July 2007 • VOLUME 23 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine

Ross Harper-Lewis

Her path led her to Portugal where, as she states: "I was privileged to be accepted as a civilian student on the Officer Instructor course of The Portuguese Cavalry School in Mafra and through this experience to meet Mestre Nuno Oliveira who invited me to study with him. I studied with Mestre Nuno for five years and learned a great deal about finesse and new concepts of collection and lightness. It was here also that I gained a sense of freedom in training."
From Ride From the Heart by Jenny Rolfe

Ross is a rider, trainer and breeder, but more than any of these, she is a kind and welcoming person who graciously shares of herself and her passion for the horses.

Welcome to this first of three parts on a far-ranging interview. One where we sit down and talk about ideas, experiences and even about past articles in Horses For LIFE.

Interview with Ross Harper-Lewis

[Nadja]: …..and what we’re doing to the horses when we’re using bits. I had no idea. I had no idea the true relationship between the size of the lower jaw and the bit we put in the horse’s mouth.

[Editors Note: See Article X-ray Bits The Story They Tell in the March 2007 Edition of Horses For LIFE]

[Ross]: Yes.

[N]: And it’s scary, actually. It truly is. And it is just astounding to me. To realize, in some cases, the port of our bit is the width. The width of the port of the bit is the width of the lower jaw and what does that mean?

[Ross]: That means the front of the port actually touching on the jaw bone.

[N]: Well, and what can happen is that if it’s a little bit wide it can be slightly outside of the jaw? And what happens when [it’s] not perfectly centered in the mouth? And do you know how many times we have the bit perfectly centered in the horse’s mouth? I’d like to say I have that all the time when I ride, but I think I’d be lying.

[Ross]: Well, yes. I mean one tries to have it near as possible anyway. I have seen people do extraordinary thing with bits in horses’ mouths. [They] might not have the bridle adjusted properly and try to turn the corner and pull on the rein so hard that the bit actually comes through the horse’s mouth and the whole of the bit sticking out the side of the jaw. Horrifying.

[Ross]: I’ve been looking at this thing about the bit and find that absolutely fascinating.

[Ross]: One of the things that I remember from one of the Oliveira books is where it says it makes him furious when people say they want to have their horse “cracking” up against the bit all the time. And look at how many people actually do. You know, they don’t understand contact unless they’ve got weights in their hands. And so in a way, he always says the horses come to the bit, not be on the bit. And that made a lot of sense. To me, that opened up a good context on what we really should be aiming at. The horse comes to the bit and when he gets there and he makes the contact with you, that’s the moment which you can set up a conversation with the horse. It shouldn’t be pressure.

[N]: I don’t think a lot of people understand that it has to come from the horse, that it’s not trying to push the horse on to the bit which I think a lot of people think what that statement means. People have twisted the meaning of even that. Do you know what I’m saying?

[Ross]: Yes, there are people that push the horse forward in the hope that they will come onto the bit. Well, a lot of that will depend on what kind of contact they’ve got through their arms and shoulders and things because unless people are sitting and carrying their shoulders and arms correctly, the poor horse has to carry all the weight of the arms on its mouth.

[N]: So if you were to describe to somebody what would be incorrect, how would you phrase that?

[Ross]: I’d try and show them. I don’t think you can entirely without showing. If you can do it in hand which I saw Oliveira do, you would have the bit in the horse’s mouth. And he didn’t move backward, but he moved it up into the corner. And the horse at that point moved his jaw and gave. And that’s really what you’re aiming at: the horse actually moves his mouth and finds its comfort zone. And you can’t do that if you’ve got constant pressure. That’s not possible. In the same way that you can’t have sensitive legs that completely set around the horse’s body tight all the time.

[N]: It’s funny that you should say that because [that’s] one of the things that I do and it brings the biggest change of the horse and everybody is so astounded because it’s such a simple thing and I just tell them to let go of their knees.

[Ross]: Well, that’s the thing. Well, actually, that went out quite a long time ago. But it’s amazing how many people still use it. Actually, if you grip with your knees, you actually push yourself out of the saddle.

[Ross]: You shouldn’t be gripping anyway. You should be balancing yourself and moving. It would be like saying you have to clutch your partner dancing, wouldn’t it?

[N]: I don’t think they’re cognitively aware that they are doing it. Because I think what happens is they end up putting their knees on their saddle and they put it on one spot and they just leave it there. Like, it has to be on that same spot on the saddle at all times. And they don’t realize that in itself it creates a restriction because they are never moving at that point.

[Ross]: The problem is, if you grip with your knees, you are, actually, virtually taking away 80% of your riding capacity anyway.

[N]: I just could never believe that just doing that one thing and the change you can see in the horses. All of a sudden they breathe, they raise, the horses could move their shoulders. You know, like all of a sudden they can do all these things. And it doesn’t have to be a lot of pressure, it just has to be non-movement.

[Ross]: I think basically a lot of what we used to do is [what] I always say to people that when you want to give an aid to a horse, make your legs lengthen around the horse rather than kick it. which is what also happens when people grip with their knees. When they’ve got their knees pinned on the saddle, really, what they are left to doing is to give it a kick from time to time because you can’t use your legs sensitively once the knee is locked. You’ve got to have that capacity to be able to lengthen downwards into the movement. And yet there is a lot of give and take. As a matter of fact, that to me is a terribly important part of the use of the leg. And I don’t think people are usually taught to use, I mean, I hear people in the lesson in which people are told to “Use more legs. Use more legs”. And you think, okay, fine, but how? How? For somebody who hasn’t got a clue of what you’re talking about, they usually end up just giving the horses a kick in the gut, which it’s rather primitive to say the least. But people don’t explain it. Nobody ever explains to you how you use your legs.

[N]: I completely agree. I completely agree. I think it’s almost in itself a completely lost art for a lot of people how to use their legs correctly.

[Ross]: You know. It has to come from a completely relaxed leg. And I remember saying this to one of my students, I said, “Look, you cannot ride until you can relax your legs.” And she says, “Oh well, but if I relax my legs, how can I use it?” And I said, “Well, you’ve got it stuck there rigid. How can you use it?” “Oh.” “If it’s relaxed, you can actually make a vibration through your legs or you can make small muscular contractions and it can be minute and the horse will feel it. But if your leg is rigid, the horse is just going to turn off and say, ‘This has nothing to do with me. It’s just uncomfortable. That’s it.’”

[N]: Well, I don’t think people realize that when you have relaxed your legs, how many different parts of your legs that you can use.

[Ross]: Well, how many parts of your legs can actually communicate with a horse? What also goes wrong is that when you talk about “use your legs”, most people think about use your heels. And they don’t think that actually the action of the leg has to start at the top and work down.

[N]: And you have many different parts of your leg and they can mean different things to the horse and it creates a whole new symphony of aids that you can speak with to the horse. Definitively. I completely agree.

[Ross]: I mean, really, it’s like another thing that Oliveira wrote in his book was that, actually, very frequently while we talk about riders who have good hands, it’s very rarely that you talk about riders who have good legs. And unless you’ve got good legs, you can’t actually have good hands.

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