Every animal handler or hope-to-be trainer needs to establish a relationship that allows the animal to understand them and figure out what they are asking them to do. The best and most effective system must be based on trust. The obedience or compliance we are looking for flows from that trust. The basis for a horse trusting you is that everything you do is routine and usual. There’s never anything sudden or startling going on. And the way you start that feeling in the horse is by doing everything you do around him in a rhythmic way.

Graphic is accompany Training Tree articles by Ron Meredith, President,
Meredith Manor International Equestrian Centre
©2002 - 2003 Riding Masters Ltd.

In my early training days, I was taught that the first thing a real trainer did was to gentle a horse. You proceeded to do that by tying the horse up somewhere and sacking him out until his skin stopped jumping when you whopped him with the sack or blanket or whatever and he stood there and accepted it. The problem with a system like that is it doesn’t teach the horse what to do. Instead of being positive, it’s negative. It teaches the horse what not to do. If he keeps flying around at the end of the rope, he’s going to get hit again. If he stands still, the sack will go away.

If you grab the handle of a hot pan, it doesn’t take you long to realize your mistake. Your body reacts to the stimulus and you let go of the pan. You learned not to pick up a hot pan but since you didn’t really have time to process all your options, your learning isn’t very complete. Just like the horse getting “gentled”, you got a negative education. You learned what not to do, what to be afraid to do. If you had had the time to process the situation, you might have gotten a more positive education and learned the way to pick up a hot pan so you wouldn’t get burned.

Rhythm is at the bottom of the training tree because that’s how you get it all started. If the horse is not worried, not wary of sudden things or unsure of what is going to happen next, then you are starting to create a relationship built on trust. From the minute you come in contact visually in the pasture or by his hearing your footfalls or your voice as you come down the barn aisle, you want to be doing everything rhythmically. Steady footfalls, steady movements open a gate or door, everything steady and even to convey a feeling to the horse that everything is going to be consistent and predictable.

You can start to judge whether you’ve got rhythm by paying attention to breathing, both yours and the horse’s. Paying attention to your own breathing can help you stay rhythmic. If you hold your breath, you’ve lost it. Paying attention to the horse’s breathing will tell you if something you’ve done has startled the horse because anything unrhythmic will interrupt the horse’s breathing. If the horse startles and catches him breath but you can keep from catching your own breath, you will keep the rhythm going despite the circumstances. Gradually the horse will figure out that if something startles him, you’re a good spot to come back to because everything around you stays rhythmic and predictable. You’re a safe place.

A lot of people can stay rhythmical while their catching their horse and grooming their horse but as soon as they go into training mode, they starting using sudden moves to gain control. To train a horse, you have to interact with him, not interrupt him.

For example, a lot of people think the best way to stop a baby male horse from biting while you’re working with him is to just keep pushing his nose away anytime he tries to take a nip. But that interrupts whatever else you’re trying to do with him at the time and pulls you into his game.

Instead, you just put a flash or a drop noseband on him and stabilize his jaw so he can nibble with his lips but he can’t bite. Now you just go about your business and when he swings around and nibbles, you just ignore him. You don’t react, you don’t break your rhythm, and pretty soon the game gets boring and he quits. Whoever controls the rhythm controls the movement.

A lot of beginners can be rhythmical on the ground but once they’re in the saddle, they tend to hold their breath and react when they get frightened. If you hold your breath, your body locks up. You need to become self-disciplined enough to maintain the rhythm under any circumstances. If a horse startles or spooks when you’re riding him, the best thing you can do is to ride him calmly and quietly forward with as little interruption as possible.

When you’re training a horse to be rhythmical, you listen to his footfalls. The order of his footfalls, regardless of which gait he’s in, should be even. Horses lose their rhythm when their backs are tense or their riders use rein aids that are too strong or driving aids that are too strong. The walk should be a four-beat march, the trot has a two-beat rhythm. The canter has three beats.

In the beginning, a trainer just rides whatever rhythm the green horse offers but as the horse progresses, the rider’s seat sets the rhythm he or she wants the horse to move in. Playing music in an arena helps a lot of riders and horse pick up a rhythm. Walking and trotting over cavaletti can help a horse develop rhythm. Walking over uneven ground or up and down hills are other exercises a trainer can use.

The games we eventually want to play with our horses all involve some test of rhythm. Dressage is a game of maintaining rhythm with varying degrees of strength and stride length. Reining involves riding a lot of circles with varying rhythm. Whatever your goal, rhythm is always going to be at the foundation of the training you need.

As the horse progresses in his training, you begin “layering” new things on top of what the horse always knows. If you have a problem, you go back to where the horse last accepted everything and start over from there.

Rhythm is at the bottom of the training tree because doing everything in a consistent, predictable way gets the horse’s attention and builds trust in the horse. When you’re doing things rhythmically and you are never quick or abrupt or “startling” to the horse, then the horse will relax. Now you can start to work with his mind.

You know whether the horse trusts you or not by watching his body language. His breathing will tell you if he’s relaxed or not. The position of his ears and his eyes will tell you where his attention is. The set of his tail and the degree of tension in his facial muscles, his neck muscles and his back muscles are other clues to his state of mind. In the beginning, you need some mechanical guidelines for judging whether a horse is relaxed. Remember, thought, that part of what any horse presents to you is just his personality, separate from the specific body language he’s giving you about how he feels at the moment. Eventually you just want to develop a feel for whether the particular horse is relaxed or not. Then anytime you lose it, you just go back to doing something in a rhythmic way until the horse puts his attention back on you and relaxes again.

To maintain relaxation or enforce it when the horse loses it, you have to stay relaxed yourself. That can take a lot of self discipline. For example, if a horse steps on your foot, you can’t startle him with a big yelp or a hard slap. You just have to stand there and take it a little while you show him the change you want him to make so he gets off your foot. You stay dominant in the situation by keeping your cool.

