Hyperfelxion Question

Question

In the event of schooling hyperflexion, how does it effect a horses breating?Why(if)does it effect the horses breathing and how severly does if effect a horses breathing?

P.S. Please dont assue I school hyperflexion(rollkur)because i dont and im not for it either but i just dont go around yelling at ppl who do but i am just curious to know.

Answer 1

I actually bookmarked this site awhile back because it was so informative.  It can (obviously) explain it all much better than I can.  (Both are pages from the same site but I thought they would be most informative.  There are words toward the top you can click on for more info on rollkur.)

http://www.sustainabledressage.com/rollk...

http://www.sustainabledressage.com/rollk...

Answer 2

It affects the horse's breathing because of the degree of flexion at the poll.  It can actually hinder the flow of air through the windpipe. This is one reason why some horses don't like to flex a the poll to begin with. The degree of the affect depends on the individual horse's anatomy. Its probably close to the same affect you would get if you put your chin on your chest.  

Answer 3

It will squash the horses throat - basically tuck your chin on your chest and try to run, or even just breath heavily - it's really hard.

Riding in rolkur is just really bad for the horse - take a look at the tail of a horse being schooled using rolkur - their tail is swishing and going round like mad - this is a sign of resistance and that the hors eis uncomfortable. For some reason now this doesn't affect the scores in dressage which it should. A relaxed and hapy horse working correctly on the bit should have the poll as the highest point and the nose should be on, or very slightly infront of the vertical as apposed to behind the vertical - being overbent is a way of evading the contact. The tail should be relaxed and it will sway slightly moving with the horse. If you watch a horse who is overbent, and even more so in a horse trained using rolkur the highest point tends to be the 3 or 4th vertebra - this shows that the horse is not truely collected. Watch some video of the spanish riding school horses and compare that to video of anky and such who school using rolkur! The spanish riding school horses are relaxed and happy in their work and work with the rider where as the horses trained using rolkur show a lot of resistance to the rider.

(not tryin to blast you at all - I just hate rolkur, it is so bad for the horse and people just don't realise because the dressage judges aren't penalising for the resistance as they ought to be. If you are interested in dressage, or just for good training for english horses the best book you can buy is 'the complete training of horse and rider' by alois Podhajsky, he used to be the principle of the spanish riding school.)

Answer 4

If you search former questions on this for rollkur, someone listed a website that not only gave the mechanics with breathing, but also with the physical aspects.

It was very indepth and very very to the point and well thought out.