Articles |The Fourth & Fifth Easy Pieces

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The beauty of this last Fifth Easy Piece is that it lets you pinpoint your horse's problem areas, and also develops the muscles in your horse's loin and hind legs- critical to many high performance maneuvers. If his neck and shoulder turn to stone, go back to Easy Piece Number One and get him flexible. If he gets too much arc in his neck, better have a look at that bulging outside shoulder, and fix it with a little bit of Easy Piece Number Two. If you can't get a nice round circle in reverse, but more of a stiff straight line, zone three needs attention, and if everything in front of you looks good, but you're not moving, better have a little talk with zone four.

Use my Five Easy Pieces as a quick diagnostic test whenever you run into a glitch in your training program, and chances are you'll be able to find your horse's real problem in short order. Imagine your horse as a closed energy system, then use the Easy Pieces to direct that energy where it's needed. Although the energy is created in zone four, it is distributed from nose to tail, that is; from zone one to zone four. If zone one has an energy leak, zones two, three, and four won't hold energy either.

Each zone builds upon the correctness of its predecessor. Your goal is to contain and control your horse's energy without creating resistance. If you can consistently work your horse through the Five Easy Pieces without a fuss, then you're ready to move into more specific, high level training, because you've built a solid foundation of body control and energy placement. You can read your horse's gauges to prevent a wreck.

Whether you call these simple body control exercises flexions, warm-up drills, or Easy Pieces, the nuance and mastery of each one is the essence of horsemanship. They're universal throughout time and riding disciplines, too: a cavalry horse in Xenophon's time (about 300 BC) needed to be flexible, willing, and obedient to its rider, just as your performance horse should be today. Horses, like people, will always do best what they can do easiest- so make what you want your horse to do easy for him by repeating the individual exercises over and over, every time you ride. Although my Five Easy Pieces are basic exercises that you can run through in five or ten minutes, you won't master them in a lifetime- and you'll never quit using them, as long as you continue to ride and learn.

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