The Origin of Avec Justesse™

Simply put: Avec Justesse™ is Karine’s horsemanship that she honed over her four decades of experience with horses. She teaches riders how to recognize, understand, and participate in the nonverbal conversation between horse and rider. Putting a label on her talent is a longer story. 

Karine's teaching style has always been recognized as "different", but explaining exactly how had always been a challenge, usually ending in a patchwork of examples and analogies that never quite captured it. She could watch a horse and rider struggle with something, make what seemed like a small adjustment, and suddenly something would change. Ask her what she saw, and she could explain it. Ask what made her see it in the first place, and the answer became much harder to put into words. 

That difference becomes especially apparent in the riders who come to Karine after their own progress has begun to stall. They are often far from beginners. Many have years of quality instruction behind them and have developed considerable technical skill. They know the aids, understand the mechanics, and can draw upon an impressive repertoire of techniques. Yet, despite all they know and can do, some have reached a plateau. 

This is when Karine’s talent begins to shine. Where a rider may be concentrating on the maneuver that isn’t working, Karine’s attention is drawn to the smaller things happening around it—the things that seem incidental, sometimes even unrelated. A slight imbalance catches her attention. Something between horse and rider doesn’t quite line up. She suggests an adjustment, and suddenly the horse responds as if to say, “Of course. All you had to do was ask.” 

One of her clients offered a wonderfully simple example. She was struggling with a maneuver and demonstrated it to Karine. Karine watched for a moment and quickly suggested a seemingly unrelated adjustment, and it worked. Later, the client slipped back the adjustment. It worked again. 

Examples like this made the difference easy to see, but no easier to define. Her peers wanted to understand what was actually happening beneath those moments. What was Karine seeing that others weren’t? 

Asked about her roots, Karine will tell you about memories of growing up in France with horses and the French trainers who formed the foundation of her horsemanship. She remembers the championships she won, the lessons that got her there, and those she still uses to this day. 

Perhaps inevitably, as we were researching the evolution of horsemanship, we stumbled across something curious—not a philosophy or a system, but familiar language appearing in places separated by generations. An old dictionary. The Fédération Française d’Équitation. The Cadre noir. The IFCE. Each was speaking about horsemanship in its own context, yet certain ideas kept surfacing: 

• A rider adapting to the behavior of the horse. 

• Information being transmitted by the horse and perceived by the rider. 

• The rider making herself understood in return. 

• Knowing when to resist and when to yield. 

• Following the horse’s movement with precision and appropriateness. 

And threaded through those passages was a remarkably ordinary French word being used to describe handling a horse with precision, adapting to the horse’s behavior, communicating through the rider’s posture, accurately perceiving the information transmitted by the horse, making oneself understood in return, and following the horse’s movement with appropriate feel and timing. 

For example, Émile Littré states that the word justesse relates to a horseman's skill: "Il manie un cheval avec une justesse parfaite" [He handles a horse with perfect precision] (1873, "Justesse" section, sense 7). Littré defines this specific sense of the word as a "Manière de faire une chose avec exactitude, précision" [Way of doing something with accuracy and precision]. This precise control remains essential in official French training curriculum today, which dictates that "Le cavalier s’adapte au comportement de son cheval et utilise avec justesse sa posture pour communiquer et interagir avec lui" [The rider adapts to the behavior of his horse and uses his posture with precision to communicate and interact with him] ("Equitation Générale : Plan de Formation," n.d.). And even where the word itself did not appear, the idea did: “La bonne main résiste et cède à propos.” [The good hand resists and yields at the right moment.] (Lancosme-Brèves, Théorie de la centaurisation (1863), p. 98, quoted by the IFCE in its professional resource Les mains du cavalier).

justesse. This word was “it”.

It wasn’t the name of a curriculum or a doctrine. It wasn’t even a word belonging particularly to horsemanship. Justesse is an ordinary French word, used in everyday language, but one that becomes frustratingly difficult to carry intact into English. There is no single English equivalent. Accuracy comes close in one context, precision in another. Correctness sometimes works. So do appropriateness, discernment, proportion, timing, or sound judgment. Each catches something of it, but none quite carries the whole.

And yet French equestrians seemed perfectly comfortable using it for that certain something between horse and rider—the quality of perceiving correctly, responding appropriately, and getting the measure and the moment right. They weren’t naming a method. They were describing the quality of the horsemanship.

Karine wasn’t being taught justesse. She was simply being taught horsemanship.

She carried those lessons with her, retaining the golden nuggets that proved their worth and adapting them as decades of experience gave them new meaning. Her autism augmented that process, allowing her to perceive subtle cues and patterns that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. What she learned from her French trainers became inseparable from what experience—and the horses themselves—continued to teach her.

That ability to perceive the nonverbal exchange became central to her teaching. Karine can visualize where the conversation between horse and rider has broken down, but more importantly, she can teach the rider to see it too—to understand why the breakdown matters and how seemingly small changes can restore what had been lost between them, improving the partnership.

All this time, Karine has simply been sharing the justesse-engrained horsemanship colloquially woven into the subconscious of the French equestrian community that formed her.

She has been teaching horsemanship with justesse—horsemanship avec justesse.

Avec justesse.