Training MICHAEL LANGFORD
FINISHED HORSE
P
GETTING Moving
This series deals with the ‘finished’ horse and how to keep him responsive and honest. Here we look at seat and leg aids
art of the appeal of western riding is the joy you get from a responsive, honest horse. In western more than any other discipline we talk about ‘finished’ horses, meaning horses that have been trained to do their job and now just need maintenance. I hope this article will help you on the first step towards maintaining a finished horse at home - keeping him off your leg.
There is nothing more enjoyable than a horse which is responsive to your leg but without proper maintenance they can become dull. Be it in generating forward motion or lateral movements, if you need do more than apply your leg with moderate pressure then your horse needs sharpening up. It is easy to understand why an experienced horse may evade the leg if he is being ridden by a less experienced or demanding rider than his previous trainer, but there is no excuse for letting him get away with it.
THINKING FORWARDS Starting with the very basics, I want you to think about how you cue your horse to move off from the standstill. I personally apply slight
pressure with my lower leg and ‘cluck.’ That is all I need to do. However, I get this response because my horses know that if they do not react to this polite ask, I will use increasingly more pressure with my leg and then spur until I get the desired reaction. I do not mind if they take a couple of seconds to quietly respond and I am especially pleased if my reiners act in this way as there is nothing worse in the show pen than a reining horse who explodes away from the leg. However, these being finished horses, if they steadfastly ignore me then I will hastily remind them.
I use my seat to control a horse’s speed, feeling the movement created by the horse in my body and controlling that to quicken or slow the horses in his gait. I also use my leg in time with my seat to reinforce the cue. I cluck if I want the horse to move at speed and if a horse were being lazy I maintain the same rhythm but increase the pressure through my leg. Once the horse is moving I soften my leg while keeping the same rhythm. If I want to slow the horse I can then ‘hold’ my seat against the movement and encourage them to slow back down. I use the ‘kiss’ sound for a lope
transition but, once in the lope, I will cluck for more speed.
Some rookie riders with more experienced horses get into the trap of nagging with their legs to get the horse to move. By this I mean a rider who rightly uses leg pressure to get a lazy horse to move off but then continues to apply pressure even once the horse is moving. Once the horse has responded in the way you desire go back to the soft leg position described previously. If you continue to apply pressure you will numb your horse to your leg and will eventually have a very difficult horse to ride, and one that will use any break in your leg pressure to quit forward motion.
The only way to fix this is to make it very clear when the horse is expected to move and then soften the pressure while still maintaining the rhythm with your seat. The first few times you do this he will probably break gait or even grind to a halt so you are going to have to come up with a way to drive him forward again immediately. In extreme cases you may have to go to your spur or use the ends of your reins to flick him on his sides where your leg lies to reinforce what you are asking. Whatever
SOFTLY DOES IT
Here the horse is moving forward nicely from a quiet leg, which I have softly against his side in a central position
It’s really important that you always ask your horse with the softest of cues first even if you know he’s going to take no notice. If you always go to the pressure it takes to get him to move first then you will always have to go to that amount of pressure. I will always ask with the lightest of pressure first and then reinforce that cue if necessary. This way the horse has the option of going when asked nicely. I want the time from the initial soft cue to him ‘trying’ to be as short as possible and I’ll always stay soft when they try. This way he can associate the light pressure with the reinforcement, if it was necessary to do so, giving him the desire to stay light.
26
May/June 2012
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