The Aids (Over)explained

Many students feel overwhelmed by too many things to focus on and control when it comes to their aids. Seat, hands, legs, and then I’m telling them to also bring their breath and back and jaw and tongue and knees and thighs and ankles and toes into their awareness… this list could go on. How can we integrate all of these pieces without our brains exploding and still manage to enjoy the ride?

My answer is twofold.

1. First of all, organizing ourselves in motion to communicate with a horse isn’t a process that exists just in the brain. More than anything, this feel is in the body.

It’s the deeper knowing in our bones and muscles. It’s the guidance from our gut. Feel is feel, not thought.

It comes down to being able to trust our bodies to pick up on signals from our horse and our environment and respond accordingly based on the sum of all our experiences, and a bit of knowledge too.

Consider the guitarist. A gifted musician is not thinking about where to place their fingers on the fretboard and which direction and rhythm and strumming pattern to stroke the strings. If they were consciously thinking about all of that, we could hear it, and we wouldn’t feel all of the emotions, energies, messages, and memories carried through the vibration of the sound. It wouldn’t be music we would want to listen to. But when that guitarist first learned to play the guitar, of course they had to think and work off of knowledge of how to play the instrument. Many, many hours of going through motions and teaching the body a new language to be spoken beyond the brain. If this guitarist were then to learn to play the piano, the brain would have to work a little harder to obtain new knowledge and patterns until the piano too could be played through feel.

My brother, Alex Buis, honing his guitar skills as a teenager, later to become the epic folk artist, Bouse.

This is much like a rider either learning to ride or learning a new discipline. Even dressage riders who work with me often feel like they’re learning a new discipline if they’ve come from more of a modern dressage background and are learning to ride classically and through true connection. That transition absolutely requires new knowledge and shifts in perspective to teach the body to communicate with the horse in a new way. Our brains have to work hard in that time to create a framework for our bodies new movements to be categorized in and stored to recall again and again as we train our bodies. But don't forget that we are working towards riding (and living) more and more off of feel— getting out of our heads and into our bodies.

2. The second part of my answer to the question of how to make sense of all of our aids and use them effectively has more to do with the knowledge side, so that we can organize them mentally to later develop feel. I think of 3 general types of aids: regulatory, preparatory, and shaping aids.

Let’s take a journey through them all.

The Regulatory Aids

The regulatory aids are those that are always on— the seat and the breath. They are there to set the tempo and the tone, and the other aids can be layered on top to shape the horse’s movement. If we go with our music analogy, the regulatory aids are like a metronome— they provide the beat for the music of the other aids to be played over.

The Seat

The seat is a regulatory aid to set the tempo, cadence, and length of each stride. The front of the pelvis can lift up providing space for the withers to lift. The back of the pelvis can lift to provide space for the hind legs to step under. Of course this is dynamic and largely unobservable to eyes on the ground, but as a trainer I tend to have an idea of what the seat is doing based on the movement of the horse.

When we provide space for the horse to move, their movement tends to naturally fill that space, given they are properly developed to do so.

As riders, we should always move our seat in the way we want our horse to move. I think about the part of my seat that blends into my thighs as connecting to the horse’s front legs, and the seat bones connecting to the horse’s hind legs.

The Breath

Zoe using breathing her pony down to a halt in hand at a clinic with me.

The breath is another a regulatory aid, as we are always breathing— or should be anyway! Just as the movement of our seat shapes the movement of the whole horse, the energy behind our breath shapes the horse too. We’ve all felt that when we breathe quickly and shallowly, like when we are scared, the horse becomes stiff, choppy, and even flighty– their movement matching our breath. I often practice breathing in for 4 strides (or steps depending on the gait) and out for 6, which keeps me regulated and aware of the rhythm. It’s like a meditation that keeps me in my body and feeling the body of the horse in motion.

But there is more to breath than just the speed and the depth.

The intention behind our breath can carry messages to our body and thereby to that of the horse.

