Article Excerpts

Clinician Peggy Cummings offers images and exercises to take the tension out of the horse-rider relationship

By Allison Rogers/Photos by Alix Coleman

Imagine you are waltzing with someone who is tense and unyielding. You try to take the sweeping strides of the dance, but your partner restricts your movements with his rigidity. What is supposed to be a floating dance becomes an awkward, jerky battle.
This is Peggy Cummings' analogy of what hap-pens between many horses and riders. Our goal as riders is to allow our horses to self-carry in balance as though we weren't atop them. Yet the way many of us have been taught to ride constrains the horse's movement rather than frees it. Cummings, a trainer and clinician now living in Boise, Idaho, has made a mission of teaching people to "free up" their bodies so that their horses can do the same.
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