This possibly accounts for some of her issues with stretching to the bit, so I had a masseuse/chiropractor work on her. He cracked, and he hacked, and he smacked, and he whacked, and the end result is that he determined that Nic wants to keep her left shoulder immobilized, rather than swing it forward and out, and she doesn't want to bend her left side properly to make contact with the bit.
I have no idea if this adjusting is going to do anything for the horse. I probably won't be able to determine anything for a few weeks because either:
1. The adjusting did nothing for her
2. The adjusting did something, and now that she is being asked to use the shoulder and her neck correctly, the lack of muscling there (because she wasn't using them before) makes bending correctly hard for her, and she is cranky and unwilling to bend without a fight.
Needless to say, she is resisting, with every trick she can conjure, bending properly to the left and accepting contact on the left side. This has made for some wonderful "Mare Moments" but also is a hemorrhoidal-quality pain in the ass, because we were making progress, and while we haven't completely backtracked, we aren't far from our starting point a month ago.
It just occured to me that the spasms possibly occurred in the first place because I'm asking her to seek the bit more effectively now (i.e., use her to use her topline muscles) than I have in the past. So, as she used her neck muscles more, she built more muscle over her topline and possibly strained or overworked the muscles...
