11
MOST HORSES HAVE THREE GAITS: the walk; the trot; and the gallop, or lope. The canter is actually a collected version of the gallop. Some horses have additional gaits, such as the running walk, the amble, and the rack, and the Paso breeds have distinctive gaits that are quite different from all of these.
Knowing how the horse moves makes it easier to understand how and when to use certain cues to persuade him to do what you ask. This knowledge enables a trainer to use informed judgment in what he asks of the horse; the good trainer asks him to do only what is physically within his ability in any given situation.
How the Horse Moves
The horse has strong muscles in the upper part of each leg, but below knee and hock there are no muscles. Muscles in the upper leg extend downward as long tendons. Muscles in the front of the leg pull it forward. Muscles at the back of the forearm bend the knee.
The Horse Is Front-Heavy
The horse’s center of gravity is immediately behind his withers. His front end, with head and neck, is heavier than his hindquarters. About 60 percent of his weight is carried by his front legs. A horse who is standing squarely on all four feet cannot lift a front foot until he shifts some weight off his front end. He does this by raising his head, by crouching a little on his hind legs, or by moving a hind leg forward to take more weight.
When you start to lead a horse who is standing squarely, he raises his head before he moves forward, shifting the weight so he can lift a front foot. If you don’t have any slack in the rope when he raises his head, he’ll pull you back a couple of inches as you pull on his lead rope. To move in any direction, the horse must first compensate for the fact that he is front heavy.
Gaits
Some horses, due to selective breeding and training, have different or additional gaits, such as a running walk; rack (one form of which is called a single-foot); a slow gait or stepping pace, which is a highly collected rack; amble; and fox trot, which is often described as walking in front and trotting behind. Paso breeds have their own gaits and leg actions. Horses who just walk, trot, and gallop are often referred to as straight gaited, as opposed to gaited, which describes horses who do four or five gaits.
Some horses pace instead of trot; in the pace the legs move forward together on the same side instead of diagonally. When pacing, the horse has a rolling motion from side to side, with less support, balance, and traction on slippery footing. Standardbreds trot or pace — and a few can do both — as fast as other horses gallop.
Variations on the Walk
The fox trot is a slow, broken trot, faster than an ordinary walk. The horse’s head nods as it does in the walk, and he brings each hind foot to the ground an instant before the diagonal forefoot strikes the ground.
The flat-footed walk is a natural gait of the Tennessee Walking Horse. Feet land in the same sequence as in a normal walk, but because of the loose (“free”) action of the horse, he can move quite rapidly.
The running walk, a four-beat gait between a normal walk and a rack, is the fast walk of the Tennessee Walker. The hind feet overreach and land in advance of the tracks left by the front feet, overstepping by as few as a couple of inches to 18 inches or more, giving the horse a gliding motion. This gait resembles a pace, but the hind foot comes to the ground before the front foot on that side.
The rack, or singlefoot, is also called a broken amble. The rack is an exaggerated fast walk with four distinct beats. Each foot comes to the ground separately and at equal intervals. At first glance it looks like a pace, but it is a four-beat rather than a two-beat gait; the hind foot lands just before the front leg on the same side. It is similar to the running walk, but the feet are lifted higher and with more up-and-down motion. At the rack, the hind feet do not overstep the front feet as much and may even not overstep at all.
LISTEN TO THE BEAT
When riding a horse, you can tell by listening to the hoofbeats how his legs are moving in sequence and thus what gait he is in.
Training at the Walk
All early training is done at the walk. The green horse needs to learn to respond to the rider, rather than doing whatever he wants. The walk is the best gait for teaching control with stopping, starting, and turning. He has a more relaxed frame of mind at the walk and is more receptive to the influence of his rider.
At faster gaits a horse tends to get more excited; these are his natural expressions of play or of fleeing a predator. Until he learns control, he is less apt to pay attention to a rider when trotting or galloping. The walk, then, is the gait to concentrate on for all first lessons, progressing to a trot only when your horse is very comfortable with what you’ve been teaching him at the walk.
First lessons focus on control and on developing the walk. When you ask the horse to move out and walk, you want him to move briskly and purposefully and not plod aimlessly. From the beginning, you try to channel his movements directionally and also teach him to maintain an even speed. He must be consistent in his gait rather than erratically speeding and slowing. This, too, is a subtle lesson in control.