For example, I tend lock up and disconnect from my hips. If I breathe energy into my hips and breathe out tension, I am then able to lengthen and engage my hips, and in doing so, the hind legs of the horse. I can breathe in courage. I can breathe out playfulness. Whatever I need. There isn’t one way to go about this, so play with it and find a way to center your breath on the feeling you’d like to create with your horse.

Riders often swap the regulatory aids, like the seat and breath, with the shaping aids (legs, hands, etc.). They have their legs and hands on all the time (often at the same time) and the seat and breath suddenly turn on when they feel the horse isn’t responding enough anymore. It’s easy to just let the horse take our seat and accept the movement at face value, and push and pull into the shape and movement we want— it takes a lot of skill to regulate the horse with seat and breath and turn our hands and legs in neutral until the moment has come to ask a question. Why? One reason is that when most of us begin riding, we are almost exclusively taught about the hands and legs— kick go go, pull to stop, steer with the reins. It takes a certain amount of balance, body awareness, and relaxation to use the seat and the breath all the time to regulate the horse, and many people don’t have that when they begin riding. But it’s worth planting the seed, all you beginner instructors out there. The horses and developing riders will thank you!

Another reason might be a culture in which people want to always look like they’re doing something or problem solving. The seat and breath are largely invisible aids, where the hands and legs can be very obvious. People have a fear of appearing to do nothing— I even feel this from time to time when I’m doing so much relational work with horses, just being with them. I know that’s what the horses need, and that holding that space for their healing is the most important part of the work, but the part of me that fears judgement knows that it can like I’m being paid to do absolutely nothing at all sometimes. But we have to trust ourselves and our horses, and in the context of riding, our aids should become invisible anyway. It’s worth doing the mental work to become aware and in control of your breath and your seat— they’re some of the only things 100% in your control while riding when you think about it.

The Preparatory Aids

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

— Archilochus.

Or in other words, the level of our preparation…

Preparatory aids are primarily used to prepare for transitions, although you can prepare for any kind of question for the horse.

The breath falls under this category, in addition to being a regulatory aid. I breathe in the energy of the gait I am preparing for, and exhale while transitioning so that the transition itself becomes a release. It’s the most beautiful feeling when you get to the point that your intentional inhalation alone prepares your horse for what’s to follow, and with practice, no additional aids are needed so long as the intention behind your breath is clear. I find this particularly helpful for downward transitions. Say I’m trotting and would like to walk. As I breathe in, I conjure up the energy of a forward, balanced transition to walk, almost magnetizing my horse’s back towards my seat as I breathe it up and in. When he feels this and I can feel him thinking walk, I simply let my breathe out as I relax my seat into walk. This way the horse is never taken off guard and all of your other aids are available to shape the transition further, perhaps by adding bend, jaw flexion, or a lateral movement. Plus, I’ve continued breathing, which is always a plus!

Inhale to bring the horse to attention before asking a question, and exhale as the answer comes out, thereby experiencing transition as a release.

It’s not the in breath itself that prepares the horse. It’s the shaping of my internal energy during the in breath, in which I am conjuring the feeling in my body of the question (and therefore the answer if I’m asking only yes-questions), and the horse can feel that before I need to use any external shaping aids. Internal energy is the horse’s first language.

Just watch a herd and see how they communicate and move each other without needing to speak and run at each other. Horses often learn that our internal energies are irrelevant because we humans have such a hard time regulating them. We are often incongruent– our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors not in alignment, and we tend to insist that the horses respond to our behavior alone, and ignore all that other stuff. Sometimes they do. But if we can master our internal energy and create the feeling of the bend, the trot, the halt, the shoulder-in– whatever– before asking through movement, the horses can connect and take us there in the ultimate softness, and we can guide that movement from there. The breath then becomes a vehicle for this internal energy.

