November 5th 2007

This week in Germany we continued to work on the development of Focus’ canter. Although the left lead canter is not yet perfect it has made significant improvements. Rome was not built in a day, and neither can you expect a horses gait to change overnight.

Christian made a key point of how to help the improvement of a horse’s gait. It is imperative that the rider does not hold their “middle” tight in efforts to sit quietly and elegantly. In effect, what this does is actually cause the horses movement to shorten and become choppy. You must allow your core to act almost like a pivot point so you can use your seat to scoop in the saddle. You must also consider the intensity to which you use the muscles of your seat. The horse can feel your muscles contracting and relaxing in your legs, seat, arms and even the back. If you constantly have these muscles hard and “driven” into the horses back their natural reaction is to bring tension into the top line. This is not the positive tension you search for in a horse. Allow your body to move with the horse.

If you have a horse that is strong in the top line or has trouble keeping a rhythm because they are difficult over the back you must do the opposite of what they naturally want to do. For example, in the beginning Focus takes longer to swing over the back in the trot. Naturally her instinct is to make the tempo higher. One may think that this is correct because she is going forward allowing the back to swing. This would only be correct should her strides be long and rhythmical. But really she is holding her back tight to make the legs go faster. In this instance I must slow her allowing the steps to become longer and more over the back. It is so important that with a difficulty such as this you do not sit into the horse to soon. This will only make the back tight again. You should not look to the clock and say “Oh, I have been trotting for ten minutes now, I should start to sit”. You must listen to what the horse tells you. Sometimes you may only be able to sit for five or ten minutes at the end of the ride. This should not worry you. More important the showing how well you sit is showing that you understand and work with your horse. A feeling rider is more impressive than one who sits pretty on a horse. When you ride at home, you must not be afraid to take your hands wide or move a little extreme in you torso. It is things like this that show you are working with the horse. And when people look at you and think “What is he/she doing”? , well it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you understand your horse and are doing your best to make things work.

When you work a horse, it is important that the horse gets breaks. A horse can only work straight for 15 to 20 minutes before the muscles can no longer get enough oxygen to work efficiently. Also do not work on the same thing every day for the entire ride. One day you may want to work the canter. This is acceptable, but the next days do not work the same thing again and again. Move onto something else like the development of the trot so then not only does the canter become stronger so does the trot, and the transitions between the gaits. It is very often that for horses who are finding difficulty in a particular transition, one of the gaits is struggling. Focus is very good in the trot to canter transition, but canter to trot in more difficult because the trot is not always strong enough to be obtained immediately after the canter. To help make this better, collect the canter and think of taking the trot when you want the transition. This makes your body ride the trot before it comes enabling the trot to be better from the first steps out of the transition.