Most horses aren't crooked, they're contracted!

And the reason your horse isn't getting better is because very few equine professionals (yet) understand where the majority of asymmetry is coming from (SPOILER: it's learned via habituation), so they don't know what to do about it (SOLUTION: it must be changed in the horse's brain, where it was learned - which only the horse can do, from within).

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” — Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860)

The truth is that manual therapy, veterinary interventions, alternative treatments, PT, postural rehabilitation exercises and 99% of training methods simply do not affect the part of the central nervous system that is maintaining habitual (aka learned) myofascial tension... so most ‘treatments’ only produce temporary results that must be repeated and/or strengthened with supportive exercises, and still the tension just keeps coming back, often for years.

Crookedness is so persistent, so common across the global horse industry that it has been accepted as normal (ie. normalized) and chalked up to 'natural asymmetry' or laterality (both of which are very real things, but they are static - meaning they don't change at all for the horse's whole life, they do not go away, but they also do not get better, worse, suddenly appear or self-resolve).

Why are so many Horses Crooked?

The most common cause of crookedness is neither natural asymmetry nor laterality, but is an acquired collection of chronic muscle contractions that pull the horse's body out of it's natural alignment. This abnormal adaptive postural presentation is what we in the field of Hanna Somatic Education® know as the Trauma/Asymmetry Posture.

Trauma/Asymmetry Posture in Horses

It's caused by habitually contracting muscles that result from either the withdrawal and crossed-extensor reflexes, (these happen when we cringe or bend our body to protect a painful area, and/or automatically avoid using/weighting an injured limb), or from simple repetitive movement (training, transport, environmental, antalgic/pain-avoidance, etc.).

The unfortunate truth is that most domestic horses are experiencing some or all of these in their daily lives - whether it's contorting their body to avoid pain or pressure from spurs, bits and pinching saddles, shifting their weight off of sore feet, bracing against applied pressure before they 'give' to it, or balancing against the sway of a moving vehicle...

Horses who have learned to unconsciously maintain the Trauma/Asymmetry Posture as their default resting posture exhibit a unilateral imbalance in resting muscle tone and spinal symmetry. They typically present a characteristic C-curve or S-curve in part or all of their spine, can't comfortably stand 'square' and frequenlty have a whole host of related, mysterious or undiagnosed soundness and behavioral issues.

Because posture is a dynamic natural nervous system process, and habitual posture is learned and maintained by the brain stem and involuntary postural reflexes, it cannot be 'treated' or fixed from the outside, but it can be un-learned from within...

Correcting Asymmetry or Crookedness in Horses

When horses actively participate in slow, deliberate movements, they use the only part of their brain that can change their internally mediated levels of resting muscle tone (the voluntary motor cortex). This happens naturally when horses pandiculate (a spontaneous polysynaptic reflex often described as a 'stretch' that helps the horse reset any accumulated chronic muscle contractions back to normal neutral levels). Normal (neutral) resting muscle tone means that instead of pulling too much on their attachments all the time, the muscles allow the skeleton and fascia to return to their original baseline levels of tension and elasticity - restoring the body's balanced alignment and ability to automatically self-organize and respond efficiently to gravity and appropriately to the environment - aka biotensegrity.

This is what we do in Equine Hanna Somatics®. Using individually tailored protocols of Voluntary Pandiculation, we can systematically help the horse reset their elevated tension levels (that are generated by the muscles and transferred around the body by the fascia), back to neutral.

Voluntary Pandiculation

Voluntary Pandiculation is the innovative technique developed by Thomas Hanna for his ground-breaking somatic work with humans. The technique was named by Eleanor Criswell, and in 1995 she adapted it for working somatically with horses when she created Equine Hanna Somatics (EHS) and Canine Hanna Somatics® (CHS).

Voluntary Pandiculation is an intrinsic activity that horses and other animals do at the invitation and guidance of human somatic educators, and/or that humans can learn to practice on their own, in addition to learn and practice with educated hands-on guidance. It is one of the three techniques used and taught in Hanna Somatic Education®, and is the key to helping clients (of any species) get free from their layers of learned chronic muscle tension.