It works the same way if the horse starts acting up a little and playing games or calling to the horses on the other side of the arena. You enforce the relaxation by staying relaxed yourself, refusing to get involved in the horse’s game, doing something in a rhythmic way to get the horse’s attention back on you.

Let’s say you’re walking along with the horse in a round pen doing some ground work with him and the horse starts to get excited. You stop and start some scratching and more scratching and more in a rhythmic way to get his attention back on you. If the horse’s activity drive builds and he needs to spend it before he can pay attention to you, then you unhook the lead and step back. You don’t add to the activity drive by chasing him or doing anything exciting. You just walk along in a bigger and bigger circle farther behind him to just give him a feel of where you are. Eventually the horse will stop and look at you. Then you stop and step back to bring the horse up to you. The key is that you always move in a rhythmic way that never startles the horse or chases the horse or makes the horse feel that you are a predator. Rhythmic, consistent movements will help the horse relax and be receptive to what you want to teach him.

Here’s another example. You’re saddling a green horse for the first time. You do some rhythmic ground work to warm him up and settle him down, then you bring the saddle in and set it down where they can see it. If the horse gets excited, you just stand there and don’t add to the excitement by insisting that he do anything in particular. You let him pick the distance he feels comfortable from the equipment and maybe you do a little more ground work. Eventually, he’ll come in and put his nose on it. When he’s totally bored with it, you start showing it to him on both sides by picking it up and down. You only lift it as high as you can without losing the relaxation. So you put it up and down, higher and higher until he’s bored with it. You break everything down into the smallest possible pieces and intentionally follow some kind of rhythm in introducing each little piece.

If you’re riding the horse and he spooks or jumps, you do not punish the horse, you do not react, you don’t stop if you can help it. You just go back to riding with rhythm and relaxation, ho hum, and get control of the mood again. If it’s hard for you to stay relaxed, concentrate or your breathing or try humming or whistling or singing something to yourself. You have to teach yourself to work in a rhythmic and relaxed way before you can teach your horse to work that way. That’s one of the greatest benefits of Linda Tellington-Jones’s TTeam™ body work. It helps people work with their horses in a calm, rhythmic way.

When you’re using nuances like rhythm and relaxation to control your horse, it doesn’t look like much is happening a lot of the time. Most people want to use dramatic pressures because they create activity and that makes it look like they’re doing something.

Rhythm and relaxation are the bridge between the heeding system of ground work we teach here at Meredith Manor and our riding program. Students who learn to work with rhythm and relaxation develop a mental discipline that allows them to work with rhythm and relaxation when they’re riding the horse. They learn to use rhythmic and relaxed body language on the ground to create feelings of shapes in their horses. Then, from the saddle, they learn to apply the aids in a rhythmic and relaxed way to create feelings of shapes they want the horse to take.

To control the horse’s body, you must control his mind. To control the horse’s mind, you must get his attention. Rhythmic movements as a member of the “herd” get a horse’s attention and make you a safe place to be. Continual rhythmic movements with no interruption, no startle, help the horse relax so you can start to work on his mind.

When we first start working with a green horse, we get his trust by working with him in a relaxed and rhythmic way whether we’re catching him, grooming him, or doing some groundwork with him in some kind of pen. You want the horse to be comfortable with your presence and with the general pattern of what you’re going to do today, based on what you did with him the day before and the day before that and the day before that.

When it’s time to ride the horse, you introduce him to the saddle and the blanket and the bridle in the same relaxed and rhythmic way, breaking everything down into the smallest possible bites you can think of. The same goes with introducing the rider’s weight. Now you’ve got the horse accepting the bridle and the blanket and the saddle and the rider mounting and the two of you are just standing there in the arena waiting for the next thing to happen. Maybe you’re scratching him and patting him to keep his attention. At some point, the feeling’s going to change for him and the horse is going to offer to move a step. Your job is to allow the horse to move however he wants and to just follow whatever he does. You allow his freedom of gait.

Freedom of gait means the horse can reach forward with his hips and shoulders without meeting any resistance. That means the rider’s not bumping him in the mouth or pulling on the reins or shifting her weight. Basically, the rider doesn’t interfere with horse’s natural movement.

Now freedom of gait is a very basic, simple concept. We want to let the horse figure out how to move on his own now that he’s got a rider’s weight on his back. Your job at this stage is to stay out of his way and to stay over his center of balance while you follow his motion. You’re going to leave your reins long and loopy. You’re not going to use your weight or your legs or your reins in any way that interferes with the normal way that horse moves. You don’t want to constrict him or confine him in any way because when you do you can actually deteriorate the quality of his gait.

This is an easy concept to think about but not always an easy one to execute. Normally we’re quite willing to allow horses to move freely when we’re working them from the ground. When we get on their backs, however, our own fears or lack of riding skills begin to limit us. When we limit the horse’s movements to what we’re comfortable with so we can stay on and stay in control then our limitation becomes the horse’s limitation. Think about the kind of basketball player little Michael Jordan would have become if his parents had tied his feet together every time he jumped in the air, if they always told him to keep his feet on the ground because all that jumping in the air made them uncomfortable.

The horse’s limit should be their own physical limit. And every horse is going to have one. Not every horse is going to be a grand prix dressage horse. Not every horse is going to be an upper level event horse or a top reining horse or a top cutting horse. But every horse should have to opportunity to develop physically to the point where they’re the best that they can be. And that’s going to be your job, to make every horse your ride better. You can make every horse better using this training tree because you’re developing the muscle, you’re developing the rhythm, you’re improving how they carry themselves so they can be better at whatever game they’re going to be. Your job as the trainer is to never limit the horse, to never make the horse less in what he can be by nature, to always allow the horse to be as much as he can be by nature.

