(“One brother is tight rope walking on a cable strung across the Grand Canyon.”)

One of the more comical sites in the dressage arena is the “Bobble Head” rider–haplessly absorbing her horse’s motion in her cervical vertebrae instead of her hips and lower back. Much more common and more pernicious is the tendency in almost every rider to look down at his or her horse’s neck. Nearly everyone has heard the physics of “moment arms” explained– the effect of the displaced weight of the rider’s head amplified by its distance from the horse’s center of gravity. There’s not a single soul who thinks you’re supposed to look down when you ride – but, nevertheless, we all do.

So how to break this terrible habit?

You can remind yourself constantly, repeating some mantra over and over. Perhaps you’ve heard the story of the two brothers – identical twins – who synchronistically are always thinking the same thing no matter what they’re doing or how far apart they are. One brother is tight rope walking on a cable strung across the Grand Canyon. The other is in New York City—3000 miles away—involved in some unmentionable activity being performed by Hillary Clinton. Both brothers are thinking, “Don’t look down!”

Other ways to break the habit include the help of an external reminder. While teaching one woman in her indoor arena, I was playing with a lunge whip. By accident I got the lash caught in the rafters directly over the centerline with the handle hanging straight down exactly at a mounted rider’s head height. I asked my student to turn down the centerline. She did so blithely gazing at her horse’s crest – until she met the dangling whip which ever so gently bonked her (as an embarrassing reminder to look where she was going) in the noggin.

Another time in a clinic I was teaching from the sidelines with a handful of spectators sitting around me. The rider had become so immersed in her work that she seemed hypnotized by her horse’s ears. Round and round she went, seeming barely aware of our presence. So to make the point, we conspired to absent ourselves. One by one, the spectators arose and quietly left the building, myself last. When the rider finally noticed that she was alone, she realized that her level of intensity had been a tad too extreme.

On other occasions I’ve tried props–sometimes literal ones–to remind a student to look up. One rider would thread a string through a full roll of toilet paper and tie the bow at the back of her neck to hold the roll under her chin and keep her head from sagging. Another wore overly large sunglasses which would slip down her nose if she forgot and looked down for too long. To a third, I jokingly threatened to attach a brass nameplate to the crownpiece of her bridle reading “Don’t look here!”

For some riders, looking down is accompanied by leaning forward, another hard–to–overcome habit especially for former hunt seat equitation riders. This image works for some of them particularly if they have spent time around the water. I tell them of my long-ago experience as a naval officer, standing on the bridge of my ship, looking out over the forecastle when (rarely) they let me have the conn. Then I have them imagine the view from the bridge of an oil tanker—the superstructure is set far towards the stern, and the distance from the bridge to the bow is much, much greater. To remember to open your hip angle and sit correctly in the vertical, you have to emulate the tanker captain by leaning back and putting much more of the horse’s neck out in front of you.