#lateral work

Another visual explanation of lateral movements

Five Poles, Five Exercises

This set of exercises works well in a 20×40 arena, allows you to set out one line of poles at the start of the session and not have to change them, and can be ridden over in all paces – perfect for dark schooling nights. As always, you may have to tweak the distances for your horse. An easy way to remember how many steps with the front feet you want between each pole is 3-2-1 (the numbers go down as the pace increases). The poles are 9ft/2.75m/3 paces apart.

Exercise 1: Walk - During your warmup, and whenever you’re letting the horse take breaks on a longer rein, go over the poles in walk. You should get three steps with the front feet between each pole. Ask your horse to walk over in different frames to mix things up – and if your poles are stripy, see if you can do the whole line over one stripe.

Exercise 2: Trot - Now trot over the poles – you should be getting two steps with the front feet between each pole.

Exercise 3: Canter - This is the next step – and it’ll help you get your eye in for a distance as well as making your horse work hard. You should get one step with the front feet between each pole.

Exercise 5: Leg Yield - Leg yielding over poles is an excellent exercise for a horse which wants to ‘cheat’ and not cross through with their hind or tends to fall through the shoulder. The poles force them to really think about where their feet are, and to pick up the shoulder and the hind leg correctly. You can do this one in walk or trot with the poles set at this distance.

So, like, two or three weeks ago, trainer injured herself quite severely on a bike and has been unable to teach since having surgery on Monday. Basically this meant that student teacher was teaching lessons so we worked on lateral work bc she has experience with that and knows what to do.

Halfpass. Halfpass presupposes that you can gather up your horse for lateral work, set up a degree of bend in your horse and hold it, and also do other stuff like steer and keep a decent rhythm and so forth. Of your horse, halfpass requires more muscle and balance and rock-back-onto-hq-ability than Joe Average Horse has straight out the field. Halfpass sits atop a whole slew of other preliminary skills. It might help you to think of halfpass as "doing a handstand pushup" -- most people can, with a sufficient amount of training and practice, learn to do a handstand pushup but not very many folks can manage it right off the bat. (There are progressive exercises you can download off the internet and do so that you can work your way from "pasture potato" to "handstand pushup-doer" and nobody expects you to get there in a month.)  Halfpass is, for horses, what handstand pushups are for people. They can learn to do it, but it takes careful, structured practice over months so that they can build the muscles and flexibility to get there.

So you still want to get to halfpass.  Start with leg yield -- establish a teensy bend, and then go the other way. Bend horse a teensy bit to the left, like enough to glimpse some eyeball, and then go rightwards. Use your leg-yielding time to practice how much bend you get and gain control of the shoulder so the horse isn't breaking in half and throwing the shoulder over there.  Use this time to work on your feel of the hq -- make sure that they're trucking along and not getting left in the weeds.  Also now is the time for some granularity in your skillz so you can get a little sideways in your leg yield or a lot of sideways in your leg yield. Finesse it up. Leg yield one stride over, go three straight, go one over, make it sharp and clear. Get your "transitions" (from "straight" to "leg yield" and from "leg yield" to "straight") tight and snappy.  Start with walk, but work up to doing leg yield in all three gaits. Make transitions clean and neat, ride without slop in the transmission.  You want a non-horsey observer to be able to see what you are doing out there.  Got all that?  Leg yield too easy? Cool. You can do all the leg yield-y tricks in all permutations and you find leg-yielding both easy and boring? OK. 

Now we do shoulder-in, which is the next step up the lateral work ladder.  Shoulder-in is where you have your horse bent (the front -- neck and shoulders-- of the horse is bent, the hq are straight) but going in a straight line.  Establish bend of front of horse like as if coming off a 10M circle in the corner (of your dressage ring, if you have one) and then just roll that bend on up along the long side of your dressage ring.  Butt of horse should be pretty straight, horse should travel on three tracks going forward in a straight line. Maintain the bend and keep it consistent. You gotta have a bend or you’re just leg yielding, so work on this, and horse should travel on three tracks (a ground observer is helpful here).  

Maintain the rhythm. Hold the shape, don't get stiff in your hips, keep horse trucking along.  Horse should not “shut down” but should maintain free forward movement.  If he starts to shut down, straighten him out and regain forwardness and try again.  Shoulder-in is not a neck-over (most common evasion), so don’t do that.  You also need to learn to feel three tracks or four and fix it when horse gets out of the shape.  Can you, at will, switch between three tracks and four and tell which one you are currently getting?  Are both sides even?  

