Understandably, the successes of extraordinary horses are exploited to accredit given schools of thought. It would be eminently useful if the lameness of others horses trained through the same school of thought were analyzed with equal passion. The flaws of a training technique may be compensated by the talent of particularly gifted horses. The deficiencies are indeed exposed by the failure of reasonably talented athletes. The alarming injury rate amongst dressage and hunter jumper horses strongly suggest that horses are not efficiently prepared for the performances they are expected to complete.   The performance asked of the three year old on the lameness video was simply to carry a rider. With this specific horse, a major back muscle imbalance impeded this elementary task. At a lesser degree, a large majority of equine athletes enter their active life with a back muscle imbalance or some other vertebral column dysfunction which, if not addressed by the rider, handicaps the horse's potential and prompts injuries.  We set the story of "the horse who could not trot carrying a rider" in motion. You read the horse's saga on the newsletter. You can watch the whole reeducation process on video. The series is entitled "Educating your Eye" because the qualities of the pictures, which have become the trademark of our productions, are even more educative when they became moving pictures.   The standards of judgments that restore soundness are far more elaborated that the standards of judgments that are scoring horses in the dressage as well as hunter ring. The later are about appearances while the former are about advanced understanding of the equine physiology. Criteria of judgments don't even acknowledge the relation between lateral bending and transversal rotation. "In the cervical and thoracic vertebral column, rotation is always coupled with lateroflexion and vice versa." (Jean Marie Denoix, 1999).  Never the less judging criteria ever refer to the fact that for the same lateral bending, two rotations are possible. The proper rotation is assuring correct functioning of the horse's vertebral column while the inverted rotation is creating sharing forces on the vertebral structures.

The video shows the interactions between lateroflexion and transversal rotation of the cranial thoracic vertebrae. Through animations you can visualize the difference between proper and inverted rotation. The practical application in the dressage ring clearly exposes the difference between a gymnastic exercise such as the shoulder-in, practiced with the horse's vertebral column properly coordinated by contrast with the same gymnastic exercise practiced by the same horse but with the vertebral column combining lateral bending and inverted rotation.