Train for Western Riding

Lesson 3

Nancy Cahill

Copyright Ó 2009

Collection and Moving Off Your Legs

At this point, you will have evaluated your horse with respect to her mastery of the basics, and you hopefully you have corrected any deficiencies.

While you are working with the basics, your horse is giving you information about her ability.  Is she stiff?  Then you need to work suppling exercises until she is limber.  Does she fail to perform one of the basics well?  Now is the time to work on improving that basic.

After your horse has mastered basic skills, performs them easily and without hesitation, and you have acknowledged in your mind your horse’s abilities, then you can move on to the last two important maneuvers essential for lead changes: collecting your horse, and moving off your leg.

These maneuvers will be used both to prepare your horse for flying lead changes, and as life-long exercises to keep your horse in “flying lead changing” condition in the future.

Collection

Horse riders all talk about collection. I am sure you have heard someone say “That horse needs to be collected,” or “look how uncollected that horse is.”

What do they mean?

When a horse is truly collected, she is supple and round from her head to the top of her tail. Her back is “raised,” and typically her head is lowered to be level with her withers (or just below level), completing the look of a rounded top line. I consider “collection” critical to the completion of a smooth, fluid lead change.

Before I talk about how to teach collection, it is important to understand what we are trying to accomplish and why.

A horses’ conformation is important to collection. It’s basically a spinal problem. All horses have long spines that stretch to their tail, and it’s your job to transform this long, flat spine into a round, moving machine. When you accomplish this, you will have collection. There are other conformation factors that affect lead changing. We have bred a lot of horses so their necks are flat and they are comfortable with their heads level with their withers (or slightly below). It makes it much easier to change leads and to collect when you have this type of conformation.   Another conformation factor is the length of the horses’ neck. If a horse is “short-necked,” or her neck comes out of her shoulders very high, it makes it more difficult to round up the top line. She will tend to carry her head above level.

The body position indicating collection: a round top line from the top of the tail, across a raised back, to a somewhat lowered neck. In order to accomplish this with a short-necked horse, you would have to pull her neck down somehow so that her back can come up and her hips can go forward, both actions necessary for her to be collected.

Collection requires that all three elements are present: a lowered neck, a rounded back, and hips tucked in. This rounded position will make it easier for her to change a lead. But if one of these elements is missing, the others are often impossible to achieve. For example, if she learns to lower her neck, but doesn’t round her back and draw her hips in, she will not be collected. Changing leads will be hard for her. In addition, if she raises her neck, she won’t be able to round her back – again, causing difficult or unattractive lead changes.

So mastering collection is very important to lead changes. A horse without the conformation to make collection easy, will have trouble making smooth, fluid lead changes. 

Here’s a fun exercise that will help you understand collection. Get down on your hands and knees. Now drop your head and neck, arch your back and draw your hips forward toward your shoulders. That’s collection.

Now that you are in the collected position, lift your head above your shoulders and then try to pick your back up and move your hips forward. It’s almost impossible. Your horse has the same problem!

Any maneuver requires some amount of collection and control. But a lead change requires a lot of collection and control. A horse simply cannot change leads with her neck up to an extreme because she won’t be collected. In fact, that is an easy way to judge if she is collected – where is her neck? If her neck is up, her back is not. In fact, her back is most likely concave (down). If her back is down, she’ll have difficulty performing a flying lead change.

Regardless of conformation, collection will seem unnatural to most horses in the beginning. It’s like trying to make us walk like fashion models all day. We walk the way we do all day, at this point in our lives, without thinking. It is unconscious. We stride with no thought of shoulder or head placement, for example.

But if we were asked to walk like a fashion model, we would have to consciously think about our walk every stride. Focusing on the elements of this new walk would make us uncomfortable and tired until it became a habit. Once it became a habit, it would again be unconscious and easy for us. It would have become natural.

It’s the same with the horse. Her primary job in life is to get from one blade of grass to the next. So holding her neck, back and hip in a particular position in order to make her collected will not be natural or an overnight achievement.

Our goal is to help her to make it a habit – so she can perform and maintain this position with little or no effort. When she can drop her neck to be level with her withers (or just below level), arch her back and tuck her hips forward, that’s collection. This is the first step in moving her toward a lead change.

The good news is that even if a horse hasn’t got the perfect conformation, and can’t collect easily, we can make her better and more consistent by simply teaching her how to be collected.

