Bill Haack is available for training all year round.  Horses have been a part of Bill's entire life and his specialty for these past 15 years is The Rocky Mountain Horse:          Breeding, Training, Sales, Leasing, Lessons

For more information about Liberty Farm Rockies contact Cindi Haack:               chaack @aol. com or 608 832 6616

2010 Spring Riding Series - Limited to 6 riders in each session                                     Location:  Liberty Farm, Mount Vernon, WI  (Indoor & Outdoor Arena)                     Start time 1:00pm  -  Fee is $30 each session, each rider                                             April 10, 11 -  April 24, 25  -  May 1, 2  - May  8, 9  -  May 15,16

Leadership techniques you worked through on the ground with Will, transfer into the saddle. Core riding techniques as taught by Jeanne, will become easier when riders learn to relax muscle tension. Under Bill's guidance, you will learn to ease muscle tension and through relaxation allow your horse to gait his best. Tensed, braced horses are not going to be able to move properly.

Most people carry more muscle tension than they need in order to carry out activities. The first skill that students learn, then, is how to lessen these areas of undue muscle tension. Second, without the interference of undue tension, riders  better communicate the cues used with their horse. Third, riders cultivate a more natural alignment of their head, neck and spine that has associated with it qualities of balance, strength and coordination. Overall, knowledge of these skills allows students to move and carry out activities with greater ease and less effort on the part of both horse and rider.

Riders understand that communication with their horse is one of the fundamentals of       good riding. What some riders don't realize is that we communicate with our horse not    only through the cues we give (with your seat, legs, & hands) but also by the way we      use our bodies. This "body use" is often unconscious. Muscles, respond to stimuli from  the environment and to our perceptions and attitudes and in turn develop patterns of        undue tension.

Although we may not be aware of our developed tension patterns, your horse perceives   your tension as you approach on the ground and also when you are in the saddle.          Horses may confuse tension with cues of communication. In this sense, we may safely assume that a horse’s experience with the human communication technique sometimes echoes that of Ralph Waldo Emerson when he said:  "You shout so loudly  that I cannot 'hear' what you say."

Our patterns of body tension may affect our ride. For example when undue body tension exists in the rider and that rider asks his/her horse to go forward, the horse is actually    hearing two cues and the contradiction creates confusion: 1) our leg cue says, "Go!"      but 2) the increase of muscle tension in other parts of our body says, "Stop!"                 As a result, the horse is slow to respond to the leg cue and seems resistant but in reality, he is just confused by your cues of GO & Stop.

A result of this situation may be that we will add to our horse’s level of tension. In fact,    if we ride a particular horse over a period of time and we are consistently tight or stiff in   a specific area, then the horse may become stiff in that exact same area!  Sally Swift calls this phenomenon comparable parts. (The phenomenon is described in an article entitled "Gain Without Pain", by Sandra Cooke, in Practical Horseman, February, 1993.)

So what does all this have to do with improving riding technique? Understanding your own body tension helps you  to gain awareness of your unconscious patterns of tension and then you can learn concrete means of undertaking a process to reduce those tensions. Ideally, through this process, we attempt to become as aware of ourselves, just as our horse is aware of us.

There are a number of results of this process. First, our communication of cues              becomes clearer to our horse. When we give a cue, the cue is the only thing our horse "hears", since we’ve reduced the contradictory "background noise" caused by our areas of tension in our bodies. If our horse is resistant, we’ve reduced one of the possible causes of that resistance (by removing any unconscious messages that we may have been giving our horse through our tense muscles)

Second, by reducing "background noise" caused by our areas of tension, we gain greater awareness of ourselves and of our horse. Our feel of the ride dramatically improves. 

Third, the freer we are of undue muscle tension, the easier it is to follow our horse.  As we lessen that tension, we gain greater control and greater ability to "receive" and follow our horse’s movement. It’s amazing how, on subtler and subtler levels, we can quiet ourselves, in such a way so that our only movement (other than our cues) is a direct       result of the horse’s movement.

Finally, our cues can become increasingly subtle. We can ask questions of our horse with a whisper when we used to unknowingly ask with a shout. This is partly because the background noise is less and also because the horse’s tension and therefore his resistance, is less. This does not mean that we are passive in relation to our horse. We can be extremely active in making a decision about what we want and communicating it to our horse but now  we  do this with a minimum of undue tension, that is, without compromising our receptivity in following our horse as he carries out our request.

Heather     Kaarakka   using core          technique and relaxed muscle to keep every drop from out of the cup

Bill Haack     using core riding and relaxed muscle tention to guide and ride during entry into the coliseum at  2008 Midwest Horse Fair

Jake Feldt learning direct rein & indirect rein to reach objects