Teaching a Faster Walk
Some horses are naturally fast walkers, while others are lazy. Some take long strides; others move with short, choppy steps. The horse’s conformation — that is, how his body parts are put together — largely determines how he picks up his feet and moves them. No matter how a horse walks, however, he can be taught to move more swiftly. To teach him to walk faster, you must understand how he moves at the walk and how to use your hands and legs to give the proper signals. If you have to push him all day to make him move faster, you’ll feel you’ve gone more miles than the horse.
Your hands check the horse and keep him from breaking into a trot, which is his natural inclination when urged faster, and your legs encourage him to move more energetically. If you check him with the bit, he will respond by walking faster instead of breaking into a trot. The best results are attained when you can synchronize your bit cues with the leg cues and use your legs alternately to stimulate the proper hind leg of the horse at the proper time.
Head and Neck Action
You control the horse’s head and neck with your hands and the action of his feet with your legs. He uses his head and neck for balance, just as we swing our arms for balance when walking and running. The horse raises and lowers his head rhythmically to lengthen or shorten his neck to keep in balance as he travels. At the walk and at the canter or gallop, the head bobs at each step. His head drops each time a front foot comes to the ground, then rises to shift his weight each time he prepares to pick up a front foot.
Leg Action
When a horse is walking, he moves each leg in a specific order, creating a four-beat gait. The sequence is right hind, right front, left hind, left front. As a hind foot comes forward, the front foot on that side prepares to take off and leaves the ground a split second before the hind foot lands, just out of the way of the approaching hind foot. As the speed of the walk increases, the horse picks up each foot more swiftly. Because most of the horse’s propelling power comes from his hind legs, with your legs you can encourage him to increase his stride length and walk faster by stimulating each hind leg at the proper time to make it push off more vigorously.
Footfall order at the walk
Using Your Legs to Cue His
Your horse already knows he should move energetically in response to leg pressure, as this was one of the first things you taught him: how to move out or increase speed when you squeeze your legs against his sides (see page 242). How you use your legs, however, will make a difference in his ultimate response. The goal is longer strides, not merely faster ones. Short, fast, choppy strides will quickly tire a horse. When he pushes off with a longer swing of his leg, he covers the ground faster. If you stimulate him at the proper phase of his stride and not at random, you will get nice long strides.
When you squeeze with your right leg, you stimulate the right hind leg. Squeezing with your left stimulates the left hind. By squeezing each side alternately, at the moment that leg pushes off from the ground, you are cueing your horse to move each leg more energetically as it prepares to leave the ground. This gets better results than intermittently squeezing together both legs. Once a leg is in the air, there is little your horse can do in response to a squeeze. The length of stride is determined by the amount of thrust given as the leg leaves the ground. Energy and the thrust of push-off determine the distance of a stride; once the leg is airborne, there is nothing to push against to influence its power.
The horse’s left front leg comes forward an instant before the right hind; thus, to stimulate the right hind, use your right leg as the horse’s left front foot comes to the ground. The simplest way to learn this timing is to watch the horse’s shoulders. Execute your squeeze to their movement. As the left shoulder comes forward, the horse’s left front is in the air. As the left foot lands, give a squeeze with your right leg. Then, as the right front foot lands, squeeze with your left.
As the horse’s right leg and shoulder come forward, the rider squeezes with her left leg to stimulate the horse’s left hind foot — which is preparing to leave the ground — to push off more strongly.
SQUEEZE FOR SPEED
Kicking with your heels is not a good cue to use to make your horse walk faster. The horse responds better to the pressure of a squeeze. Each time he reacts with a faster step, release the squeeze to reward him with a decrease in pressure.
It all happens so quickly that you will have the proper timing if you squeeze each side just as the opposite shoulder moves forward. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll feel the rhythm with your legs and body and won’t have to watch your horse’s shoulders; squeezing your legs alternately at the proper time with the rhythm of the horse’s walk will soon come naturally and won’t take any concentration on your part.
Squeezing and Swinging
Squeeze where your legs hang in the stirrups, not back toward the belly. Exert the pressure through your upper calf muscles. Once your horse learns to increase his stride, all you have to do is swing with him, flexing at the hips and waist and rolling your weight in the saddle a little as you alternately squeeze your legs. You gently push him with your whole body, especially your legs and seat bones, as you move in rhythm with him.
This type of urging for a longer stride (faster walk) is easy on you and quite effective. Proper leg use, coupled with light hands and a good feel of your horse’s mouth through the bit, will make the transition to a longer, quicker stride a simple matter for both you and your horse.
