20/02/2020
Squirrel
While I am proud of Squirrel’s accomplishment, what I am excited about is how he was prepared for his Second level debut. For the article that follows, credit has to go to Heather Blitz, Missy Gilliland, and Ashleigh Luca.
I combined three concepts that I learned from these astute ladies, and concentrated from November through January, on mastering these exercises. The results were so good that I decided to write about it. The article will be posted on my training page, “Ray LaCroix Training and Coaching”. It is written for Dressage enthusiasts, but these exercises will help any performance horse reach it’s potential!! For those that want to try these concepts out, please contact me, especially for my main ring friends, as there is a difference in how you need to sit and use your aids. Explore what happens when you build core strength in your horse!
IMPROVE YOUR HORSE’S CORE AND YOUR TIMING TO RAISE YOUR SCORE: A SERIES OF SEQUENTIALLY LINKED EXERCISES FOR YOUNG HORSES AND AMATEUR RIDERS
I was told by many that the transition from First Level to Second Level is akin to entering “the black hole of dressage”. “They” were right and, yes, it is a challenging transition for several reasons. From the perspective of the horse, most horses going through levels Training, One, and Two, are from ages 4-7, and their musculature is still very much in the developmental stage. They are learning to develop uphill tendencies in the gaits, prompt transitions from somewhat collected gaits to medium trot and canter lengthenings, bend within a 10 meter circle, as well as the lateral movements of shoulder in and haunches in. Strength and flexibility are being built through the training of the horse to meet the requirements demanded by the structure of the tests.
But really, how are strength, flexibility, and balance within the horse being constructed?
This can only happen through the repetition of the working patterns. Your daily work with your horse. For amateurs stuck in the score range of sub 60 to 63, hoping for a better score while practicing the same movements in the same way is a sure fire way of staying in that range with continued disappointment.
Why?
Something must change for improved scores.
From the novice rider’s perspective, the movements and transitions shouldn’t be surprising, as you should be working on them well before riding an actual test.
What may be surprising are your test scores.
What is surprising is the demand for the new quality of work that defines “uphill tendencies”, the beginning development of “cadence”, and effective transitions from collection to extension, and back again to collection. Asking a young horse for these movements is difficult not just because they are new, but because the strength necessary for quality and flexibility within the movements simply isn’t there. That strength and flexibility has yet to be developed.
For the novice rider, the “black hole” is a conundrum for several reasons as well. For one, the movements are new to both you and your horse, and in order to ask the horse for the movements, you have to use and move your own body in precisely balanced ways to enable your horse to achieve them. Additionally, your horse is learning new ways to move as well, and his balance is constantly being challenged.
And therein lies the problem .
An amateur’s response to rebalancing the unbalanced horse is problematic because the success of the half halts and leg aids to channel the impulsion and weight distribution necessary to balance a horse, depend upon the rider’s development and timing of the aids. The rider’s timing is predicated upon their own expectations, and expectations are built on experience.
From the perspective of learning, for both horse and rider, knowing comes from doing, and building excellent responses to the aids simply doesn’t happen quickly for novice and many amateur riders. Novice riders don’t know the difference in the timing and intensity of the aids between an average response compared to an excellent response because they have no way of experiencing an excellent response until they build it, with guidance, themselves. For some, this can take a period of years, and for some, an excellent response can be perpetually elusive.
For me it took two horses with a five year time span between the two, and a menagerie of different instructors/clinicians before I understood the difference that makes the difference in improving your score range from sub 60-63 to 68-70.
The difference that makes the difference is the amount of time it takes you to rebalance your horse.
Riding the balanced horse, for a few steps, is relatively easy. Re-establishing balance once it is lost can be difficult. The time it takes a rider to rebalance a horse on the forehand, back to an uphill balance, has a direct relationship to the quality of the horse’s stride, transitions, accuracy, and ultimately, the score of your test.
