Train
for Western Riding
Lesson 5
Nancy
Cahill
Copyright
Ó 2009
Advanced Exercises
In this lesson I will give you some
more advanced exercises that will get your horse really ready for the lead
change. These exercises will actually get both you and your horse ready, and
build on all of the basics you have been working to master.
In these exercises, speed is not desirable.
Your goal is a smooth, quiet, steady and correct response.
Turning
and the Half-Pass
Of course in addition to the basics
you’ve been teaching your horse, you’ve had to be sure you’ve proven to your partner
that she can trust you. The trust your horse places in you is what helps her to
overcome fear.
You should now be ready to move up to
a more difficult level of movements and commands. While it is not too hard to
build trust, it is very difficult to rebuild it if you lose it.
You will be asking your horse to do a
lot of movements that are new and foreign, so there are many chances you could
scare her. Be sure when changing leads or even doing the exercises leading up
to changing, if your horse gets nervous you respond with absolutely no abuse
and hardly any punishment. You have to
be patient, take tiny progress steps and bring the horse’s mind to a calm
place.
You can’t scare a horse and expect to
get championship results. I have worked with horses that have been scared while
learning lead changes, and it can take months to gain back the trust you must
have for successful changes. Better to avoid losing that trust in the first
place.
The
Half-Pass
Before ever asking for a lead change,
you must teach your horse to move forward and diagonally at the same time. This is known as a half-pass, and can be done
at all three gaits.
We will be teaching the horse to move
diagonally across the entire arena. While lead changes do not call for the
horse to move across an entire arena to change, but only a few inches, you have
to get her to go the mile before you get the inch. The inch will be easy for her after
performing the half-pass across the entire arena. I have also found that it is
easier to train the half-pass to a young horse that has no bad habits than it
is to train it to an older horse with many bad habits. Most young horses haven’t made many mistakes,
so there is very little to overcome. It
is more just a matter of showing them what you want. With older horses—some of
which may have been mistreated—you have to overcome their way of doing things
and the possible fear they have in their minds.
(View the
I start with the walk. The
half-pass—traversing the pen—combines two basic movements into one; moving
forward and the side pass. It is almost always a help if you use a visual guide
such as the arena corner to move toward. If you are not riding in an arena,
position something, such as a large bucket, as a guide to represent the far
corner and move toward that.
To start, stand in the right hand
corner of your arena. Traverse your arena diagonally toward the far left hand
corner, keeping your horse’s body as perpendicular to the fence ahead of you as
you can. This means you have to keep your horse’s body straight while moving
her both forward and to the side simultaneously. This will require both your hands (reins) and
your legs working together. To stay
straight, keep the horse between the reins and your legs; your legs are the
barriers.
You’ll use opposing leg and rein
pressure in constant adjustments to keep the horse straight. For example, as you are moving to the left,
you will use more left rein and right leg to keep the horse very straight and
always perpendicular to the end fence.
I said to keep your horses’ body
straight to the fence as you move – but this is an oversimplification. Ideally
you should be moving diagonally while keeping the horse’s head and hip tipped
just a bit toward the direction of travel. In this case,
that would be tipped to the left. Think of it as you letting the horse see
where she is going.
Keeping her tipped just slightly draws
her toward the direction of travel.
The half-pass is a great exercise for
lead changes as it teaches her how to position her body when you cue her to get
this diagonal movement. This position is a “must” in order for her to make a
good lead change.
Because she is moving to the left and
forward, you are constantly moving the weight off her right side. That will
free up her right side to take the right lead. This will make the lead changes
more effortless for her.
However, for the first couple of tries
at half-passing, you may not be able to traverse the whole pen. Just keep trying. When practicing this exercise you must keep
the horse perpendicular to the fence or whatever visual guide you are using.
If you can’t tell if you are straight,
get someone to watch you, or take a video of your practice session. Sometimes
when you are learning this movement, it is hard to tell exactly where the
horse’s body parts are. You may think the hip is in one place and it may
actually be two feet over.
Take your time. As you move across the
arena, being correct is more important than speed. Adjust your horse’s shoulders and hips, as
needed to keep her as straight as possible with the slight bend in the
direction of travel. Make small adjustments – in this exercise, if you miss
your target by 10 degrees when you are starting the half-pass, by the time you
reach your destination you may be off by 45 degrees.
During your first few attempts, the
horse will usually go too fast with her shoulders or not fast enough with her
hip. If you are moving to the left, and
you want to slow down the movement of the shoulders, put a little more pressure
on the left rein to actually “block” the left shoulder movement. Don’t shut it
down completely; just slow it down so the hip can catch up.
If you open that rein, it is an
invitation to the horse to get crooked. By holding the left rein slightly
tighter than the right and closer to her neck, it keeps the horse straight,
which in turn makes her cross over with her feet, exactly what we want her to
do.
Continue to move her hip left with
your right leg until it catches up to her shoulders. Through all of this,
remember to maintain the slight tipping of her head and hip to the left (the
direction of travel).
