Sit back and enjoy this great chat between Equitopia podcaster Kaylie Hanson, and Internationally Recognized Clinician Celeste Lazaris.

Celeste is a biomechanical lameness specialist and an expert in equine movement and muscle development. But more than anything, she is a student of the horse.

Over the last ten years she has carefully reverse-engineered her bodywork and performance training knowledge to dissect the core reasons of why horses struggle so much in the same places, and has developed a unique lens and ability to body map the condition of the horse to find its’ strengths and weaknesses from a balance point of view.

Here’s a short snippet of the conversation. Kaylie brings up the question of what makes a good rider. Celeste talks about the difference between being a good rider versus a good manipulator/micromanager – and compares how horses are developed in English versus Western:

“And, you know,  I have really good feel, and I’ve got very good aids, and I’ve always been a phenomenally good manipulative writer. And so I would get a lot of gigs. And I could, you know, do a lot of catch rides and stuff, because people could give me their horse. And I could go out and do quite well with them. But I’ve kind of swapped from just training performance horses to developing performance horses – and the big difference is, when you never let your horses fail.

When you’re always out there, manipulating them in every moment, and micromanaging every moment, you’re not ever actually truly developing a horse, you’re just making it so they’re easier to manipulate.

But you’re not giving them an opportunity to develop their body to do the job on their own, which is the difference between English and Western.

So in Western, you don’t go out there and manipulate them like that. There’s a whole process and how to develop a horse that way. But the idea is, is that you’re developing them to do these movements and have a body that can function off  the very, very, very lightest breath, because you can’t, you know,  manipulate a horse while you’re chasing a cow. It’s not that you don’t have time to do this, you know.”

Listen to the full interview, by clicking the image above – or on the Equitopia podcast on Spotify.