So, for those transitioning to second level (and many other folks as well), the problem is the development and maintenance of balance that is critical to precision riding. The solution, then, is identifying what, specifically, needs to happen to re establish balance. What makes rebalancing so difficult?
The difficulty lies in the fact that once balance has been lost, rebalancing the horse isn’t just one simple move. Re-establishing your horse’s balance takes several sequential movements involving different anatomical parts of your horse’s body and each movement needs to be “taught” (think recruitment of muscle groups). To establish the chain of events that must occur, let’s look at the three steps that comprise the classical biomechanics of collection. Step one is engagement of the hindquarters, step two is the lifting or rounding of the back, and the third, and last step, is the raising of the base (last 3 vertebrae) of the neck which augments lifting of the shoulders.
That’s all easy to visualize, but what really has to happen for your horse to collect and carry enough weight to lift his shoulders to achieve “lightness”?
The hind leg must be positioned far enough under the horse so that it can actually, for some moments of the stride, support the weight of uphill movement. To “round” the back takes work from the abdominal groups to lift the spine slightly, but the rest of the muscles that comprise the core, the psoas, and the multifidus, work in concert with the abdominal groups, and the thoracic sling muscles to elevate the shoulders to achieve the “lightness” of collection.
Hilary Clayton says it best by saying, “So the pushing power of the hind legs must be harnessed by the elevation of the forehand so the horse can perform with controlled power in an uphill balance”.
Does the above description sound like many training and first level horses you’ve seen? Of course not, because about 95% or more of First level horses are on their forehand and the carrying groups of muscle cannot be strengthened while on the forehand.
Now that we understand that strength plays an indispensable role in your horse’s ability to respond to your requests of collection and uphill carriage, we are starting to understand why the second level is oftentimes referred to as “the black hole of dressage”!
Let’s now get into the mechanics of what comes first, second, and third in a plan to strengthen your horse’s core.
First things first: Reposition your horse’s hind leg and haunch.
The first thing that must occur is repositioning your horse’s hind leg. Some breeds and some horses are blessed with hind leg conformation that requires little manipulation. Some, that have a hind leg that is long, or a pelvic angle that causes them to be camped out will take more work. We will start with trot work. If your horse has not yet developed much of a collected canter, this will help simply by the positioning.
We start by connecting the aids for a half halt with taps on the hindquarters with a whip, in time with the stride of the inside hind leg. Start this with a seated working trot. As you half halt towards a collected trot, rhythmically tap as the inside hind leg lifts for the forward phase of the stride, for several strides. The outcome is for the horse to slightly lower the haunch and take a somewhat deeper yet quicker and shorter ( more collected) step behind. The timing for this is important. As you firm your pelvis, move your elbow and squeeze your fingers for the half halt, immediately follow with a tap on the top of the croup. The time in between is in nanoseconds, not more. Make sure the tap is also in time with the forward phase of the stride. In that way, 3 things happen sequentially so that the horse makes the association of the usual half halt aids augmented by the whip. You will either need a mirror, or a coach to help you with the proper timing and to know that the angulation of the haunch and hind leg has been significantly changed. Three or four inside hind leg strides, with half halts and taps should be sufficient to alter the angulation. Once this occurs, gently increase your strides back to working trot and repeat. Spend 3 to 5 minutes one way, give your horse a minute or so for a walk break and repeat on the opposite rein. Repeat this exercise for about 30 minutes with appropriate walk breaks.
The object of this session is to gradually teach your horse to drop his haunch and change the angulation of his hind leg when he feels the aids for the half halt. In the first 15 minutes, you could expect that as the horse begins to learn, 3 to 4 taps might not be necessary and the angulation and shorter, more compact step might start to occur with just a whisper. Each horse is different. At the completion of 3-5 minutes (or so) give your horse a 2-3 minute walk break, and then do another 3-5 minute set of the same exercise. Notice any differences in the number of taps or the strength of the taps necessary to produce the more collected stride. As your horse adopts the collected stride a bit more easily, give him another walk break. I repeat this cycle for a total work time of about 30 minutes. At close to the end, make the walk break a minute or two longer, then briefly revisit the exercise again to insure that he has some understanding of the exercise and feels good about his work. This may sound intense, but it need not be. What does need to happen is for your horse to have no other distractions and no other transitions so that his/her total focus is on these simple mechanics.