Some young horses are pretty enthusiastic about life. So when you first get on and you’re not interfering with how they move, they may choose to run around the arena in three leaps or to buck and twist a little bit. It’s the riders’ job to allow the horse to do any of this for two reasons. First, we want to allow the horse to develop their gaits to the best possible quality and, second, we don’t want to quell their enthusiasm. Remember the whole purpose of the training tree and of training in a horse logical sequence is to take what the horse has by nature and make it better.

It’s the same with the baby horses. You have to allow them to play, to express their feelings towards what they’re doing in a positive manner. Later, when they understand the language of aid pressures we can tell them what to do but we don’t do that right at the beginning. Eventually all of their enthusiasm gets turned into work that develops the muscles, that develops the gaits, that develops the horse into an athlete. If you have a really enthusiastic horse, you can limit the range of his reactions by limiting the size of the arena where you work him.

Some communication with the horse does start right from the beginning but only in the sense that the trainer applies aid pressures that shape whatever the horse is offering them anyway. So it’s horse logical. You’ve been doing groundwork that teaches the horse that when he moves away from a pressure, the pressure goes away. So if he offers to trot, you use a little leg pressure just as he moves off. Leg pressure means to move forward so you apply it just as the horse offers forward movement then you reward by taking the pressure away and giving him a little pat. Eventually the horse begins to connect the dots. But we don’t start systematically applying directional pressures until the horse is comfortable carrying the rider’s weight.

In these early stages, the hands and elbows just follow the horse’s motion and allow whatever the horse offers. There’s no interference with the horse’s forward motion. As the horse gets more and more comfortable carrying a rider’s weight, he will start to relax and reach his head and neck forward and down. By showing him a little bit contact without interfering with or restricting his freedom, we start teaching him to move forward seeking contact with the bit.

We’re not doing anything fancy at this stage in the horse’s training. We’re just building on the trust that rhythm and relaxation has produced, keeping him comfortable with having us around, showing him what we want in a horse logical way. Rhythm, relaxation and freedom of gaits form a solid base for our training tree. By allowing the horse freedom of gaits, we allow his natural forward movement. With the next step up the tree contact--we encourage that forward movement even more.

As our baby horse progresses up the training tree, we’ve given him a solid base of trust. We work with rhythm and relaxation doing anything we do from catching him to grooming him or putting on his leg wraps or giving him some play time before we put his tack on. He’s comfortable with us and the general pattern of the work we do together. When we first got on his back, we allowed him to move with complete freedom, never interfering with or restricting his natural gaits. The next step is to get him working with freedom of gait while seeking and accepting contact with the rider’s hands.

When we’re talking about contact, we’re talking about an even, steady, elastic connection between the rider’s hands and the horse’s mouth. It’s easy to get side tracked by the terminology here because everybody uses it a little bit differently. “Elastic” is probably the best descriptive term because what we call contact isn’t a single point somewhere. It involves a whole lot of dots we have to connect from the horse’s mouth to the bit to the reins to the rider’s hands and elbows and shoulders and then through a whole circle of the rider’s muscles and the horse’s muscles. So if we say “seeking the bit” or “soft elbows” or “straight reins” then someone might focus on just one point and miss the bigger picture.

For contact to be elastic, the rider has to be relaxed. Otherwise, their hands or their elbows or some part of them is going to be set and rigid, not moving as the horse is moving. If the rider isn’t relaxed enough to follow the horse’s motion, the horse is going to get bumped in the mouth.

The rider’s hands and elbows aren’t immobile because that would bump the horse’s mouth, too, as his neck and back flex with his motion. They are quiet. Or some people say soft because that helps other people remember not to allow any muscle tension there. Hands can’t be quiet and steady until the rider has developed an independent seat. He or she doesn’t need to tense their leg muscles to keep their balance or hang on the reins to keep their balance. So their relaxation isn’t going to disappear the moment the horse makes some bigger move underneath them.

So we’ve got our baby horse moving freely around in the arena and as he gets used to the feeling of carrying our weight he starts to relax. His neck muscles relax, then his back muscles relax and the horse just naturally starts stretching down. Up to this point, the rider has just been allowing whatever the horse offered and keeping a loopy rein. There hasn’t been any interference from the rein that in any way discouraged or limited the horse’s forward motion. The rider’s just been sitting there relaxed, following the motion with a quiet hand, allowing the baby horse complete freedom of movement.

As the horse relaxes and offers that stretching, he takes that loop out of the reins. The rider then shows him a soft, elastic connection between his mouth and the rider’s hands through the bit and the reins. The rider is still allowing freedom of gait, still not interfering with the horse’s natural forward motion. Gradually, our baby horse begins to connect the dots. When he moves forward, stretches down and seeks contact, he gets a little steadying support from the rider that helps him balance himself and carry the rider’s weight a little more easily. But there’s still no interference, no restriction of his movement.

Now the important thing to remember here is that the horse is going to look for this contact himself. You’re not going to say, “Today’s the day.” You’re not going to pick up the reins and reach for a feel of the horse’s mouth or hold it or pull on it and say now you have contact. Contact comes from the horse working with rhythm and relaxation while being allowed the freedom of his gaits. And with that, he begins to relax his neck and back under the rider’s weight and stretch down. He starts looking for the rider’s hand a little bit to help him steady himself and deal with that weight. The rider has to wait for the horse to offer that himself. Then the rider’s going to be there to give him a little support in front.

With the first three steps on the training tree rhythm, relaxation, and freedom of gaits the horse is really just getting accustomed to being comfortable around the rider, comfortable working with the rider, and comfortable carrying his or her weight. Now we’re adding contact, we’re starting to show the horse that we want him to move forward freely. Generally, a baby green horse that was a clean slate when you started is going to take 6 to 9 months to reach this stage. Some horses are going to reach this stage sooner than others. Some are going to take longer depending on their athletic ability or their history, things you might have to be working with that happened to them in the past. It’s important to allow the horse to progress at his own rate. Otherwise, you may find yourself coming back to this point when the horse’s progress starts falling apart farther down the road.