Learned chronic tension is part of a condition (also named by Hanna and Criswell) called Motor Sensory Amnesia (MSA), that can persist quietly and unconsciously for many years, gradually distorting a horse's healthy posture and movement until it finally becomes restrictive enough to start causing pain or other symptoms.

Reversing Motor Sensory Amnesia

Motor Sensory Amnesia is reversible, and this is how we are helping horses rapidly change from crooked to straight, seemingly overnight!

Straightness doesn't have to be taught or trained, it's the normal state of a healthy horse, frequently hidden under one or more layers of learned muscle contractions, and it only needs to be revealed.

THEN, after a horse is freed from their chronic unconscious muscle tension, we can effectively and efficiently use training to balance out their true natural asymmetry and handedness (aka laterality) to build strength and enhance performance.

Take a look at the case examples below!

Case #1: Roxy, typical "crooked" riding horse is able to reverse 90% of her lifetime's accumulated asymmetry over 10 sessions with a first-year Level 1 Equine Hanna Somatics® Educator!

Top photo (2013), your typical "crooked" riding horse, with a long list of issues, both health and behavioral.

The middle photo is after 3 YEARS of wonderful, biomechnically correct training provided by a skilled and loving guardian (read her story in the original post). What she didn't know was that all that lovely and well-intentioned training was helping to the degree it could by building compensatory strength and muscle contractions in opposition to the existing compensation patterns that had become habituated (aka learned) - but it wasn't changing the underlying self-organization.

In the bottom photo, we finally see this horse's true natural alignment and degree of mild laterality (or congenital asymmetry) after she participated in a few Equine Hanna Somatics® sessions. Finally, she has been freed from her previously learned compensatory muscle contractions that were once useful, but had become maladaptive (ie. they persisted long after the original injury or trauma).

Now, she has full access to all of her muscles because their resting tonus has been reset back to (or toward) a healthy neutral, and that is what her brain stem and postural reflexes are now maintaining as her baseline, default postural pattern.

She is 'straight' because she no longer has layers of learned muscular contractions pulling her out of her natural alignment. THIS is why the subtitle of my ebook introducing EHS to horse-owners is 'the secret to straightness.'

"For the first time, Roxy could hold herself straight and relaxed. Under saddle, she now switches bend effortlessly at the walk without any manipulation from me, just a quiet change in my seat.

We’re not quite there yet in the trot—she still needs a gentle nudge—but I’m hopeful we’ll get there soon. Roxy is 21 and has traveled crooked for a long time creating a lot of issues in her body. It's never too late to start changing."

Floriane Weyrich Level 1 EHSE (and Roxy's owner)

Case #2: Dusty Rose, 27 year old Quarterhorse diagnosed with arthritis self-resolves her compensatory asymmetry (developed over 2-3 years of retirement) after 1 EHS Session!

"Vet diagnosis was arthritis in C7 where nerve innervations for hind end control were pinched off by the arthritis. Dusty was to be retired the year this happened because we noticed stiffness and more difficulty collecting around the barrels (all cues that would have indicated her needing EHS had I know about!). I will say the posture in the before photo progressed after retirement due to her being so camped out right hind, that left front stood forward an away from midline. I never saw her standing square over the last 2-3 years since injury, and now I see her loading right hind all the time, even attempting to rest on it.

Before EHS, her movement was slowing down with increased instability on right hind. She has since tried to out walk me! Stability is better, and I foresee even more improvements with more sessions."

Kristen Nitka Level 1 EHSE (and Dusty's owner)

RESOURCES

Criswell, E. & Mayer, A. (2006-2025) Equine Hanna Somatics® Professional Training Program Manual

Hanna, T. (1988) Somatics - Reawakening the Mind’s Control of Movement, Flexibility and Health. Da Capo Press

Haussler, K. K., le Jeune, S. S., MacKechnie-Guire, R., Latif, S. N., & Clayton, H. M. (2025). The Challenge of Defining Laterality in Horses: Is It Laterality or Just Asymmetry? Animals, 15(3), 288. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani15030288

Krueger K, Schwarz S, Marr I, Farmer K. Laterality in Horse Training: Psychological and Physical Balance and Coordination and Strength Rather than Straightness. Animals. 2022; 12: 1042. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani12081042