> Fascinating! A few years ago, my daughter gave me a translation of > Xenophon's The Art of Horsemanship. I was in absolute awe of the fact > that > some of the concepts I had viewed as "modern" had been written about by > Xenophon in 23 centuries ago.
Here's the whole book, which you can read: http://tinyurl.com/3y6ezj Here's a quote from the "seat" section: "Exaggeration spoils good riding as it will the best argument, and is ridiculous into the bargain." I think that some seats are exaggerated so far that they end up being inefficient and not in the spirit of the original purpose; for example, the classical seat. The riders end up being so stiff, hollow-backed, leaning back, heavy on the reins. There's no way that this position goes "with" the flow of the horse. Think of that seat and then the seat of someone like Linda Parelli. Is she "technically" correct? Maybe not, but she moves with the horse much better than a classical rider. I would bet that a horse, if he was able to chose between two riders, one being classical, would chose Parelli over the other. Judy http://icehorses.net http://clickryder.com
