since the horses were, at best, on passive contact,
and we had no concept of "pushing and receiving aids"
or the horse being in lateral balance. At the time it didn’t mean
all that much to me. We had more important fish to fry – like getting
to the cross country course.
Then in the fall of ’72, I witnessed a rather amazing spectacle.
Col. Nybleaus of Sweden conducted an FEI Judge’s Forum at the American
Dressage Institute in Saratoga, NY. Nybleaus was a major proponent
of leg yielding, while ADI was a bastion of Spanish Riding School
emigrees, all firmly planted in the non-leg yielding camp. I remember,
as a very humble novice dressage rider, sitting in a lecture room
as tweedy, nattily dressed older men with European accents pounded
their fists on the table, pointed fingers, and shouted back and
forth, "Your ideas will be the death of classical dressage!"
"No, yours will!" And so on.
The argument ran: why move your leg behind the girth and teach
the horse to move over with him looking back the way he’s coming
from, when later on, the leg in the same position will be the aid
for half pass? Isn’t this just a contradiction in training that
only confuses the horse?
The next day in the arena I was watching an ADI instructor
schooling a young horse. It was moving along the track on a shallow
angle, forehand to the inside but not bent. "What movement
is that?" I innocently asked. "This is shoulder-in,"
was the reply. "But shouldn’t the horse be bent?" I ventured.
"Well, of course!" was the answer, "but when we’re
teaching them, we can’t expect them to learn to move sideways and
bend at the same time. We do things step by step."
Upon hearing that explanation, I distinctly remember wondering
what everybody was so stirred up about the day before.
Several years later, with my eventing career sputtering along
and my leg yielding career at a virtual standstill, I had some lessons
first with Maj. Hans Wikne (from Sweden) and later with Col. Aage
Sommer (from Denmark) and Col. Bengt Ljungquist (then the USET dressage
coach and a former Swedish cavalry officer). All three insisted
that to execute a leg yielding, one did not bring the inner leg
back at all, but rather kept it at the girth.
In subsequent years, as I began to ride with Louise Nathorst
(then a young trainer from Sweden working in New England) and with
Maj. Anders Lindgren (from guess where), the explanation became
clear:
To the Scandanavians, leg yielding is not just an obedience
exercise to teach moving off the leg. It is also a suppling exercise
during which the horse is invited to find his lateral balance. In
the moment where he is de-stabilized laterally, he can also be re-balanced
longitudinally.
Leg yielding is ridden forward to encourage the horse to step up
under himself, not just to displace his hips to the side. And, most
significantly, it is ridden with almost the same aids as for shoulder-in
since it is the center of gravity that is being displaced, not just
the hindquarters. The legs are placed the same for both movements
– inner leg at the girth and outer leg behind – and only the relative
proportions of the aids control whether the horse remains straight,
bent a little, or bent as much as a classical shoulder in demands.
If the outside shoulder pops and quarters trail, the inner leg is
not drawn back. The advice, instead, is to make a half halt, using
the outside rein supported by the forward-driving outer leg (still
behind the girth) to make the shoulders "wait" so the
quarters can catch up.
I have followed this advice for more than twenty years, using the
leg yielding, not only for green horses, but to refresh and rebalance
more advanced ones in conjunction with other exercises.
As the saying goes, much time passed.
In the early ‘90s, as a USDF committee was assembling its Dressage Manual for Instructors, I was enlisted to write
the section on leg yielding. The first draft under the aegis of
its "classically-disposed" chairman, Michael Kirkegaard,
had contained all of half a page on the subject, of which two thirds
warned of the dangers of using this satanically-inspired training
exercise.
Eventually, I wrote the accompanying piece, whose text and drawings
were approved by Maj. Lindgren. And then the committee took over.
Suddenly, time rolled back thirty years, and the article’s instructions
were re-written to put the inside leg behind the girth (where it
had caused so much contradiction and consternation). My persuasive
powers were insufficient to change minds, and the result that was
published in the Manual totally obfuscated the issue by suggesting
somehow that both legs be placed behind the girth when performing
leg yielding.
I’ve been brooding about this now for seven or eight years, periodically
gaining reinforcement when Kyra Kryklund at her National Symposium
and then Conrad Schumacher at his, both reiterated placing the
inner leg at the girth and the outer one behind.
So, please, as you read this, think about your choices. Before
you just do as you’ve been told, figure out what makes sense both intellectually
and to your horse. And if you still want to put your inner leg back
(or think you should swear off leg yielding altogether because you’re
supposed to put your inner leg back), do me a favor and JUST
GET OVER IT!
Thank you.
Bill Woods
© Copyright June 2000
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Underlying
Relationships - Kyra's ABC's From the May 1999 issue