Proprioception and Horses

In the article Good House Keeping: Finding the Right Balance in the Management of Dressage Horses, Eurodressage asked International Dressage Judge, FEI dressage committee member and Danish Team vet Hans Christian Matthiesen what his opinion is on a succesful balance when managing high performance dressage horses. I found his sentence about the horse's proprioception very intriguing and it just comes to show how important it it for the horses to move around on different and varying surfaces.

"The decisive factor to turn dressage horses out is to prepare them and make a plan. It is important to stimulate the horse’s proprioception; each horse's relative position of the foot and leg of the body and strength of effort being employed on different surfaces. One can train this by riding the horses on many different surfaces.”

And guess who would like to go to the Netherlands for a week and train with some schoolmasters at Judy de Winter's place.