Thoughts on the Canter

It seems that the early canter lessons that beginners receive - "move with the horse, follow the horse, push with your seat..." can be really damaging.  These lessons,  laid down as gospel, set a muscle memory of 'what canter feels like' which is very hard for riders to break away from.  I recently watched my toddler daughter on a rocking horse and wondered if that's where it all starts?! I suppose the horses that beginners learn to ride on are usually not so forward-thinking too, so you feel like by pumping with your seat you are keeping them going (or they have inadvertently been trained to need that kind of riding to maintain the pace.)

I remember learning, realising the feeling of being able to shorten and lengthen the canter on a little Thoroughbred I was lucky enough to own as a 13-year-old crap rider with plenty of aspirations and book learning but no natural talent or ability or even access to regular lessons.  (Seriously, I look SO AWFUL in the old photos.)  But even then, I remember playing with my horse's schooling.  I remember experimenting, fiddling, riding friends' horses whenever I could and just trying stuff.  Nobody taught me to collect the canter, to shape it, with my seat.  I just figured it out.  Which is one of the reasons I'm pretty surprised more people don't figure it out.  Riders spend years, lifetimes!, getting it really wrong.  And sitting too actively in the canter just makes the horse drop its back away, lengthen its stride, go on the forehand and eventually break to trot.


But the nice part of this is, it's an easy skill to teach because it's easy to feel, easy to explain, easy to do.  Just resist the forward and upward forces from the horse's cantering hindquarter by pushing back and down against it.  That's it.  Most times the horse will think you are asking for trot but if you are quick with your voice and/or inside leg you can soon find a balance between go and woah.  And then the canter stride is YOURS.  Seriously, it makes such a difference being able to control the length of your horse's stride.  Often, green or lazy horses get out of cantering by lengthening their stride to the point where they feel too fast, then when the rider tries to slow them down with the reins, falling out into a trot.  (A truly horrible feeling, the flat canter lolloping downhill into a scrambling unbalanced trot...)

Having this 'collecting seat' tool in your toolbox makes the canter MUCH easier to ride, it makes corners easier to negotiate, it gives you a whole new set of gears and it works on even very green horses.  They instinctively follow a pushing seat and lengthen stride so it makes sense that they will also follow a lifting seat and shorten up.

A note: DO teach your horse to maintain the canter himself until told to trot.  This is also a surprisingly easy skill to train, you just sit still with totally passive legs until they drop out - or threaten to - and then you give them some welly and shout in their ear.  After a couple of repetitions they work out to stay in canter until they're told otherwise!  I wouldn't suggest a wallop with the stick, though, that's uncalled for and unnecessary and might result in a buck!

Riders tend to insist on this 'cruise control' very well at walk and trot but consistently fail to follow it through to the canter.  After all, if your horse was trotting along and dropped to walk without being asked, you'd certainly do something about it, right!?

I wonder - and impatiently await - what other lightbulb moments horses have to teach me!