The in-breath as preparation and the out-breath as execution and release is something easy to practice out of the saddle, and even at home. If we go back to our musician analogy, you can picture the way even a violinist might take a deep inhalation before playing a phrase, even though they’re not playing a wind instrument. The breath is one of the most basic ways of preparing our body for what’s to come, and in the presence of horses, it prepares them too.

The voice can also be used as a preparatory aid, which we will return to later.

The Shaping Aids

The shaping aids are all of the other aids we’re so used to talking about— namely hands and legs. They also include all the other parts of our body, as we are always dynamically shaping the horse with our bodies. I sometimes refer to the shaping aids as asking aids, as their purpose is to ask the horse for something, be it bend, transition, speeding up or slowing down, jaw flexion, poll flexion, neck extension, steering, and so on. Let’s go through the main 3: hands, legs, and voice.

The Hands

Through our hands we can speak with the horse’s jaw and tongue, and from there the whole body. The horse is truly in your hands, so be kind.

The hands are the shaping aids with the precious opportunity to talk directly to the horse’s jaw and tongue, and by way of muscles and fascia, the neck, back, forelimbs, and hind limbs. It is essential that we use our hands wisely while riding so that we are allowing and helping the horse move in the most relaxed and balanced way possible. This of course means that our own balance cannot come from our hands. As my students know very well, no matter how old or experienced you are, a good ole lunge lesson without reins goes a long way to make sure your hands are not being used to balance yourself or give you a false sense of security.

Samantha developing an independent seat to eliminate the need to balance using her hands

So once you’re made sure you’re NOT using your hands for other purposes, how can we use them to shape, balance, and relax the horse?

First of all, the directions in which we use our hands should be limited to up/down, side to side, and forward. Which direction is left out? Backward. We should never use backwards action on the reins. Why?

Pulling backwards on the horse’s mouth acts directly on the tongue, a highly sensitive organ that directly connects to the horse’s sternum and shoulders, via the sternohyoid and omohyoid muscles, which we should be seeking to lift and free, not block. Farther back, these muscle groups connect to the diaphragm, which is vital to the horse’s ability to breathe fully and allow the rib cage to swing, and therefore the range of motion of the hind legs as well.

The tongue is truly the key to the body of the horse, and it lies at our fingertips, at the end of the reins, under the bit. When we act backwards with our hands on the horse’s tongue, it tends to contract towards the back of the mouth (or even go over the bit), avoiding what can easily become painful pressure, that blocks the horse’s ability to swallow and relax the muscles connecting the neck to the thoracic sling. When the underside of the horse’s neck is braced, the thoracic sling cannot truly engage to lift the withers and free the shoulders.

So what can we accomplish by lifting the hands? When we lift both hands, we can stimulate the horse to yield the jaw to lick, chew, and swallow (when educated correctly from the ground). Lifting the hands also is an essential part of changing the balance of the horse, in shifting weight from the forehand to the hind end. The neck acts like a balancing rod for a horse, and is tremendously heavy in itself (the head taking up approximately 10% of the horse's body weight). Therefore, lifting the neck to a higher position transfers weight up and back to be carried on the hind quarters, the essence of collection.

Instead of thinking of driving the hind legs under the horse, I prefer to create space by lifting the front end.

Again, horses will go where there’s space to move. Anyone who’s ever left the gate open knows that.

When we lift one hand at a time, we can ask the horse to flex or bend the neck, or change balance from one shoulder to another.

Simple jaw flexions in hand with Faith the fjord

Lateral displacement of the hands, moving left and right can be used for shoulder control. We can bring a hand towards the neck as a neck rein, asking the forehand to move away from our hand. We can move a hand away from the horse’s neck, creating space for the shoulder to move into.

Good horsemanship is not about pushing and pulling, it’s about making the space for the horse to move in a healthy way, and preparing adequately for the desired movement.