The nice thing about having a training tree built on a sequence of horse-logical steps is that when you get in trouble or the horse quits making progress, you can start all over again at the bottom and work the horse back up through each of the levels until you find the sticky spot. Then you have to stay at that level and fix the problem before the horse can make progress again. I happen to think it’s just easier to do it right in the first place, but that’s my opinion.

We get halfway up the training tree before we introduce the concept of straightness to the horse. We spend the first months of a horse’s training working on rhythm, relaxation, and freedom of gaits. In this early phase of training, we want him to feel comfortable carrying the weight of a rider. In the second phase of his training, we start to develop the quality of his forward movement. We ask him to accept the contact between the bit and our hand. Toward the end of his first year of training, we put our focus on straightness.

Straightness is a pretty easy concept but a lot of people mythunderstand it. It does not mean the direction the horse is moving. Whether he appears to be standing or moving crooked when you look at him is not the point. What straightness means is that the horse’s entire body from nose to tail is in alignment with an imaginary line on the ground. That line might happen to be parallel a fence or it might be running down the middle of an arena. But a horse can travel “straight” on a circle just as well.

In order to travel straight, the horse has to be able use and coordinate the muscles on both sides of his body to an equal degree. All horses are crooked by nature. They all have one side that they prefer to turn on and one side that they don’t. Some people refer to this as a horse having a stiff side and a hollow side. If a horse is stronger on his right side, it’s easier for him to turn to the left so that’s the side he’ll turn to when he’s fleeing from danger and that’s the canter lead he’ll tend to favor.

This should be easy to understand because most people aren’t straight, either. People have a dominant side that they prefer to use, too. You learned to write with the hand on that side and you don’t try to change unless you break that arm. There isn’t any reason that you couldn’t write as well with one hand as the other. But, basically because we don’t see any big need for it, we don’t try. The horse sees things the same way. So it’s the trainer’s job to help him work on both sides and develop his muscles evenly.

The line you are following on the ground, whether it’s a curved line or a straight line, determines whether the horse is traveling straight. The horse’s right feet move along a track just to the right side of this line and his left feet travel along a track just to the left of it. An easy way to tell if a horse is straight is watch his hind feet to see if they are following in the same track as the front feet. As his hind foot steps forward it should land along the same track as the front foot on that side. When the right hind follows in the track of the right front, the horse is traveling straight on that line at that moment.

Staying straight on a curved line is hard for many horses. They tend to travel more crooked in one direction than the other. On a circle, this means that they tend to put their inside hind foot on the line they are traveling instead of on the track just to the right or left of it. This moves their haunches to the outside of the circle. When that happens, they’re cheating. They get out of using their whole circle of muscles, especially the abdominal muscles. They aren’t developing both the carrying muscles and the pushing muscles that they are going to need to compete at the higher levels.

So now it’s the trainer’s job now to work on straightness. Circles, serpentines and leg yielding are all good exercises for building the horse’s muscles equally on both sides. Contact has to be there before you can straighten the horse. Remember each hind foot has to follow the track of the front foot on the same side. You can keep putting a horse’s feet back on a track after he moves off of it but you can’t really influence the footfalls so that he doesn’t move off of it in the first place without contact.

To influence the horse’s footfalls, you have to be able to feel them. You can always see the front feet. But you can’t see the hind feet. Start out walking on a loopy rein while you try to feel when the hind foot is moving forward. As the hind foot steps forward, you’re going to feel the seat bone on that side drop a little bit. In the beginning, an instructor on the ground can be a big help in learning how to feel when the haunches are drifting off the track. Eventually you’re going to develop a feel for where the horse’s hind feet are. You’re going to feel with your inside seat bone whether the inside hind stepping straight along the track of the inside front. You have to be able to feel where the hind legs are and where they’re going in order use your aids to ask the horse to move straight. On a circle, for example, you need an independent seat that allows you to apply outside rein and leg in either direction to keep the horse’s haunches from swinging to the outside.

As a rider, you’ve probably found out you have one direction you prefer to go, too, whether it be on the left hand or the right hand. You can get your aids better, you can get your seat better or you might have one leg that’s stronger than the other because you tend to use it more. To be a better rider, you’ve got to work on becoming equally strong on both sides. It’s the same basically with the horses. In almost every game they play, they have to do everything in both directions. Dressage tests are a mirror image. Reining horses work mirror image patterns. Cutting horses have to be able to turn as well in one direction as they do in the other. Jumping horses have to be able to make sharp tight turns to take up a line in one direction as well as the other. So basically your job at this level on the training tree is to make your horse even on both sides.

Balance is one of those terms in the horse industry that is so misused that it’s become mythunderstood. All it really means is that the horse is distributing his weight equally on all four feet. We want him carrying as much of his weight on the ride side of his body as on the left side. We want him to carry as much weight on his two front feet as he does on his two back feet.

That seems pretty simple. But there’s a catch. A horse has this long neck with a big heavy head hanging out there at the end of it which naturally has a tendency to shift a little more of his weight onto his front feet. When he’s just hanging around being himself, a horse typically carries about 60 percent of his weight on his front feet.

This natural balance is going to vary quite a bit from horse to horse. One young horse may look like he’s carrying about equal weight on all four feet when he’s standing there. You can look at another horse and it looks like 90 percent of her weight is on her front feet. As horses grow and develop, their hind end grows first and pretty soon they’re standing downhill. Then you’ve got to wait for the front end to catch up. Some horses never completely catch up and stay built downhill, or what we call on their forehand, their whole lives. Because one side of his body stronger or more dominant than the other, a horse also tends to carry a little more weight on one front foot than on the other. When you’re training a horse, it’s your job to get him carrying his weight more or less equally on all four feet.

