You can take the title of this blog as meaning either or both of two things:  horses that are moving (in which case the word “moving” is an adjective), or the things a person does to move a horse (in which case the word “moving” is a gerund).  The two things are related, which will turn out to be the theme of this blog.

This entry is the joint product of two people:  myself as the anatomist and biomechanics scientist, and my business partner Jo Belasco as professional trainer. Jo and…

Sometimes the best way to understand how your horse moves is to mindfully experience how your own body moves.  This is called experiential learning.  When I used to teach comparative anatomy and functional anatomy in the university, I always told my students that the number one tool we all have to understand how animals move is our own bodies.  See if you don’t discover something really cool about horse…

In a very interesting conversation with a trainer whose observations are consistently brilliant, I realized that it’s hard for riders to see the similarities between human and horse gaits.  This is because the vertical position of a human’s torso, due to our being bipedal, changes the orientation of the arms or forelimbs, thereby obscuring their motion.  So I thought it might be useful and interesting to compare the motions of humans and horses, anatomically.…

It seems like such a straight-forward title, “Understanding the Horse.”  Yet if it was easy to do, we wouldn’t have a book, video, clinic, and training industry that’s worth billions of dollars annually.

Two aspects of understanding the horse are represented by the seminars I offer:  how horses stand and move, and how horses relate to humans through story. …