Using Your Hands
Good hands are as important in increasing the speed of the walk as are proper leg cues. Hands make the difference between a calm horse and a nervous one, between a responsive horse and a frustrated one. Proper use of the bit keeps your horse from continually breaking into a jog instead of lengthening his walk when you urge him.
Keep a light feel on the bit for communication and control. You never want to hurt the horse’s mouth or make him resent the bit. He should not break into a trot when urged with your legs, nor should he prance (bounce up and down in a nervous trot in place) or throw up his head because of too much restraint. Some horses want to walk slowly or to trot — no middle pace for them — and when you try to speed up the walk, they insist on breaking into a trot. It takes hand and leg coordination and some patience to teach a horse to extend the walk rather than to move into a trot.
You need constant communication with your horse’s mouth, your hands giving and taking as his head and neck make balancing movements. A fixed hand — that is, one always in the same position — will bump the horse’s mouth with the bit at every stride if the reins are held short or have so much slack that there is never direct communication with the mouth and you are unable to adequately check the horse. Keep your reins at the proper length to maintain a light touch on the bit at all times.
The Curb Bit
If the horse is past the snaffle stage and you are riding in a curb (see pages 183–87), you can keep a direct feel on his mouth even with slack in the reins. You will have adequate feel on a slack rein if the reins are heavy or when there’s a snap between the rein and the bit. With a little weight in the reins, you always have a feel on the mouth without tightening them, and the rhythm and swing of the heavy reins as the horse walks help to maintain that feel so you can keep him from breaking into a trot. Reins should never be too slack,however; you need constant and instant control to keep the horse at exactly the gait and rate of speed you want. The reins are the right length when they have a nice curved line from bit to hand, without looking taut or having an excessive droop.
CHECK, THEN SQUEEZE
Learn to feel when the horse intends to break gait. Lightly finger the reins if the horse starts to break into a trot. Check him slightly just before he does or you will be too late. Each time you check the horse, continue squeezing with your legs so he’ll know he is to walk faster and not more slowly. If you squeeze immediately after checking him, he will respond by taking a longer stride rather than breaking into a trot. Soon you can increase the speed of his walk just by using body language to encourage him at the proper phase of his stride.
The Advantages of an Extended Walk
Many horses are never taught to extend the walk and therefore are not very alert as they go. They often daydream and thus are apt to stumble or even trip and fall clear down, unlike the horse who is “on the bit” and responsive to your hands and legs. The rider who just sits on a horse as a passenger rarely has a horse who walks swiftly.
Roll with the Walk
When you are sitting balanced, with your legs relaxed, you can be responsive to your horse’s movements as you sway from side to side with motion in your waist. You are moving like a hula dancer; your waist will be very supple. The thrust of the horse’s hind legs moves you, from the hips down, from side to side in the saddle.
You get a rolling motion because as the horse takes a hind leg off the ground to move it forward, that side is unsupported for an instant and tends to drop a little. To be at one with your horse, let your back and buttocks sway from side to side with the horse’s natural rolling movement. To follow his motion, let your seat bones move forward and down with each step, as if you were walking along with him. When you are moving with him this way, you can speed up your rolling motion and “push” with your seat, as part of the encouragement to walk faster, or slow it down to encourage him to stay in a walk rather than breaking into a trot.
You should be moving with your horse, attentive to everything he is doing, encouraging him with your body language. Then you’ll have command over his walk and can extend or slow it readily. He’ll become more pleasant to ride and more apt to respond willingly to your signals. He can walk swiftly on the way home instead of trying to break into a trot if he’s overeager.
By teaching your horse to respond to leg, rein, and body language cues to extend his walk, you have more control over his actions, whether you are encouraging him to walk faster on the way out or to do a relaxed fast walk on the way home without prancing and dancing.
STRIDE AT THE WALK
In the slow walk, the horse has three feet on the ground at once.
In the fast walk, the horse has only two feet on the ground at once, alternating from a pair of lateral legs (same side) to a pair of diagonal legs.
Calming the Excitable Horse
Some horses are excitable, with lots of nervous energy. Like a coiled spring, a horse who’s poised and eager to go can be a challenge. He always wants to be going a little faster than you do. If he’s walking, he wants to trot. If he’s trotting, he wants to break into a gallop. He may be impatient if you are riding with other horses, wanting to be in front rather than left behind.
If you are heading home, he wants to be there right now and can’t relax until he gets there. He’ll start prancing and dancing because you won’t let him run home. He may develop the bad habit of tossing his head and pulling at the bit if you try to hold him down to a walk, and it takes a lot of careful, patient work to relax him.