When we’re working on straightness, the previous level on our training tree, we start helping the horse develop the muscles and strength he needs to adjust his balance laterally so that he’s carrying an equal amount of his weight on his two front feet. Until the horse becomes straight, becomes equally comfortable using the muscles on both sides of his body, he is going to be carrying more weight on one shoulder or the other. He will feel “stiffer” and less accepting of the rein on one side compared to the other. Once he’s straight, once he’s accepting the rein on both sides, we move to the next level and start asking him to shift some of his weight from his front feet to his back feet to balance longitudinally.

As we’re developing the horse’s muscles and his ability to carry himself in longitudinal balance, remember that horses have rear wheel drive. All of their power comes from their hind end. They don’t have front wheel drive that’s pulling them along. Their engine is in the rear. So we’ve got to build up their engine muscles to play the games they’ll eventually play whether it’s to get over a bigger jump, to get a longer slide, or to do a better canter pirouette.

Developing balance means that we are asking the horse to bring his hindquarters more under his center. If his back feet tend trail out behind him and we use our aids properly to ask him to step more under the center of his belly, he’ll lift his back and start carrying more weight on his hind feet and less weight on his front feet. So his hindquarters need to move up under his center of gravity in order for him to be more balanced. Cavaletti work and transitions are some of the exercises you can use to help a horse develop longitudinal balance.

Training means systematic mental and physical development of the horse. The training tree gives you a sequence of concepts that you can picture step by step. This is very important because it gives you something to go back to when things aren’t working. That’s a big hole in a lot of trainer’s programs. They don’t have a step-by-step system that, if something goes wrong, allows them to go back through the sequence to find the source of the problem.

Take a spin, for example. Some trainers just put the horse in the shape of a spin, reinforce with leg to get him to speed up and hope that the horse will figure out how to do it. A really athletic horse will which is why so many trainers get away with doing things this way. But then they get horses that don’t have natural athletic talent. Something is wrong in the spin. Maybe the horse is crossing his outside front leg behind his inside front instead of in front of it. Or when he pivots he puts his weight on his outside hind leg instead of on his pivot leg. If you have a horse logical sequence like the training tree to develop the horse’s mind and his body, you’ll always have a place to go back to in order to fix something. You can fix the problem within the problem and then, when you ask the horse to spin the next time, he’ll get it right.

A lot of horses that intend to play the higher level games can get along in life quite nicely if they get this far on the training tree. If a horse has rhythm, relaxation, and freedom of gaits, if a horse accepts contact on both reins, can move straight, and is balanced, then that horse is farther along in his training than 90 percent of the horses out there. He’ll do OK at lower level competitions and be a real pleasure as a trail horse.

If you want to play the upper level games, however, the horse needs to continue his body building program. He needs to develop impulsion, suppleness, and learn how to be on the rider’s aids so he can achieve true collection. These are the skills he needs to be a grand prix dressage horse or a super reining horse or a really agile cutting horse.

The horse has rear engine drive. Impulsion describes the powerful thrust from the hindquarters that propels the horse forward. Impulsion is the surge that occurs when the horse’s hindquarters push off the ground. With impulsion, there’s an elasticity and spring to the horse’s forward movement. A rider needs an independent seat and an understanding of how to coordinate aids in order to ask the horse for impulsion.

The only place you can actually see impulsion in gaits like the trot, canter, and gallop that have a moment of suspension (there’s always a foot on the ground when the horse is walking so you won’t see impulsion at that gait). The more impulsion a horse has, the longer that moment of suspension will be. Think of a jumper’s take off or a dressage horse doing an extended trot and you can picture impulsion.

To check to see if you have true impulsion, pick two spots in your arena. Ride at an ordinary, working trot and count the number of strides between those two points. When you come around again, ask the horse to lengthen, to give you a bigger stride with more impulsion from behind. Count the strides again. If you actually have impulsion, if you get the lengthening, there will be fewer steps between the two points. If you get more strides, if the horse quickens his strides when you add a driving leg, he hasn’t yet developed the muscles to create impulsion.

If you aren’t sure if you’re really getting impulsion, this is a good little exercise to test yourself. Eventually, you are going to be able to feel it without counting. But when you’re initially trying to develop a feel for impulsion, pick two points and count your strides.

Impulsion is a power surge that doesn’t have anything to do with speed. It means the horse is pushing more powerfully with his muscles, not moving them faster so he gives you more strides. Impulsion does not have anything to do with excitement, either. You don’t use louder, more exciting aids to create excitement in the horse in hopes of getting impulsion. If you use raise the horse’s excitement level, then what you get is a horse that feels excited rather than one that feels the shape his rider is asking him to take.

Horses don’t do equations very well. You can’t expect that if you did this thing a week ago and another thing two months ago and something else yesterday that the horse is going to be able to add them up and come up with something new. As a horse progresses up the training tree, you have to “layering” his training. That means that the new thing you are asking him to do is just one step or at most two steps away from everything you’ve already taught him. This is true both mentally and physically.

A lot of people who have no trouble understanding the mental layering forget that there’s physical layering and learning going on here, too. Just as a rider has to develop the correct muscle strength and muscle memory in order to apply and coordinate aids, the horse has to develop those skills, too. If you rush the horse and ask for impulsion before he has the skills and muscle strength to respond correctly to your request, you risk developing the wrong muscle memory.

That’s why you have to go through a specific training sequence before you can ask for impulsion. The horse has to respond physically to rein contact and has to develop both sides of his body equally and become straight before he’s got the muscle strength and muscle memory to go on the to impulsion. To give you a longer, bigger stride, the horse has to use his hindquarter muscles to surge off the ground. He has to have a relaxed, strong back to do this. He has to be balanced.