Obviously you start shoulder-inning at the walk and then progress to trot and canter once he has some understanding of the cues.  Use shoulder-inning to talk to horse with the reins, to get him to understand that you're picking him up for a reason. (This "gathering up the horse" thing is important for shoulder-inning and onward ... you gather up the reins, pick him up into contact, have him right there *with* you ready to do stuff. This is where you get half-halts from, it's a "Yo, horse, we are About To Do A Thing") Get him in the shape. Get very comfortable with shoulder-inning.

Also, once you have a workable shoulder-in on the long side, you need to ditch the corner "prep" thing -- that's training wheels. Get away from the rail and practice in the middle of the ring. Go straight, leg yield, then straighten then shoulder-in. How good is your control? Can you put your horse in SI from E to H? From X to C? How much of that is you getting "organized" or drifting off the line? Is the transition as clear and distinct as a walk-trot transition? Can an observer on the ground who is NOT your coach tell what you are doing up there? Okay, so go from X to C, starting straight in walk, pick up SI in walk, then transition to trot without screwing up the SI... in that distance. Try up the centerline... Straight, SI LEFT, Straight, SI RIGHT, three strides of each in walk and in trot and in canter. How straight is your straight? Is that too easy? You know all the shoulder-innings and can do it at the drop of a hat at any time, in any gait, on a circle to the inside?  On a circle to the outside? You are totally bored with and master of shoulder-inning? No difficulty doing it on your horse, no "do I have it now, coach?" Your shoulder-inning is certain and confident and you have granular control of it and you are precise about it? Awesome. Have a cookie and let's look at haunches-in. 

Haunches-in is the third step of the lateral work ladder. Horse is kinda-straight on the front end and the hq are bent to the inside track WITH BENDING ON THE RIBCAGE. I feel like haunches-in is pretty much "doing shoulder-in except with the butt of the horse instead of with the shoulders". I think it's four tracks these days, but whatever. Might be three. Do some reading for what they're currently looking for in the show ring. Haunches-in is somewhat harder for riders because they can't see it and may have trouble feeling it. It's described as the last step of a smallish circle before you rejoin the rail, where the forehand is on the new line and the hq are still stepped out to the center a bit. 

As with shoulder-in, you start off (in fancypants dressage land) by doing a little prep circle in the corner and then rolling it up the long side.  I generally am walking along, gather the horse up, and do the "horse, move your hq over off my outside leg and kinda bend around my inside leg" body shape until that works while also having "horse please to be having *this* bend" which is a concept carried over from shoulder-inning.  (I don’t have a dressage school to work in, so I’m doing all of this in a hayfield, which makes it a bit tougher but still doable.)  

Anyway, whatever you do, get some haunches-inning working for you.  Manage the degree of bend, make sure horse is even left and right, keep an eye on the outside shoulder (has a tendency to break the bend there), make sure you don’t “drift” to the outside.  All the stuff you can do with shoulder-inning you can also do with haunches-in.  Play with the toy.  Get it working for you in all gaits.

Remember that this stuff is DIFFICULT for your horse and he needs to be building muscles to be able to do this better and longer. Also, his first efforts at all of these lateral movements will kind of suck because he will be a beginner. You need to feel and reward the crappy first efforts and encourage him to keep trying.  (Your first effort at a handstand pushup would be pretty sucky, too, wouldn’t it?)  Be sympathetic and give him the benefit of the doubt, especially in the beginning, because his first efforts are going to suck balls and yet they are what you need to reward to keep him trying.   

Also, note that you do not need PERFECT leg yields to progress to shoulder-in or PERFECT shoulder-in to progress to haunches-in. They should be pretty good, but also I want you to allow time for your horse to build muscle and flexibility.  You can’t make it happen overnight -- physical strength and flexibility takes time -- so might as well USE that time to get better/snappier/moreprecise at your current rung of the lateral work ladder while you’re waiting for him to adapt physically to the demands of the work.  

Once you have a functional haunches-inning working for you (in all three gaits, at will, on demand, without training-wheel prep circles, through transitions and stuff without losing the shape or the quality of the transitions), then you're ready to do the prep work for halfpass.