What is the natural crookedness?

Natural crookedness is the tendency for all horses to possess a dominant side in their body. This asymmetry develops early in life and varies from horse to horse.  The crookedness doesn’t depend on age.
 

It is important to recognise the individual natural crookedness, to counteract the consequences resulting from this crookedness, such as tension, lameness, improper distribution of loads to the spine and limbs.

Crookedness is an overload in one of the shoulders. Let’s call it forelimb dominance.In this picture it is the right shoulder.

When the weight of man adds to it, the overload of the dominant forelimb greatly increases.

The natural crookedness causes several tensions, whereby huge forces to the side influence the spinal column. A horse with uncorrected crookedness cannot express its full potential.

Just as a person has particular confidence in his strong left or right side, the horse makes use of its respectively strong side, to help itself in critical situations.

 In fear (critical situations), horses typically raise their heads, necessarily invert their backs (down), and lock their dominant forelimb. With this behaviour embedded, many horses retain the inverted, downward swinging back, and excessive tension and loading with restricted freedom of extension of the dominant forelimb through the various gaits. This embedded defensive posturing is demonstrated in the photo of a right “handed” horse with an inverted back accompanied with excessive loading of the right front hoof.  Thia inappropriate transfer of the horses dynamic support from the left hind leg – Diagonally – to the right front would cause this animal to tend to fall in to the center as he is being lunged on the right rein. It is the objective of our training to Diagonally transfer the weight back to the hind limb opposite the dominant forelimb and bring the horse into dynamic balance. We call this a Diagonal Shift.

The natural crookedness is a diagonal shift.
Therefore it can only be neutralised by a diagonal shift.

This drawing shows the training objective for the above mentioned right handed horse. Creating a diagonal shift from the right front to the left hind is what is needed to attain dynamic balance. The drawing also implies increased freedom of the right hind leg when it is unblocked by the diagonal shift.

Shoulder-in is a diagonal shift.

Question:
Why is it so unusual to start the basic schooling of the horseby teaching it shoulder-in before we start riding. 

Riding quality and potential are substantially effected by crookedness. 

These pictures show a left handed horse during competition. Notice the front left shoulder position in the photo at right. 

In our opinion 90 – 95% of performance and movement problems can be solved or prevented by straightening the crooked horse.

Straightness Training applies to:

• All competition of pleasure horses, independent of the riding style.
   
• Starting young horses under saddle.
   
• Horses with movement problems, (chronic or acute), (subtle or severe). Including difficult to diagnose rhythm problems.
   
• Horses who’s forwardness, willingness and performance diminish with training.
   
• Horses with back problems, “kissing spines”, recurrent lameness, short stridedness in forelimbs, U-neck or overdeveloped under neck muscles, pressure sensitive in the neck area, head shaking, nervous behaviour, navicular disease, “hunter’s roach”, (sacral protrusion), stifle/knee problems.
   
• Horses needing improvement in overall quality of movement or expression.