Preparation for medium paces!
By Alison Short
Whether you are taking the plunge into Novice from Prelim or finding your distances between fences difficult to achieve, the ability to achieve a certain length of stride or ground cover in trot or canter can make all the difference, between winning and loosing.
If you are struggling to develop a few steps of medium trot you will be familiar with, no real difference, modest steps, fair attempt or even needs to take more weight behind. The trouble is that we often expect more explained on our sheet to enable us to go home with our “pearls of wisdom”, ready for an improved mark next time.
If you have never been fortunate to ride a horse with a really generous medium trot it can seem that it is difficult to tell if your horse actually lengthened.
“It is always a great idea to have the opportunity to have a lesson on a true school master as feel is one of the biggest keys to achievement.”
Equally riding a horse down to a fence with one true balanced rhythm in canter has to be the most confidence building experience, even for the faint hearted.
The first thing you have to asses is what type of training weakness your horse has. I will often be asked to help someone to develop better marks for the medium paces and will be given a description of their horse as quickening in trot when asked to lengthen or being flat and unresponsive.
When I have my assessment with each combination I will watch the transitions, are they balanced? Is the horse steady in the contact through transition both up and down? Does the horse have ground cover, purpose and stretch in the free walk?
If the answer to all these questions is no then this horse has no stability in connecting power to the contact, this means this horse has ability to lengthen but as yet is not developed well enough in his training to produce the steps.
We will call this the tortoise!
Does your horse have good paces with a big ground covering canter? Always achieves a large mark for free walk but maybe jogs when being collected? A very rhythmical swinging trot but doesn’t show a clear difference for medium?
This horse has the natural paces to achieve medium trot with ease but at present is being influenced by the rider to work on the forehand, and elongate his body to cope with his big paces and the balance of the rider on his back. Horses were not designed to carry people and I expect on a cold winters day this horse is seen producing the most amazing medium trot round his field with ease!
We will call this horse the giraffe!
It is important to decide which category your horse fits into as this will guide you to improving your horse’s physical development.
The tortoise is the horse as his title suggests, who keeps his neck in his shell coming back at the rider’s leg when being asked to move forward, this evasion can be as mild as a slight loss of contact in upward transitions, to literally being sluggish and dead to the leg or at worst resistant.
This in turn makes precision steering and suppleness especially at the base of the neck difficult. Because the tortoise never really accepts moving forward from the leg to the rein his muscles through his back and over his top line to the bit are poorly developed, this in turn is why he shows little desire to lengthen his frame and steps in free walk, as the need to stretch these muscles to release of them is absent.
The goals for this horse are to achieve an effortless forward respect for the leg, this means you have to be sure not to ride with a nagging lower leg. Try to develop a result by the use only of your ankles rather than the whole of your leg or seat to drive him, back up each request with a gentle tap behind your leg with your schooling whip. Some horses can provoke a response from the rider so that they lighten their seat in anticipation of some resistance from the horse, it is important at this time to keep your bottom gently grounded and jelly like, and this in turn will give a feel of quiet command to your request. Practise lots of transitions to start on straight lines and then move onto half 20meter circles.
Once your horse starts to develop a more forward thinking way of going you can now add the second element, the contact. This should always remain elastic so as to create a desire to move forward into the rein, if the rein is too restrictive remember your tortoise, he needs no excuse to retreat again!
Work on being able to move him forward walk to trot with ease off the leg and the same connection to the rein, once this is developed your horse should begin to mouth the bit more, licking and chewing and starting to salivate, with some horses this can take several weeks to achieve as your horse needs to find a new desire to want to travel towards the bit.
“Ninety percent of horses in my experience who have had problems with the contact are, in fact lacking connection of pushing power to connect correctly to the hand”
The giraffe has all the ability to show loose paces, but now the rider needs to understand how to make use of the big engines. At present those engines are behind the rider and we need to work on bringing them under the rider. The giraffe is again as his name suggests, he feels like his body is elongated, his neck protruding from his shoulders.
The image I want you to have in your head is of standing on the ground with your video camera, it has an oblong screen which you look through, and you are following you and your horse around the arena trying to keep them exactly in the picture, nose just in front of the vertical and tail against the rear frame. The difficulty will be that your horses head will tend to slip out of the frame as he elongates his neck and lowers his forehand.
“Think like a Lego man!”
This combination need to work on not allowing the horse to move the rider off of their peg during upward transitions, maintaining a little more resistance to the contact during transitions but still expecting the horse to travel efficiently off of the leg aid.
By achieving this you are encouraging the horse to push up from behind on the first step and not draw itself forward from the front legs, thus achieving greater balance and the rider being able to influence the horse’s hind legs. Try to remember that your balance is key at the point of these transitions and each one must be analysed by you to see who was at fault. Did you ask, the response was not instant so you moved your seat forward and in turn released the contact, dropping the horse on the forehand? Or did your horse move obediently off of your leg but your rein was not elastic enough resulting in hollowing?
You also now need to practice this on half 20 meter circle’s asking for suppleness and looking to achieve the same smoothness to the up and down transitions, along with the same balanced contact.
This stage of training will vary from one combination to another, but once the giraffe and the tortoise are at a fairly level stage of suppleness and balance you should be able to work on developing the medium trot.
Next month in Pegasus, “Establishing the Medium Paces”.
Alison Short is a Listed British Dressage Judge and a Freelance Trainer. Please call to discuss you or your clubs future training on 0771990027 alisonshort@btopenworld.com
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Struggling to get to grips with something? Keep getting the same old mark?
You can also send a DVD of you and your horse working and Alison will write
you a training programme catered to your individual needs.
Training clinics at Plumpton College Sat 6th Dec 2008
and January 24th 2009. All standards welcome.
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