He may be insecure and not want to be left or to have other horses leave him. He may be a bit balky if he must leave home by himself with no horses for company. When you take him out he may be in such a hurry to return to his stall, pen, or pasture that he’s frustrating to ride. Trying to make him walk may result in an argument, with the horse becoming even more upset and tense.
The nervous, jittery individual can be trained to relax when you handle him with patience. The first step may be to give him more exercise and less grain, if the problem is accentuated by high-energy feed and confinement. The stall-bound young horse can go stir crazy with pent-up energy. If training sessions and riding are his only outlets, you’ll have your hands full. He will do much better if he can be turned out at pasture or in a large pen where he can run off some of that energy and be a little more mellow for his training sessions.
Patience, Not Punishment
When working with a nervous or overactive horse, make a conscious effort to keep your cool. You must remain patient and understanding. Remember that he is insecure. He needs reassurance, not threats. Never lose your temper. And don’t punish him for his actions; that will only increase his anxiety and make him more jumpy. Punishment is appropriate only when a horse intentionally misbehaves — if he bites, kicks, or commits other aggressive actions. If he is misbehaving due to insecurity, punishment will make him more fearful, less able to relax.
Be Calm
Your attitude while riding is crucial, just as important as your training methods, because the horse can easily sense your attitude. If he is tense and apprehensive, you must be completely calm. Gradually, your relaxed attitude will be transmitted to him, and he’ll be able to settle down and pay attention to what you’re trying to teach him.
CONSISTENCY IS KEY
The key to resolving the problem of the nervous horse is quiet, gentle firmness and consistency. If you are consistent in your actions and cues, the horse will learn what to expect from you and learn to trust you, which in turn will help him relax.
Being a herd animal, the horse takes his cues from other herd members. In a sense, you and he are a herd of two when working together, and you are the leader of this herd. When you maintain a calm frame of mind, your “herdmate” gains confidence from that and will lose some of his anxiety. But if you are tense, worried about the challenge he poses in the training situation, upset because he is trying to go too fast or not paying enough attention to you, your horse will have a difficult time relaxing.
If you worry about the fact that he is constantly testing the limits of your control, it will be even harder to calm him because he interprets your worry as a threat or a sign of danger and becomes even more agitated. When you are riding the tense or nervous horse — especially one that wants to jig rather than settle down and walk calmly — the first step is for you to relax. Practice relaxing until your body becomes almost as limp as a rag doll’s. Transmit your serenity, not your tension.
Using the Reins
The way you use your reins is another factor in determining whether you can calm a nervous horse. The reaction of many riders when mounted on a jumpy animal is to try to keep him from getting out of control by tightening the reins or punishing him for his nervous actions, holding him tighter or even jerking his mouth. Remember, punishment is not warranted when the behavior is caused by anxiety.
The horse’s response to this constant restraint through the bit is to toss his head and fight the bit, and he becomes more fidgety instead of less. It is the horse’s natural tendency to pull when pulled at, so pulling at the horse creates a tug of war that you won’t win.
The answer to most problems is to become a better rider, to fine-tune your cues and improve communication through the bit, to develop better use of hands and body language. Communication is through your hands and bit, accentuated and helped by your legs, weight shifts, and seat. The whole attitude of your body — how you move, whether you are tense or relaxed, for example — is part of that communication.
EXAMINE YOUR METHODS
If a horse reacts adversely or does something wrong, it’s usually the fault of the rider. Perhaps you asked him to do something beyond his ability, and he doesn’t know how to respond properly. Maybe you communicated your request unclearly, so he made the wrong response. If your horse performs poorly, resists cues, or won’t do what you want, examine your horsemanship and rethink your tactics.
Your hands are important because they control, encourage, steady, and direct your pupil. Calm, sure hands can help settle him if he’s nervous, especially when coupled with patient horsemanship and lots of miles under saddle. This helps build a bridge of understanding.
Relax to Relax the Horse
All too often, the rider of a nervous horse gets frustrated when trying to make the horse stop prancing: “It doesn’t make sense to prance; the horse would get there faster if he’d just settle down and walk!”
Remember that the horse reacts to emotions, not logic. All he can think about is that you are restraining him; thus, he becomes upset. Your tenseness and frustration increase his feelings of worry and panic; you inadvertently punish his mouth and make him even more fretful. It’s very difficult in this situation to stay calm, yet this is exactly what you must do before the horse can relax.
