Turn it Up!

A fly lands on your horse’s shoulder. Your horse flicks an ear back and shivers its skin, sending the insect off to search for a better landing stripe. It is a small movement that equestrians know well. So well, in fact, that we think nothing of it. You ride your horse and ask for a quicker trot by applying your calves around its barrel. No response. You end up kicking and whipping to get the desired result, but still no shiver of skin.


What am I getting at? Well, I’ll get to it; just give me a few more paragraphs.

I think all riders, pros and ammies alike, no matter the discipline, want an obedient horse. They want the horse to be sensitive to their aids. Not over reactive. Not dull. They want to communicate with the horse and say, “Hey, let’s canter now!” and have their horse willingly move off into that gait. No one trains their horse to take off cantering only when the aid has been applied several times in succession, each time more forceful than the last. “Well, he should hopefully canter the fifth time that you kick him…” That’s not fun for anyone involved.


The first clinic that I rode in was with Paula Lacey. I was excited because not only had I heard great things about her as a teacher and been judged by her in the past, but because my horse and I were debuting at 2nd Level and I was anxious to know what she thought of us as a team and what she would have us work on. Imagine my surprise when she didn’t start the lesson with bells and whistles. She asked us to halt and then walk. Paula came over to us and gently pushed my calf against my horse’s side. This was how I was to ask for the walk from the halt. No more than that. If my horse didn’t listen to that then BANGBANG went my legs and SLAP went the whip. She had us do this very simple transition over and over until my horse moved off of a light application of my leg. We didn’t even worry about the roundness. I didn’t try to get it, but as our transitions improved, I noticed that my horse was on the bit. (And isn’t that what true roundness is? Being on the bit a.k.a. on the aids?) Once we got the transitions prompt and obedient, we had laid the foundation for the rest of the work. By the end of the lesson, we were doing haunches-in on a diagonal line which could also be described as baby steps of trot half pass, something my horse and I had only just begun to learn.

Us after our clinic lesson!

Have you ever been accused of kicking your horse too much? I have! I don’t know how I fell into the habit but it happened gradually until the horse so dull that I had to literally kick it every stride to keep it going. I was kicking and kicking with little to no result. I was nagging and the horse had tuned my chattering out. I compare it like this. There’s a friend of yours, right? He has hearing aids and you’re yelling at him so you can converse. So you shout “CAN YOU TURN THOSE THINGS UP?” and he does. Then you are able to continue on with your conversation using a normal tone of voice. Yet somehow when we’re riding we keep yelling at our horses (Always figuratively… right?) and never bother to turn up their sensitivity to our aids and at last we reach the grand finale where we look like we’re flailing around atop our steed to just get them to walk on. It’s a very attractive picture. Not.

I can’t promise that I’ll be able to tell you how to fix this. Each horse has different knobs to turn in a different manner and order. For example, you and your horse could be the complete opposite of what I have been describing. Your horse might take off without any application of your aids and if that’s the case, your course of action would be to make the horse less reactive. So here’s a disclaimer about how you’d be best off having your trainer tell you what to do. It’s true, but since I’m writing this blog post, I’m going to tell you what I do anyways.

1. Halt.
2. Ask the horse to walk by gently closing your inner calves around their barrel.
3. If no response, ask nicely once more.
4. If still no response, give a big hard kick or whip whack or both simultaneously. Be careful not to pull on the reins while doing this.
5. Once horse walks, praise. Even if the horse goes from the halt to a trot or canter, still praise like he/she won the Kentucky Derby.
6. Repeat as often as necessary until you are the fly the horse shivers away. And for those of you who don’t get my poetry, do this exercise until the horse walks on with a light leg aid. It should not take hours on end before you have improvement. If it does… UR DOING IT WRONG and need to get help from a more experienced rider/trainer. No shame!

I enjoy taking a dull horse and tuning it up into a mount that willingly does what I ask when I ask nicely. I don’t like working hard to make the horse work hard. I like a good give and take conversation without shouting. Who doesn’t?