Even after the horse has learned to
traverse the pen, you still must concentrate on keeping her perpendicular to
the end of the pen. I have always found
that when going one direction the horse will want to move too fast with her
shoulder. You have to apply a lot of
rein to slow the shoulder down while using a lot of leg to keep the hip moving
over.
In the opposite direction, however,
she’ll usually move too fast with her hip and too slow with her shoulder. You
will have to compensate in just the opposite ways. I’ve found this to be true
with every horse I’ve trained. Perhaps it is because horses tend to be “better”
on one side than the other.
Hey, don’t get in a hurry…it takes as
long as it takes. You may work at traversing at the walk for 3 months; it
doesn’t matter how fast she learns the exercise, it matters how well she
learns the exercise. Keep practicing, and when you can traverse the pen at the
walk both ways with ease…you are ready to try it at the trot.
When you can traverse the pen in a
perfect half pass at a walk, you’ve got part one of the flying lead change - the
approach.
Half passing at the walk doesn’t give
us much elevation. But we can get some
elevation at the trot.
The half-pass at the trot is done in
exactly the same manner as at the walk. But I have found that when traversing
the pen at the trot, you may find the horse’s way of going pretty choppy. Don’t worry, she is moving major weight
around and she has to learn to balance it. You may even have to go a few steps
forward, then sideways, then forward again. Your goal is to move toward
combining the two movements as you did at the walk.
If the horse becomes scared or
frustrated and refuses to move forward, won’t move or jumps up and down, release
all pressure and allow her to move forward. Often riders want to increase
the rein pressure in such situations, or they start hammering on their horse. DON’T!
That response is completely counterproductive; the horse is already scared and
doesn’t know what to do, and this will scare her more and start eroding your
trust relationship.
Don’t get frustrated. Just release the
pressure of your hands and legs, and move forward. This will usually eliminate
the problems and avoids a confrontation.
As you perform the half-pass, you want
to hold the horse as lightly as possible.
Sometimes a horse will try to run
through the bridle when you are teaching the half-pass, so you must be prepared
to hold them with enough pressure to slow the forward motion. Always work
toward the minimum amount of pressure needed to get the job done, so that when
you are finished teaching the lead change, she will execute it with minimal
visible help from you.
Finally, you will execute the
half-pass at the lope.
Make sure your technique is solid at
the trot before moving to the lope. If you go to the lope too soon, you will
likely scare her and create a battle.
But if she is ready, she can apply what she knows. She will recognize your cues and know how to
respond.
Step her off into a lope and continue
to practice traversing the pen. You need
to be sitting in the center of her back, maintaining her balance.
Once you are traversing well at the
lope there will come a time when you know you can ask for the lead change.
You’ll be moving to the left with your right leg pushing her forward and to the
left and you’ll say to yourself, “I could change her here.” She is in perfect readiness; she is
relaxed, calm, and trusting with correct body position.
But hold back - she
isn’t quite ready to change yet… remember you are just preparing her. (Take a minute to observe her weight
position, your hands and legs and her body position. Feel this---you will want
to be able to feel it and recognize it easily.)
Typing
So far, we have just moved the horse
in one direction at a time. It would not occur to her that you might
change legs in the middle of traversing the arena.
To add to her ability to move left and
right with fluid motion, I use a training technique I call “the typewriter.” It
is quite simple: just side-passing left and then right, left and then right
without moving forward.
Move back and forth like a typewriter
carriage (for those of you who have never seen a typewriter, look it up on
Wikipedia!).
For example, once I get her
side-passing to the left, I just change my cueing leg and ask for movement to
the right, keeping her straight between your hands. The horse will transfer her weight
from one side to the other as she shifts to move in the opposite direction.
This typewriter exercise grooms the
horse for instant back and forth movements and weight-shifting that are
relaxed, smooth, and effortless. This
movement is an absolute for flying lead changes.
Repeat this often enough that you feel
the horse instantly move away from your leg each time you change
directions. You will feel a "stall" between moves in the beginning.
This is normal. When
it gets smoother, then that is enough.
When you master this exercise, you are
getting close to being able to try your first lead changes.
The
Counter-Canter
A horse should be able to lope on
either lead anywhere and at anytime. In
general, I don’t make a big habit of it, but I counter-canter anytime I please.
Every now and then I use the
counter-canter to make the lead change happen.
By being in “the wrong lead”, the horse is uncomfortable. It gives her a reason to change to the “more
comfortable” side.
When I do use the counter-canter, I
don’t particularly go in a circle. I
just use straighter lines that turn the corners. There is nothing wrong with using a circle as
long as you exit your change to the straight line.
Some horses are easier to control when
asking to change leads from the counter-canter, so I may use this tool in the
early stages of teaching the lead change.
ASSIGNMENT
Send
me answers to these questions:
1.
How quickly should the horse move off the rider’s leg?
2. Why is the “typewriter” exercise important to
the lead change.
3. Please load short videos of
you doing a half-pass at the trot and lope, and doing the
"typewriter" exercise to YouTube, PhotoBucket
or other online video hosting web site.
Send your report and the video links to nancy.orders@gmail.com. Make sure your full name and email address is
included in the email and attachment.