It is my suggestion to initially spend 3 works in a row on just this concept with the outcome being on day three that the horse is actually in an uphill (withers raised above croup) collected trot for some of the time. At this point, in my training program, I would give the horse a day off as a break, and the next work would begin with a warm up and then some experimenting with canter work.
The second step in building your horse’s core is to utilize the hind leg angulation that has been taught at the trot to help build a true collected canter. The active and engaged collected canter is a product of recruiting different muscle groups.
For simplification, lets say that a horse has two distinctly different functional groups of muscles in his hindquarters, a carrying group that helps support the undulating weight of his trunk, shoulders, neck and head, and the propulsive group that thrusts the weight forward over ground. Under the normal work patterns of lower level horses, transitions from working canter to canter lengthenings and back, can be slow and somewhat subtle. What transpires in this pattern is that the horse mostly depends on the propulsive group of muscles and the carrying group is under utilized, which means that the carrying group at canter is also underdeveloped. As well, while the propulsive group is active, the carrying group is slumbering or inactive.
New research indicates that the quality canter that all of us desire to build is produced by “firing up” both the propulsive group and the carrying group of muscles in sequence and much more rapidly than what traditional work patterns require.
Let’s look at it this way. When one group is being utilized and the other group is dormant, tapping into the dormant group isn’t instantaneous, there is a lag time. But, what happens when both groups are “fired up” and instantly “on demand”? Magical movement happens. Tempo transitions within the gaits begin to be both smooth and dramatic at the same time. Think of Charlotte DuJardin and Valegro. Think of Edward Gall and Totilas. Both sets of horse and rider pairs were flawless in their expressive transitions. Yes, they are extraordinary examples of horses, yet they were also in extraordinary training programs.
What does it take to fire both the propulsive group and the carrying group so that they do more than just work independently? It takes rapid transitions from collected steps to extensions and back again. For the trained and conditioned horse, these transitions can happen within 3 steps. For those horses developing the strength and balance for rhythm and tempo, think 6 or 7 steps. Rapidly sequential recruitment defines neural pathways in a phenomena known as cross education. Cross education is the process whereby the training of one limb gives rise to enhancements in the performance of the opposite, untrained limb.
Now, think about what has occurred in the prior three training sessions at trot. Those back and forth transitions from working trot to collected trot back to working trot ended up with your horse, at times, keeping it’s withers higher than the haunch. This exercise demanded that your horse use both, the carrying group of muscles and the propulsive group. These rapidly recruited muscle groups, along with the rein, seat, and leg aids that stimulated accurate responses, combined to create a newly compacted frame enabling your horse to trot in an entirely new way, with much more flexion in the joints and much more expression! The very same pattern can help you develop a true collected canter while avoiding the pitfall of “drilling” the slow collected canter until you have lost the quality of the three beat gait due to a hind leg that has been lulled into laboring.
Step two: A true collected canter is integral to raising your score!
As the next step in building your horse’s core is to actually develop a collected canter, there are a few components to think about before you first ask your horse to collect. Your hands that usually follow your horse’s rhythm in canter will become quiet, or still when asking for collection. This is not pulling, nor is it a backwards riding hand. Your seat is responsible for setting the rhythm. The stride for a working canter is longer than that of a collected canter and as such your seat movement will shorten when asking for collection. Think of the energy of the hindquarter that propels the horse for the longer stride of a working, or lengthened canter. That same energy, or a bit more, has to be kept as the horse shortens his stride and turned into more vertical height, so as the horse follows your seat, aided by rein aids, and leg aids, the long stride turns into a shorter, bouncier stride. The important concept to focus on is that the energy is in the bounce. If you do not develop this “bouncy energy” your horse will fall out of the canter.
