I.  GENERAL COMMENTS
A. The horse must be balanced, not falling in or out with either its shoulders or hindquarters
B. The horse’s nose must be pointed in the direction of the movement. If it isn’t then the nose will be away from the movement causing the hip to go out and therefore, the horse will not be balanced
C. Get the horse balanced first, then add speed
D. When loping circles the parts (of the horse) must be mobile and the parts must be lined up
E. Most people get used to a horse not being balanced
F. You must get the horse to be ambidextrous, because most horses are left-handed

II. ESSENTIALS OF STRAIGHTNESS
A. The best way to describe straightness in a horse is to visualize the following:

1. Imagine looking directly down from above the horse so that you can see the whole horse from head to tail
2. Now draw two lines that touch both the horse’s left and right hips and point straight forward past its muzzle
3. Since the horse’s shoulders are narrower than its hips by about five inches, then from the horse’s shoulders to the lines that you drew on each side of the horse there should be a 5” gap
4. Also the horse’s head must be lined up with its sternum and its tail must be hanging straight down
5. That image constitutes a straight horse
6. But it takes very little to get a horse to be either right or left sided

B. The real question is why are so many horses not straight? There are lots of theories on this subject, but I will mention the most obvious one – it is because of the human. Because we work mostly on the left side of the horse: haltering, leading, saddling, mounting and dismounting and very little on the right side of the horse

C. How does one make a horse straight (and this includes being straight on bent lines) that is crooked.

1. We must develop lateral mobility in the horse; this means that we must loosen the parts of the horse first and then we must be able to move those parts into alignment for whatever maneuver we want the horse to do
2. The horse must learn to have its weight distributed equally on all four legs
3. The horse’s shoulders must be in front of its hindquarters and not the other way round so that the back end follows the front end and keeps the shoulders up.
4. You must get the shoulders up so they are not leaning and laterally supple them to move them in line with the hindquarters. Suppleness is not ragginess
   Loosening of the horse’s shoulders plus stability of the hindquarters are the keys to straightness
5. If you fix the back end of the horse then the front end will get fixed
6. The hind feet must track in the place of the front feet for the horse to be straight – either on straight lines or curved lines with the exception being that once a circle gets smaller than 20 feet in diameter then the inside hind leg will step a little to the inside and in the direction between the front feet
7. Horses getting straight begets a happy horse; horses are not happy if they are not balanced
8. You must give the horse the correct information to get them better
9. The rider must know what exercises (gymnastic movements) to do to correct imbalances in the horse
10. There is no crookedness without heaviness
11. The rider must:
    1. get the horse supple through gymnastics using appropriate exercises, such as shoulder-in, travers, renvers, front end around the back end, back end around the front end, leg-yielding, half-pass, back-up, etc.
    2. bend the parts of the horse by riding circles of varying diameters, riding through corners, serpentines. etc.
    3. capture the horse mentally

D. Other factors that are equally importance

1. Human balance and unbalance is the cause of horses being unbalanced
2. The rider must sit balanced on each side of the horse with equal weight on each seat bone (unless the rider is using his weight as an aid) and the hands must not be hanging to the right or the left
3. The horse’s neck and head must be in the center of the horse, i.e. lined up with its sternum
4. Horses will always try to get back under the rider’s weight
5. The horse will always match the efforts of the rider
6. If you don’t ask much of the horse, he won’t give you much in return
7. If you take what the horse offers instead of the horse doing what you requested him to do, then you give away all your preparation
8. The rider must always look up (not down) and in the direction where he or she wants to go