Then we have the movement of the hands forwards as a release. I think of throwing little bit of rein to the horse as a reward for saying yes or giving an honest try, regardless of which aids asked the question. The release of the rein is not only an important reinforcement for the horse, but it also allows self carriage. People often talk about self carriage as something we create or develop in horses, but the way I see it, the horse will carry themself if we are not carrying them. Perhaps not in optimal balance without our support in development, but the horse cannot lean on the hand if there is no the hand to lean on.

There’s no such thing as a heavy horse. But there is a hand that doesn’t let go and chooses to carry the weight of the horse as opposed to educating balance through wise hand aids and diligent releases.

When we take back the reins after a release or allow the horse to stretch forward, our contact shouldn’t be anything more than the weight of the reins themselves. Anything more is an ask (a shaping aid from the hand). Our questions never need to be asked forcefully.

The Legs

The legs are also shaping aids, primarily used to ask the horse to go forward. When we squeeze our lower leg at the horse’s girth area, the horse should learn to go immediately and energetically forward. How does this work? Is the horse born with a go-button behind each shoulder? Of course, not! But it seems riders and even trainers tend to make this assumption, and therefore when they squeeze and the horse does not go forward, they squeeze harder, and then kick the horse, and then kick harder, and then they ask someone to get them some spurs. Go to almost any beginner lesson program or horse show and just listen– you will almost certainly hear someone enthusiastically yelling “Kick, kick, kick!” to a child on a pony. Most of us were taught this at a young age.

So long as the horse is not being restricted in any way (by a contradictory hand aid, a seat that doesn’t move, a poorly fitting saddle, pain, fear, etc.), the horse must not understand the leg aid if it doesn’t work as a squeeze, so increasing the force behind it won’t help either, unless perhaps you activate the horse’s fight/flight response. If your gas pedal isn’t hooked up to your car, pressing it down harder with your foot still won’t make the car go.

We have to educate horses that the leg at the girth means forward! This starts at the ground, using a whip, flag, or your hand at the girth when encouraging forward. When you’re on the horse, a whip or flag can easily clarify that the leg means forward. No, I do not mean to hit your horse with the whip. Horses naturally move forward when they see things moving towards them, so if you move the whip towards the hind quarters, with a gentle tap if needed, just after applying the leg, the horse can learn to associate the leg with their natural instinct to move forward triggered by the whip. With repetition, the whip will no longer be needed– think Pavlov’s dog drooling at the bell. (For those who might not be familiar with the reference, Ivan Pavlov, a psychologist who pioneered classical conditioning performed a famous experiment with his dog in which he rang a bell before feeding his dog, repeatedly. The food naturally caused the dog to salivate, and later became conditioned to salivate at the bell due to its association with the food.)

The leg replaces the whip as the “go forward” aid, just as the bell replaced Pavlov’s dog food as the “drool” stimulus.

The leg can also be used in other positions to ask for lateral movement. Again all of these cues are taught from the ground, first spread out from girth to haunches so the horse can differentiate, and later may only be separated by an inch or two as the horse becomes more sensitive. Spurs used appropriately can increase the precision of leg aids by coming in contact with the horse over a smaller surface area, allowing the horse to more clearly differentiate.

There are 2 other leg positions behind the girth achieved by bringing the leg back incrementally from the hip joint. The farthest back position can be used to ask the horse to lateralize the haunches only, whereas moving the leg only a little back from the girth can ask the horse to move their whole body sideways, such as in a leg-yield, for example.

We have discussed all active leg aids so far, in which pressure is being applied and released. The leg may also be used passively, meaning without pressure. For example, in rein back or highly collected movements such as piaffe and passage, we often bring our legs passively back to encourage engagement and the folding of the hind leg joints without confusing the horse with a forward or lateral driving energy.

Just as the hands should follow the movement of the head and neck with light contact when in neutral, the legs should also follow the movement of the horse’s rib cage.

Let your legs hang like wet towels when they are not active.

Imagine your legs hanging as wet towels when they are inactive.

