Riding 'Deep and Round'

[Ziggy_]

Its been suggested to me that working my mare deep and round would be beneficial to her and I'd like to understand a bit more about it - what are the benefits, how do you achieve a deep and round outline, etc - if anyone has any pics that would be great too.

I am familiar with working long and low and often warm up this way but deep and round is new to me. Please note I am not talking about Rollkur, have no intention of riding my horse this way and don't wish for this thread to become a debate on rollkur please!!

 

[teddyt]

If you are new to it i suggest you get a good instructor to teach you. It is a skilled technique that can cause more harm than good and supervision with an experienced person is important. For a start your horse needs to be physically capable of working in that outline in the first place, which needs assessment in real life. It should only be carried out for short periods, following a thorough warm up and needs sympathetic riding- not forcing, which can be done unintentionally.

Finding an experienced, yet kind (to the horse) instructor to teach you is the hard part!

 

[estellebradley]

This is how my dressage instructor encourages me to ride my horse because he paces.

Working deep and round encourages the horse to relax the muscles in his back and get rid of any tension. The horse is rounder than you would ideally like when riding e.g. in a dressage test and you need to make sure the horse is working properly from behind.

This will then allow the horse to 'swing through' when working.
When done correctly you will feel the difference - it's very different!

Best bet would be to get an instructor to help you.

 

[Peacelily]

you can achieve similar results working over raised poles as it encourages them to flex their legs and back much more through each stride, they look "more" down to see what they're doing and this then encourages the rounding over the top line as they're having to raise their shoulders and trunk and use their abdominals to achieve this,

easier to do to play with that as a suppling exercise and then get your instructor to fully explain (or even show you..) what they mean by deep and round,