In this issue - HAYGAIN hay steamers sponsored rider, Matt Ryan, talks about how to improve your flatwork, through his own training routine. Here we provide advice on improving paces, rider position and being more disciplined to get the best out of your horse.
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Sitting Trot
This will help warm the horse up and build up control and suppleness.
Shoulder-In
Working on the Flat with Matt Ryan Flatwork training has a huge influence on how successful a horse’s jumping is and plays an important role in the fitness programme. All my horses have flatwork sessions; usually being schooled four or five times a week. The normal routine would be to have an easy day after a competition and then to be schooled on the flat or over jumps for the rest of the week, apart from the days they do their fast work.
I believe in getting them fit by working them on the flat in the school and combining these sessions with galloping. My horses actually do very little roadwork and I feel the schedule we use works better for us than doing short sessions of schooling with lots of hacking out.
I look at flat work for horses as being the equivalent to gym work for an athlete; it builds and tones muscle, improves heart and lung capacity and supples and strengthens the body. And on top of that, it leaves you with a more obedient horse that is easier to ride.
Some people worry that the horse will become stale if it is given this amount of schooling, but I feel that it completely depends on the rider. If you just plod around in circles day after day both horse and rider will become fed up, but if you make it fun and varied it will be enjoyable for both. To prevent any boredom, I train all the horses to an exceptionally high dressage level, far higher than they need to be at for eventing. They learn canter pirouettes, flying changes, Passage and Piaffe, enabling plenty of variety in our schooling sessions. The extra movements also give the horses improved performance in the dressage phase and the better the flatwork, the easier it is to ride a fence.
Schooling at Home A typical schooling session for me would be to come into the school and work the horse in walk, using as many lateral exercises as possible. A really useful suppling exercise is Shoulder-in; for older horses it helps loosen them up before asking them to do anything more demanding and for younger horses it is a lesson in obedience, listening and
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www.equestrianlifemagazine.co.uk responding to the hand and leg aids.
Control and accuracy, on the flat and over fences, all comes down to the horse moving away from and around your leg.
Continuing to walk, I then tend to ride half-pass; again this is a lateral movement that teaches obedience as the horse has to move away from your outside leg, while bending around your inside leg. This is an important exercise to make the horse supple and make sure the horse engages his hindquarters.
Progressing in trot and canter, I tend to play around between different movements, paces and transitions.
Many horses tend to work better on one side than the other, it can often be better on the left side than the right. If your horse has one side better than the other, try to do most of your initial work on their good side, but then work more on the side the horse finds difficult, with the aim to strengthen the horse and make them suppler on that rein.
Generally I work my horses quite low and deep, my interpretation of roundness is more to do with a feeling than a picture of a particular outline. To get this feeling, I want the horse to be strengthening down through the rein and going forwards into the hand – this will start to encourage the horse to swing through its back, which is exactly what you want.
When trotting, I do a lot of work in sitting trot because, as a rider, you can be far more effective in the saddle. It is important to achieve a good sitting trot and to do this you do need to have developed a good seat, position and balance.
Walk
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