Good posture is more than your standing or sitting position. Good posture ignites a muscular and skeletal balance that protects the body from injury whether you’re moving or not. This means athletes need good posture or form when running, jumping, diving, tumbling and tackling in addition to sitting or sleeping. Your body learns to adjust constantly in what is referred to postural adjustment.

We all agree good posture is important for our health.

If we think good posture is important for human athletes, shouldn’t we expect the same for our horses?

And yet we see horses slouching everywhere around us. That can’t be any better for our horses than it is for us. Regardless if they are being ridden or not.

So what is a slouched horse?

But First A Brief Review:

1st Level of Balance == The Horse Carries More Weight on His Front Legs than on His Hind Legs.

2nd Level of Balance == The Horse Carries the Weight More Evenly Between Front and Back

3rd Level of Balance == The Horse Begins to Carry More Weight On His Hind End. Freeing up the Front End to be more expressive and active.

We do expect that our horses will utilize different levels of balance depending on their current activity.

While we call them Levels of Balance, if you think about it, we could refer to them as different postures. And isn’t good posture just as important for our horses as it is for us?

Another thing to consider is that poor posture in horses is different from that in humans, especially if you believe that horses can be expected to work in three different levels of balance, while we expect humans to have only one. Something we will discuss further later.

But if true that would mean that a horse could have good or poor posture in each level of balance based on that logic.

In which case not only do we need to be aware of the three levels of balance and how that affects things, including the rein effects, but we must also be able to assess if the horse has good posture in a particular level of balance. Especially when he is carrying us.