If you wind up retraining a horse that has been rushed into impulsion before he was ready, you are going to have to back down the training tree to the level he doesn’t understand and come back up slowly from there. Everything on the lower levels of the training tree needs to be there first in order for the horse to be able to carry himself correctly and have the properly developed muscles to produce impulsion. If you don’t have straightness you’re not going to have impulsion. If you don’t have balance you can’t get impulsion. So again, the key is those sequential steps.

As you move on to the upper levels, choosing a good partner can make your training job easier. Some horses are just naturally more athletic than others. Their conformation works for them, not against them. These horses have the potential to develop faster with fewer training plateaus than the horse whose conformation is less than perfect. Temperament comes into play here, too. But if you have the patience and take the time, there’s no reason you can’t take whatever horse you’re working with and improve his capabilities.

Suppleness is another mythunderstood word in the horse industry. Suppleness simply means the ability to bend without stiffness. We want the horse to have loose, pliable jointshis hocks, his hips, his knees, his shoulders, his poll and his jaw. There are other joints that must be flexible, too, but generally when we talk about a horse’s ability to bend, we’re talking about one or another of those major joints.

If a horse stiffens any of these joints, that stiffness goes through his whole body. If the horse braces in his poll or jaw, for example, nothing else is going to be loose because he is locked against the rider’s hand and that stiffness is going affect all his other joints to some degree. Stiffness or resistance in any joint causes a disruption of the energy flow throughout the horse. Smooth transitions are a sign of a supple horse and, vice versa, jerky, jumpy or jarring transitions signal resistance somewhere.

Just as some people are suppler or stiffer by nature, horses are individuals. Some have short bunchy muscles, short necks, straight pasterns, or other conformation traits that make flexibility more difficult to achieve. Others have long, lean muscles, long necks, and perfect shoulder and hip angles that make bending their joints very easy for them. There are a lot of different exercises trainers can use to help any horse become looser and suppler in his joints. The key is that these exercises need to be done while the horse is moving in order for him to become truly supple.

There’s a lot of mythunderstanding in the horse industry about this. Stretching and bending the horse while he is standing still will not make a horse supple. Some trainers think stretching is the way to supple a horse so they tie a horse’s head around to his side while he’s standing in a stall in order to “supple” his neck.

First of all, you’re not going to loosen and supple a horse without motion. Maybe there’s a little stretching going on here. And you can stretch a horse’s front leg and sometimes the horse will reach out and stretch his back down. You can do a little stretching with the horse standing still but you’re not doing anything to strengthen the muscles around his joints so you can’t make him suppler.

Second, tying a horse in a position for any period of time is going to make him uncomfortable. So instead of giving to the pressure, he’s going to brace against it. Imagine if you slouched and a physical therapist decided the way to fix that was to tie your arms behind your head in some strange way and make you stand that way for several hours. You probably aren’t going to stand any straighter or get and looser. Instead, you’re probably going to tense your muscles and have muscles resisting and working against each other. There’s no logic to tying a horse into a pretzel with the idea of suppling him somehow.

Finally, I don’t think I’ve ever known any horse, unless it had some sort of severe physical problem, that couldn’t bend his neck. Horses can reach around and bite our feet when we’re riding them and reach around and scratch their bellies. Most horses are pretty loose in their neck vertebrae. So the idea that tying their head around loosens anything and makes them suppler doesn’t make a lot of sense.

So when you’re thinking about suppling a horse, you need to use common sense. The muscles around his joints have to be stretched and strengthened and he has to be moving to do that. You also can’t work on suppling the horse until he has achieved a certain level of gymnastic conditioning that comes from developing the muscles equally on both sides of his body so he’s straight, learning how to bring his hindquarters underneath himself to become balanced, and building the muscular strength in his hindquarters that allows him to move with impulsion.

Trainers have to be aware of everything that can be affecting a horse. If a horse stays stiff or resistant despite gymnastic exercises, he may need to go back down the training tree a level or two to correct the problem. But sometimes there can be a physical problem causing his stiffness and it’s always going to be your job to figure out what is going on. We have a chiropractor visit regularly because we have some horses that need adjustments to help them stay loose and avoid stiffness. Until the horse achieves suppleness, he can’t attain the highest levels of training.

It takes a baby green horse an average of 18 months to get to this point. When people take a horse to a trainer and expect to have a finished horse in 30 or 60 days they’re not playing fair with the horse or the trainer. That encourages short cuts that leave big holes in the horse’s foundation. Going back to plug those holes and unlearn bad habits can take a lot longer than taking the horse through the full training sequence in the first place. There are no short cuts if you want to play the upper level games right.

A lot of the terms that horse people use have been misused and overused to the point that they are no longer meaningful. Because the term means different things to different people, it is more apt to be mythunderstood than it is to be helpful, especially in a training situation. Saying that a horse is “on the bit” is one of those terms. As a horse gets near the top of the training tree, we like to talk about him being “on the aids” rather than being on the bit.

Saying that a horse is on the aids takes the focus off a mental picture of the horse’s mouth and front end. It puts it on the horse’s whole body and on the whole package of communication tools that the rider should be using and the horse understanding at this level in the training. A horse that is on the aids:

• Offers no signs of resistance to the rider’s aids,
• Instantly responds to all of the rider’s aids,
• Is muscularly connected from his hocks through his back and neck to the bit because the rider’s whole circle of aids is closed.

Remember that at the very bottom of the training tree, we started out asking the horse to move with rhythm and relaxation. As he moves up the training tree, we don’t want him to lose those basics. As we get closer and closer to where he’s going to be at the top of his game, we’re making a lot more physical demands on him. If we’ve taken the time to bring him up through all the in-between training levels, methodically developing his body as well as his mind, he’s still going to be rhythmic and relaxed as he reaches the top.

