Long & Deep . . . an Opinon!

First let me change the name of 'long and deep' to 'round and low'. Long and deep makes me thing of a horse that is hollow and on the forehand.

Lately when giving clinics around Australia I have very often seen riders, when doing collected work and facing any kind of resistance, immediately putting the neck down to solve the problem.

One can think that the technique of round and low is like a kind of magic that can solve all the problems. Round and low or round and down is nothing  new!

Baucher used this technique as an important part of his method, which he called 'ramener outre', which we can roughly translate as 'over on the bit'. Captain Chambon (at the beginning of this century) used to ride with all his squadron (about 120 horses) behind him with all the horses' noses on the ground. Schockemohle, the German showjumping rider and others used to warm up horses before competitions with the horse's nose on the chest. Of course these techniques are all a bit different, but are all based on round and low or round and down. In my opinion this technique is very useful. The biomechanics experts will be very happy to explain why it is so!

There is an experiment which demonstrates dramatically what happens. It can be conducted by placing your hands on the seat of a chair with your feed firmly on the ground some distance away. If someone was to remove the chair from beneath your hands the only way to stay on your feet is to step forward under your weight and it is the same for the horse. However, it is very important to know when to use it.

It is an exercise: a gymnastic exercise for example to warm up, like special work for some kinds of horses (conformation problems) - or horses who are wrongly collected, or to take the pressure off the top line muscles, at the end of the work. In these situations , it is very useful and presents no problems.

What I sometimes see is that it is used as a means of overcoming resistance during the normal work, or, most unfortunately during the collecting work. This is a problem particularly when collection is the aim, because the horse responds to a simple half halt by lowering the neck and even going on the forehand.

This means that the horse loses the facility to use its neck muscles to allow the half halt to pass through.

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