Start with your warm up, and when the horse is focused, on the aids and the bit, revisit again your collected trot work for a few minutes to develop the same step. When you feel that shorter more compact collected step, in time with the rhythm, ask for a canter.
This upwards transition to the canter should feel somewhat different than what you are used to for these reasons: His hind leg should be relatively more underneath him, his response from your leg should be quicker, and his bridle response should also be quicker. The result of this should be a more “upward” transition into a compact, round, canter, rather than the “launch forward” transition of a horse that is less round and less collected, and results in a sloppy canter where the horse is on the forehand and covering more ground.
As you are cantering, guide your horse to a 20 meter circle, and in that circle ask your horse for a moderate lengthening. This should take about 6 strides. At the 6th stride, take 3 more at the same tempo to check for balance and self carriage. Once satisfied, ask your horse to come back to you gradually, one “notch” at a time. The mechanics for this are, momentarily firming your calves to tell your horse “come under me”. As you feel the haunch stride under, firm your seat as you tighten your knuckles for your half halt when the withers of your horse just start to rise in the upward undulation, feel for the half halt and back it up by drawing your elbows back, if necessary. Your seat should actually speed up slightly asking for a quicker stride, with another immediate half halt to shorten the stride. Your leg aids, in a rhythm should add more impulsion, when necessary, to provide a “bounce”, and prevent your horse from falling out of the canter.
Your goal is to create a slightly quicker stride, asking the horse to place more weight on his haunch, just as the front legs are lifted off of the ground. This rhythmic riding continues until your horse is at the same speed as before your “mini extension”. If executed correctly, the speed will be the same, but the rhythm will be slightly quicker, indicating a greater degree of collection. Once your horse is at roughly the same speed, only slightly more collected, check again for balance and self carriage and when satisfied, repeat the process.
(One of the benefits of conducting this exercise in a 20 meter circle is to count your strides during a complete circle. Having more strides, hence shorter steps, per 20 meter circle than before the collection exercise empirically indicates a higher degree of collection).
The development of a serviceable collected canter for the dressage horse takes time, and is different for each horse. Those horses with great conformation and a talent for collection may develop a beginning collected canter in as little as one week to a month. For those horses that are not so talented, or, for those with poor responses that need retraining, 3 to 6 months may be necessary.
When you have developed a measurable collected canter, start to shorten the number of strides to develop the same speed of lengthening, and the subsequent collection. I work on this exercise for a period of time in my works, 3 sessions per week, and add a shortened version into every work. The goal is 3 strides forward, and immediately 3 strides back. This is rigorous and may take some months to accomplish. This level of expertise is not necessary before starting the third step towards a developed core for your horse.
Once a “serviceable” beginning collected canter has been established, the fun part of “weaving” can begin!
Step 3: “Weave” your way to strength and better timing!
The third step towards strengthening your young horse’s core is actually one of the steps that can be taken to develop a counter canter. I call this exercise weaving because of the back and forth nature of the exercise.
To start this exercise, put your horse in a collected canter down the long side. The object of the game is to ask your horse to take 3 strides towards the quarterline, straighten one stride, and then counter bend and take three strides back to the rail. If this is really challenging for your horse, start with only one stride counter bent, and add more strides as confidence grows. The timing of the turning aids are in rhythm with the start of the upwards movement of the withers as the front hooves are leaving the ground. When your horse is competent to weave back and forth, three times sequentially, you are getting there!
As you can understand, the bilateral exercise of lifting the forehand with some directional rotation on each weave really develops and strengthens the core. As well, playing with collected canter to medium canter to collected canter in rapid sequence fires up the carrying group and the propulsive group of muscles. Interspersing the weaving exercise in between the back and forth pendulum of lengthened and shortened strides, completes the 360 degree nature of strengthening.
The completion of this series of linked exercises will have not only improved your horse’s core, but also your timing and understanding of what quality aids feel like and engender within your horse. The fun, now, really begins in your ability to master 2nd and 3rd levels!