Resistance means that the horse has lost that basic rhythm and relaxation. You’ll know he’s lost it if he goes around with his mouth open, or his teeth grinding, or his ears pinned, or his tail swishing, or some other indicator that he’s uncomfortable about something. The trainer needs to back down the training tree until she finds the place where the horse’s comfort turns to discomfort, solve the problem, and work back up from there.

When we talk about a horse responding instantly to the aids we really mean that the communication between the horse and rider is so subtle it’s basically invisible. Sometimes people talk about a horse being “obedient” to the rider’s aids. That’s a mythunderstood term, too. Obedience implies things like dominance and subservience. It makes it sound like communication is a one-way street. The rider tells the horse what to do and the horse’s job is to do it right away. A lot of people ride with this attitude.

Communication between the horse and rider should always be two way. When the horse was a baby green learner, we made sure that we first showed him what we wanted him to do. When he understood that, then we could ask him what to do. When we were sure he understood what we were asking, we could tell him what to do, or reinforce our asking, if he didn’t respond to our aids.

To get that invisible connection, the rider has to ride stride by stride by stride and keep her focus on her horse now and now and now. When a horse is “on the aids,” the rider asks, the horse listens, the horse responds, and his response gives the rider feedback about how to apply her aids at the next stride. So invisible obedient to the aids is as much the rider’s responsibility as the horse’s. It isn’t just about the horse being obedient and doing whatever the rider told him to do.

The rider also has a responsibility for making sure that the horse has a muscular connection from his hocks through his back and neck to the bit. In order for the horse to give her that response, she has to make sure her whole circle of aids is closed. That means that she’s coordinating her seat and weight aids, leg aids, and rein aids so that none of the horse’s energy leaks out anywhere. He’s using all of his body with just the right degree of muscular tension to correctly take the shape she’s asking for at the speed she’s asking for stride by stride by stride.

Being on the aids is hard work for both the horse and the rider. If you ride an advanced level horse for 40 minutes you’re not likely to have him on the aids that whole time. But as the horse comes farther along in his training and as your partnership with him develops and your communication becomes more and more sophisticated those moments when you and the horse are 100 percent in sync will come more and more often. That’s the sweet spot that makes all the hard work up to this point worth every minute. It’s that quiet thrill when, even for just a few moments, everything is perfect.

Good training is boring. When the rider is keeping everything relaxed, everything consistent, everything logical it looks like nothing is happening. A lot is going on between you and the horse and it’s probably not all that boring for you as you work with him. But someone watching oftentimes isn’t seeing a whole lot happening. And maybe it can even be a little boring for the trainer who’s starting his ninety-fifth young horse and he’s just kind of waiting for it to come along and there’s not much satisfaction yet. Then comes one of those moments when everything comes together and you feel like all you have to do is think something and the horse understands it. That’s what it feels like when a horse is on the aids.

Collection is at the top of our training tree and it is another one of those mythunderstood words out in the horse industry. A lot of people look at a horse and say he’s collected when he’s really just all bunched up in front. Maybe he’s got a lot of activity drive and the rider is hanging on his mouth so he can’t move forward and spend it as freely as he’d like. So he curls up his neck and prances around and people who don’t know any better say he’s collected. Or maybe the rider doesn’t really know what it means to have an independent seat and put her horse on the aids. She just fusses with the reins and the horse, being an obliging sort, bends at the poll, tucks his nose, slows down so she thinks her horse is “on the bit” and that she’s got collection.

True collection only comes at the end of a long road when the horse has done the necessary body building to be able to respond correctly to a complete circle of correct aids. We had a lady who brought a 2-year-old horse here for training and after just a few months, she wanted to know if her horse was doing collected work yet. Collection is at the top of the training tree for a reason. It takes a great deal of both physical and mental conditioning before any horse is ready to attempt true collection much less achieve it for more than a stride or two.

In order to achieve collection, a horse has to develop a lot of muscle in his hindquarters. He has to be able to shift his center of gravity more over his hind feet by increasing the bend in his hocks and stifles. That lowers his hindquarters, shortens his strides, and means that when he thrusts off the ground, his impulsion now becomes more “up” than “forward.”

When people try to describe what collection looks like, they talk about the horse shortening his frame. If you draw an imaginary line around a horse when he’s standing still, you can describe where his body is relative to the sides of that box as he begins to work. When people talk about a horse lengthening or shortening his frame, they mean how he looks in that imaginary box relative to where he was when he was standing still. He may have stretched out and lengthened his spine so his nose may now be sticking out the front of the box or maybe he’s gathered himself up so that now there’s some space between his nose and the front of the box.

In true collection, that frame shortening comes about because the horse shifts his weight to the rear so that his hind feet are closer to his center of gravity. He does this by increasing the bend in his hocks which lowers his hindquarters. Now if you look at the horse relative to the sides of the imaginary box, it looks like he’s traveling uphill in a shorter frame even though he’s standing on level ground.

There’s one more thing that’s got to be there for true collection. When a young horse or a horse that’s lower down on the training tree moves with impulsion, their stride becomes bigger and longer, more forward. When collected horse shortens his frame and lowers his hindquarters, however, his impulsion or thrust off the ground becomes more up than forward. Now the horse that’s framed in that box is the picture of coiled power.

Some people pull their horse together in a shorter frame, slow down the rhythm so he’s taking shorter strides and think they’ve achieved collection. But it isn’t collection because the impulsion, the way he pushes off the ground, stays the same. In true collection, the horse must lower his hindquarters and push off the ground so that he moves his body more up than forward.

