Top Tips and Common Mistakes

By Your Horse

Riding advice

03 September 2010 15:42

Top Tips:

- Have a clear warm-up routine that you know works well for your horse and stick to the same formula every time you school. This has a calming effect and gets you both more easily into a work frame of mind. It's especially useful to relax and engage the horse's brain in a new venue or at a competition, provided you always stick to the same routine.

- Make life easier for the horse by starting on his better rein. Allow the horse to break into trot if he loses bnalance, then get a quality canter back before trying again.

- Think of keeping the horse's shoulders straight and upright throughout the exercises, and turning your shoulders, too. They should be aligned with those of the horse. If the hose is falling in through one shoulder, free up his body and straighten him by riding a few lateral steps the other way - ie, if the horse is falling in left, leg-yield off your right leg, or use a few strides of your shoulder fore to control the outside shoulder.

- Don't over-ride or over-organise your horse. Let him make his own mistakes, then rebalance, reorganise and try again calmly.

- Remember that counter-canter is a tiring and demanding exercise, so use it sparingly and allow the horse plenty of breaks.

Common Mistakes

- Trying to work the counter-canter before true canter aids are properly understood and obeyed, or when the horse is too weak or too young.

- Overbending the horse's neck rather than taking control of the shoulders.

- Asking for too steep a turn or too many strides before the horse is strong enough, forcing him to break. Stick to shallow turns and loops that get deeper as the horse gets stronger.

- Rider tries too hard and over-rides, commonly resulting in pulling back or being too strong in the hans, and/or gripping with leg, stopping breathing and/or bracing against the horse.

- Rider loses clear 'position left' or 'position right' and stops using correct canter aid. Keep that outside leg back (the one nearest the open side of the arena) and inside leg on the girth (remember, the inside leg is the one nearest to the wall during counter-canter).

- Rider's weight slips in wrong direction, often because rider twists her upper body rather than aligning her shoulders with those of the horse. Correct placement of rider's shulders usually results in corerct placement of the seatbones below them.

- Rider allows canter to become too big, resulting in horse becoming hollow and possibly changing/going disunited in effort to rebalance.