Moving off Your Leg with the Side pass

There are four ways to move a horse—forward, backward and sideways in two directions.

While you know how to move forward and backwards (these are basic skills your horse should already have), the two important ones for lead changes are moving away from your leg to the left or right. This maneuver is called the side pass, in which you move the horse laterally. As you will see, the side pass is really just part of the lead change, but it is a critical part of the maneuver you must master.

The idea of the side pass is simple to describe, but more difficult to do well.

To start, you will move the horses’ front to the left or right and then follow with the back end.

In teaching this maneuver, you may need to split the lesson into halves and just teach movement in one direction at a time. Side passing is difficult and unnatural for the horse, so take your time and don’t force the issue.

Using your hands and reins, move her front end over to the side, and then push her back end over with your leg an equal distance(so she is relatively straight again).

You are asking your horse to move away from your leg. So by pressing with your left leg, she will learn to move away and understand that you want her to move to the right. Remember that your reins control her front end movement in this maneuver, and your leg controls her back end.

You are searching for balance as the horse moves sideways. To side pass correctly to the right, she must move her left legs (front and rear) in front of her right legs. Going to the left, her right legs cross in front of the left legs.

Ultimately, your goal is to teach your horse to move smoothly to the side while keeping her body relatively straight. When she is doing it correctly, she will be crossing both the front feet and hind feet to move to the side. With time and practice, her side pass will become much more fluid.

The side pass is a major component of our lead change, and I use it throughout a horse’s career to remind them how to move away from my leg.

There are two common problems you will probably encounter when teaching your horse to side pass. Horses naturally know how to move forward and backward, but the side pass is completely foreign to them. Therefore, when I first press the horse with my leg to teach her to side pass, she will usually try to walk forward with me. That’s probably because she thinks my leg pressure is telling her to move, and forward is how she knows to move, even though now the leg pressure is only on one side. To help her understand the pressure and the request for a sideways move, I will eliminate the opportunity for her to move forward by putting her head in front of a fence or wall. By facing the fence, when I put pressure on her side with my leg, she wants to move, but can’t move forward. Since she wants to move, most of the time she’ll move away from my leg and to the side. Some horses, though, will move backwards instead of to the side.

If the problem is that she backs up when I ask for the side pass, I will turn her around and put her hindquarters against the fence. By blocking her automatic response, I am making it easy for her to choose to move to the side – the only way out for her.

Earlier I said you would be moving her to one side or the other while keeping her body relatively straight. Notice that I said ‘relatively’. I do not want her to be perfectly straight.

When I put pressure against her right side to move her to the left, I want her to be very slightly curved to the left (or away from my leg). I only want a slight curve; I want to just be able to see her left eye, a bit of her left nostril, and feel her hip move just a little to the left. My goal is that she will, over time, learn to be shaped like a very shallow semi-circle curved away from my pressing leg. Over time, she will learn this position and her side pass will become smooth and quiet.

Fast is not important – position is.

I should mention that this isn’t the easiest way to teach a horse to side pass, but it is the best way and gives the best results that can be applied to the lead change.

You may know an easier way of teaching a horse to side pass. The easiest way is to let her lead with her shoulder, with her head and hip following slightly behind. You can picture this as her forming a semi-circle like before, but this time she is curved around the leg I am using to apply pressure instead of away. In other words, in a left side pass (moving her to the left), her head is to the right, the ribs are to the left and the hips are to the right. This position is not good because it allows her to develop the habit of dropping, in this case, her right shoulder as she moves left.

The problem with a horse learning to side pass this way is that she will always want to drop her shoulder in the lead change. Dropping a shoulder in the lead change is very hard to correct, and will reduce the quality of the lead change. The way to avoid this is to teach the side pass correctly the first time.

While the way I recommend to teach the side pass may be more difficult initially, in the long run we will have eliminated several problems. 

Assignment:

Send me answers to the following questions:

1. Name a conformation trait which will make it hard for a horse to make good lead changes.

2. Why is collection important to lead changes?

3. What are some common problems encountered when teaching the side pass?

4. Why should the horse be curved slightly into the direction of travel when learning the side pass?

5. Load videos to YouTube, PhotoBucket or another video hosting web site demonstrating your horse side passing in both directions. Please shoot the video from the front or back and from the side.

Send your detailed report and the links to the videos to: nancy.orders@gmail.com