The walk is the most complicated of all the gaits having both a diagonal and a lateral component. It is what we often refer to as a gait of healing.  Because of the intricacies of the walk, it can be the one that is most difficult to have a full and complete understanding of.  But it is the one that is perhaps most important to understand so that we can fully utilize it as a gait of health.

Where we further examine the mobility of the horse's neck especially in the gait of walk as the gait of health.

There is so much happening here at any given point in time and yet this is an area that we don't spend enough time watching, observing so that we can understand how this is something that we must allow the horse at all times.  A fully mobile back is the sign of a truly healthy horse.

The trot is our first gait of impulsion and it is here that we must strive for a purity of movement at all times so that we keep the trot as a gait of impulsion.  

We have an incredible resource available to us that we should never underestimate.  We need to value this incomparable resource that every single equestrian can benefit from.  Especially if we put healthy movement first in all of our dealings with our horses.  The wild herd uncompromised, with an endless variety of terrain to challenge the equine body yet a body uncompromised by our mistakes.

The ability of the body to make minute adjustments to bring the body back into balance.

The complicated subject of bend is probably the most intense and most complex of any and all subjects of anything that has to do physically with the horse. A subject that you will need to study for the rest of your life.  The importance of this subject cannot be overstated.

The study of movements that include bend.  This subject is covered extensively in our Healthy Movement of the Centaur Program, but we begin an introduction here of lateral movement. Interesting to understand to watch and see how the horse moves without a rider on and how he incorporates lateral movement as he plays within his own body.

Studying the shoulder of the horse.  Deserving of study because it is different in the horse then it is humans.  There is no skeletal connection in the horse for the shoulder and the front legs.  They have no collar bone and we need to understand the ramifications this has on the movement of the horse.

Æquilibrium

Discovering where the horse finds balance.  Where equilibrium lives in his body without the rider.

æquus means Equal and libra means Balance

So Aequus Libra or æquilibrium means to be in Equal Balance

Balance could and perhaps should be the defining essence of the horse.