Highway Stables

Perfect explanation! 👨‍🍳 💋

Bake the bread!

I have a lot of students in the 1st/2nd level phase where they are really starting to touch on true collection. I think the hardest part of collection is that the rider has to set clearer boundaries and not allow the horses energy to escape and flatten out which can feel a bit restrictive to the rider at times.

I try to explain collection (and roundness in general) as baking bread. When baking bread, as the energy causes the bread to rise the bread has to fill in all the nooks and crannies of the pan. This gives it a round appearance since the “energy” needs to go somewhere but can only expand in certain directions due to the parameters of the pan.

Think of your contact as “the pan” and your leg and seat as the energy used to expand the dough. As the horse learns collection the “pan” gets smaller and smaller and the horse gets rounder and taller.

If you take the exact amount of dough and put one in a smaller pan and one in a longer pan you will end up with two very different loaves of bread. This is the same difference in the outlines of a training level horse and a upper level horse.

Just some food for thought (see what I did there?! 😉)