27/10/2024
“We have to make friends with the canter.”
If you watch many riders school a horse, they will trot until the proverbial cows come home, will walk now and again to give the horse, (or themselves) a break, but will manage to avoid doing much practice in the canter.
I don’t think I am making this up. I think that if a random group of riders could somehow be timed, the amount of elapsed minutes and seconds of canter work would be far lower than time spent trotting.
Maybe that’s OK, maybe no big deal, but schooling at the canter has some important benefits that the trot can’t provide.
The canter is the gait that has the most potential uplift, that gives that nano second of upwards thrust, Reiner Klimke said to think of each canter stride as “a miniature jump.” So to build in more lifting power, the canter, with that moment of three legs off the ground, is more effective than the trot where two legs are up, two on earth, in diagonal pairs.
I have heard it said that the trot “borrows” lift from the canter, that the quality of the trot just following a good canter will be more buoyant, if only briefly.
Also, if you are a jumping rider, the canter is the gait from which most jumping happens, and it’s so important to be able to lengthen and shorten the canter, to create an adjustable canter, and it can’t be practiced at any other gait.
Certainly, the canter is more tiring for the horse, so it shouldn’t be overdone, but neither should it be avoided. This is a good quote that I heard---not sure who came up with it---
“We have to make friends with the canter.”
Consider your own schooling practice. Maybe you already utilize enough canter, but if you realize that it’s not a familiar enough sensation, maybe that means something needs to be added?
(Note in photo, 3 hooves off ground)
https://www.allbreedpedigree.com/drf+all+eyes+on+me