Our legs should allow space for the ribcage to swing. When we ride a circle or a corner, positioning the outside leg passively behind the girth allows greater rib cage swing to the outside, giving the impression of a horse taking the bend of the curve, while you’re experiencing mainly just rotational bending through the back, not lateral bending as we see in the horse’s neck.

The Voice

The voice is somewhat of a controversial aid. In competitive dressage, you aren’t allowed to use any vocal aids, including clicking. Some trainers swear by total silence with a horse for peace and focus. I think this is a very possible and beautiful space to teach in. At the same time, I feel that the vocal aids are indirectly helpful to the horse, but directly helpful to us. That is, when we use language to ask a horse to do something like “walk”, we are clarifying our intention and likely conjuring up a mental picture in doing so. We can picture the horse walking, imagine what that walk feels like in our bodies. What the hoof-falls soundlike. Horses do not use language (well, depending on how you define language, but we won’t go down that rabbit hole today).

Horses communicate through body language, energy, and intention. So when we language-using creatures are able to clarify our body language, energy, and intention by using words, we communicate more clearly to our horse.

It’s often not the word itself that is cuing them, but the processes happening within us when we use that word.

In 2020 I spent a couple months living in Mérida, México studying psychology, interning in equine assisted therapy, and training rescue horses. I spoke only Spanish with the horses and humans. When I came home and lunged my horse Sage for the first time, I found myself accidentally using the Spanish words. “Paso”, I said to him, and sure enough he walked. “Trote”, and he trotted. “Gallope”, and off he cantered. Sage definitely did not know Spanish, but my body language, energy, and intention were the same as if I had said “walk”, “trot”, and “canter”.

Interning at Équre Equinoterapia in Mérida, where I spoke Spanish to the therapy horses.

All of this to say, vocal cues are not necessary for the horse, but they can be helpful in so much as they help us humans. However, the tone of voice and the way we use our voice can absolutely influence the horse when we are using vocal aids. If we yell a staccato “trot! trot!” we are likely to see an abrupt and choppy trot transition. And from that trot if we ask for a walk, but raise the pitch of our voice like a question– “walk?” our voice is mimicking the energy of an upward transition, which I often see confusing the horse– it all comes back to the energy behind the vocal aid. If the energy (or pitch) is going up, we’re likely to encourage an increase in energy from the horse.

Match the tone of your voice with the type of transition or behavior you’d like to see.

If anyone has ever barked “calm down!” at you, you've probably experienced how not-so-calming it is. Horses know this all too well.

Finally, the voice can also be used as a preparatory aid, which brings us back to the beginning of our discussion. I like to use the word “ready?” before using any of my shaping/asking aids that involve increase in energy or upward transitions. If the horse is not ready, I will not ask until the energy required is present. Similarly, for downward transitions or any sort of lowering of energy, I will use the word “and”. The repetition of these aids, paired with the appropriate tone of voice, helps the horse prepare their minds and bodies for the shift in energy before you ask for it, therefore allowing timely, balanced transitions.

Conclusion

The possibilities of details to discuss with regard to the aids are truly endless.

Everything about us, on the physical, energetic, and emotional levels, can act like an aid. Our whole being, inside and out, influences the horse, whether we intend it to or not.

That being said, there are also infinite ways to educate the horse to particular cues or aids. I have offered some of my methodology, but this is not a be-all end-all. I often tell my students that it doesn’t matter to me what cues they use, as long as they follow compassionate and coherent principles, such as those outlined in my code of ethics. Heck, if you want to do a back flip as an aid to ask your horse to back up, more power to you! If you have a method of communicating that is effective and respects the horse, I don’t care if it’s different from my methods, and it would be a waste of your time to change it. (Although, I don’t foresee myself taking the time to perfect a back flip just to back your horse.) If what you’re doing isn’t effective or respectful, or is producing undesired side-effects, then I’ll jump in and show you a better way to communicate with your horse. It would have been impossible to cover them all here, but I hope I’ve provided you with a framework for your brain so that you can go out and let your body develop muscle memory and feel.

Happy training!