How Doing Bodywork With Your Horse Improves Feel Under Saddle 

The reason learning how to do bodywork on your horse can improve riding feel is not simply that both massage and riding are physical. It goes deeper than that. Bodywork teaches the rider to pay attention to the horse’s body with much greater clarity. It teaches you to feel tension, asymmetry, guarding, release, effort, and softness. It teaches you to recognize when the horse is truly participating and when he is merely tolerating what is being asked of him. That kind of perception is at the heart of feel.

For the amateur rider, this can be especially valuable because riding is a very noisy environment. When you are in the saddle, everything is happening at once: your balance, your position, the aids, the horse’s energy, the line you are riding, the transition you are trying to improve, whatever your trainer just said, and whatever worry you have about whether things are going well. It can be very difficult to sort through all of that and know what you are actually feeling.

On the ground, during bodywork, the same horse is easier to read. You can slow down. You can observe. You can feel one area at a time. You can notice where the horse is tight, where he is guarded, where one side feels different from the other, and what happens when he begins to soften. In that sense, bodywork becomes a kind of laboratory for feel. It gives the rider a quieter, clearer place to learn how to perceive the horse’s body.