It takes a lot of muscle to do collected work. It’s extremely difficult. It’s not intended to be something simple and you can’t take shortcuts. A really talented, athletic young horse may be able to achieve collection in two years of training. Many horses may need as long as four or five years of working four or five times a week before they have the proper muscling to compete as a grand prix dressage horse. Different horses will take more or less time. And not every horse is going to have the physical potential to reach the top levels in whatever game their rider has decided to play.

The horse needs to go methodically through every step in the training tree in order to develop the muscles he needs to play at the upper levels. Whether it’s a dressage horse or a reiner or a cutter or an event horse, you can look at the horse’s muscle development as he goes into the arena and predict whether he’s going to be able to give a good performance or not. If he doesn’t have the muscle, you know it’s not going to be a good performance because the horse hasn’t been conditioned to do the job.

Followed in the correct sequence, the steps in the training tree methodically prepare a horse both physically and mentally to play whatever game the rider likes to play. The training tree has ten levels that have to be mastered in sequence: rhythm, relaxation, freedom of gaits, contact, straightness, balance, impulsion, suppleness, putting the horse on the aids, and collection. Now, not every horse is going to have the physical ability or the mind to go the upper levels. And more than 90 percent of the time, a horse gets limited by his rider’s ability level. But following the training tree sequence can help any horse be the best he can be.

It’s nice if you can start out with a baby green horse that has no fear of people or bad habits that other people have taught him. When a horse is a blank slate, an open mind, he can come along pretty quickly. For most horses, that means spending about 2 years mastering the basic and intermediate steps. Really athletic horses with good trainers and riders may take a little less time to develop the degree of muscling they need to make it all the way to the top.

No horse goes right through each level without a hitch. Horses advance and regress. As the baby green horse learns to carry weight for the first time, he may think he’s got it all figured out. Maybe he’s a little crooked right now but he’s found a place he’s comfortable. And the trainer lets the horse go along and work freely and eventually the horse starts reaching for the bit and seeking some contact with the rider’s hands. Then the trainer asks him to start moving straight and the whole deal falls apart. All those compensations for the rider’s weight that the horse figured out to keep his balance don’t work anymore because the trainer is showing him something new, asking a different question. Maybe the horse even seems to go all the way back to start and loses his rhythm for awhile. That’s alright. You’ve got to think of regression as progression. As the horse’s muscles develop so he can carry the rider’s weight and stay straight in his body at the same time, all of the previous things he’s figured out will fall back into place.

Some horses fly right through two or three levels and then get stuck for awhile. Plateaus are normal, too. It’s the trainer’s job to make sure he or she has correctly shown the horse what they want. And if they have, then they need to give the horse whatever time he needs to develop mentally or physically enough to move on to the next level.

Consistency is really important in training, especially with baby horses. You cannot bring any horse along in its training by riding them on an erratic schedule. You need to be working them at least four days a week. Five days are better. Now that doesn’t mean you’re going to be putting the ultimate mental and physical pressure on them every day. But you’re going to remind them of what they already know and every once in awhile introduce something new. In order for this work to carry over and become muscle memory for them, you have to be consistent. Once you have a trained horse, you can give him a week or two off and they come back fresh and haven’t forgotten anything. But a training baby is going to act like he never heard it before, he’s never seen it before and he has no idea what you’re talking about. His habits aren’t ingrained yet so it may take you a week or so to get back to where you were before you took time off.

The training tree works for training older horses, too. You just start the older horse out just as though he was a baby green horse and work him up through each level. If he’s an old trooper, he’ll move right along through several levels quickly until he hits his hole, the place in his training that was skipped, or that he was never shown, or where he’s been compensating for his own physical limitations or those of his rider. So you stop there and go to work.

Sometimes when an older horse has to give up an established habit, things fall apart. He seems to get worse instead of better. But, again, that’s OK. Until he figures out what his trainer is showing him and develops the muscles he needs to perform at that level, he won’t be able to move up the training tree and reach the higher levels. He’s got to untrain what he knows and retrain both his mind and body. That can take more time than if he had learned to do things the right way from the start. Cut him some slack and give him whatever time he needs.

The thing you want to remember is that the training tree is a solid, sequential foundation for bringing any horse along in training. It’s something you can always turn to, whether you’re working with green horses or older horses. Each step builds sequentially on all the steps before it. When you look at the bottom of the tree, rhythm has to be established before you can get relaxation. Relaxation has to be there before you can get freedom of gaits. And so on right up the tree. You can’t skip any step because if you do, you’re going to hit the wall at some point. You’ll have to back up and go back to the level you missed and master that before the horse can make lasting progress again.

The training tree applies to everything you do with your horse, even when you’re not mounted. If you go to the barn in a rush, throw the tack on and hustle the horse to the arena, you may find you have a tense or spooky horse. You’ll probably waste the first 30 minutes of your riding time because you lost all the relaxation back in the barn when you first went into the horse’s stall. Instead, if you’d approached the horse in a rhythmic way while you were grooming and tacking up, if you’d led him to the arena with a relaxed attitude, if you’d stayed rhythmic and relaxed as you made your final tack adjustments and swung into the saddle, your horse will be ready to move out freely in rhythm and relaxation as he warmed up.

You can go back to the training tree any time to help you analyze problems. Often when you’ve got a problem, it’s going to be something that was rushed or missed as the horse moved through the training sequence. The difference is that now instead of calling your horse stupid or stubborn or something else out of frustration, you have a way to back up, find what he doesn’t understand, and fix it so that he can be the best that he can be and the partner you want.

1997-2004 Meredith Manor International Equestrian Centre. All rights reserved. Instructor and trainer <a href="http://www.meredithmanor.com/about/staff.asp#ron"> Ron Meredith</a> has refined his "horse logical" methods for communicating with equines for over 30 years as president of <a href="http://www.meredithmanor.com/"> Meredith Manor International Equestrian Centre</a>, an ACCET accredited equestrian educational institution.
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