You must communicate confidence, reliability, and calm so your horse can start to trust your judgment about the gait or speed he should go. Lean back a little and relax in the saddle (leaning forward is a form of urging, and staying tense is also a form of urging; your seat and legs are rigid). If you lean back slightly while he is prancing, not only are you more relaxed, but also your body weight becomes more of an anchor; you are a little behind his center of gravity, and he tends to slow down.
Try to communicate relaxation through your hands, reins, and bit. Never keep a steady pull or fixed hand on a nervous horse. This enables him to lean into the bit and pull harder. Don’t pull at his mouth or he will become less responsive. Let your hands go with his head movements. A horse pays more attention to a bit that wiggles around in his mouth than to one that is constantly pulling. Give and take with the reins, using wrists and finger action. If you relax and are not pulling on the reins, eventually, your horse will calm down.
Teaching Patience to the Prancer
Once you gain a constant but gentle feel of his mouth with give-and-take action instead of a pull, your horse will soon progress to the point where he is relaxed enough to walk freely. He can begin to be “on his honor” again, without constant restraint. When you reach this stage, your horse will start to make noticeable progress.
The next hurdle to overcome is how to work through the times he still insists on going faster than you want him to. You must continue checking him with the bit but not enough to start a tug-of-war. How you check him determines whether or not he will react properly.
Start by giving him his head a little more. On a very nervous or overeager horse, you may be able to do it only a few seconds at a time or when the situation puts things in your favor. You may make the most progress after the horse has taken the edge off his exuberant energy with miles of riding. Perhaps then he will settle down and relax enough to stretch out his walk instead of trotting.
If his problem is trying to hurry home in a prance instead of a walk, you’ll do best after a long ride, when he’s a little tired and more willing to relax. It may take many miles of steady, daily riding before you see a change in his attitude. Once you can let him have his head in a relaxed walk, even if just for a few strides (followed by your checking him again to keep him from breaking into a trot), you’ll be making progress. The goal is to create that cooperative moment amid the jumble of nervousness and discord.
When your horse does relax for a moment, praise him and let him know this is what you want. When he learns that you are not going to pull on his mouth when he fulfills his part of the bargain, he’ll do more calm walking and less prancing (for more tips on how to deal with the horse who always wants to prance and hurry home, see chapter 17).
GIVE AND TAKE
If your horse is trying to trot, keep giving and taking with the reins as you would with the head movements at a walk. When he’s in that borderline space between a walk and a trot, your give-and-take rein action can often keep him down to a walk even though he’d rather trot. Keep that gentle mouth contact in walking rhythm.
Reward Him with Your Trust
It takes a subtle, fine-tuned feel for how much freedom you can give your horse and how much restraint with the bit he will need to stay at the gait and speed you want. If you let him proceed more and more on his honor during the moments he is attempting to cooperate, however, the nervous charge-ahead attitude will diminish. Gradually, you will be able to enlarge that cooperative moment. If the horse walks a few strides in the middle of his usual prancing routine, praise him and keep trying for more walking steps the next time you ask him. If he regresses and prances, go back to a guaranteed success — a few walking steps — and start building on that again.
The key to relaxing the nervous horse so he will walk is less restraint, not more. Little by little, you can develop the rapport and confidence that will allow you to let the horse go more on his honor, without your constantly having to check him with the bit. Patience, understanding, tact, and many miles of relaxed work in open country — with less concentration on fast work; skip those lessons for a while — will go a long way toward calming the high-strung horse.
If you are patient, you can minimize or resolve the type of behavior that makes the nervous horse such a frustration and challenge to ride. The two of you can then become a real team: he will be willing to work with you instead of against you, and you will be trustworthy and won’t let him down.
The walk is the most important gait to focus on at first, for it allows you to build a solid foundation for all of your future training of the horse. It is the horse’s slowest gait and usually the most calm and relaxed. This makes it the ideal gait for starting to build rapport with, and to gain perfect control of, the green horse.
The walk also has the potential for development of advanced, fine-tuned communication, because you can refine your bit, body, and leg cues to a bare minimum once the horse learns how to respond. You can allow or encourage him to do a very slow, medium, or fast relaxed walk; a crisp and alert walk at any speed; or a highly collected walk at any speed. You can collect or extend his walk at will.
The communication you develop with the horse at a walk can be the basis for excellent understanding and trust, creating a very willing pupil for all further lessons. He feels at ease and secure in your calm, benevolent control.