Are your horses jigging on trail? Horses wait for your cue to determine what action they should perform next, and when they are not used to your cue, then comes the jigging. Baptism by fire won’t do; the best way around the problem is to work on their coaching at home first by building your cues and make sure that your horse is reactive to them.
Here is a straightforward method of equestrian training to get your horse to be right on cue, as it were. Employ a round pen of approximately 60′. In this round pen, use your rein and seat position as training cuess for your horse to either increase or decrease their gait speed.
It’s simpler if you commence with a trot on a loose rein: Shift yourself to a two point seat position and let your hand go as far up the horse’s neck being careful not to get your face in front of or over the pommel. Use your established cue (voice, or leg) to tell your horse to go faster without changing gait. Keep her at this pace till you are feeling she is ready to slow down. When you think she’s thinking of letting up, sit back down and remove your hand from its position on her neck. If she slows, good—praise her. Otherwise, resume your 2 point position and push your hand up her neck again and give her your cue to accelerate like before. If she breaks gait turn her head towards the railing and change direction utilizing the rail to help turn her. Get her used to breaking down gait when you sit right down and start changing direction you wish to establish this as a definite stop.
You’ll have to have patience with the procedure , and at first there won’t be any remarkable changes. You can expect some degree of understanding in your horse after roughly 20 minutes of work. But like plenty of other methods of equestrian coaching, once your horse tires out, the routine will start sinking in more and you will be able to see excellent results. Keep on applying this type of coaching for a couple of days dependent on the horse you are training till you get both a strong trot and a slow one. You know you have won when there’s a larger spread of gait speed at your immediate command.
Back on the trail, rein in as much as your are able to. If she breaks gait, just do as you did in the pen: turn her back and tell her to resume the gait you started with. If in case she breaks gait again, just repeat what you trained for. Soon enough she’ll stay on your preferred gait. A note of caution though: going out with a huge group right after training would put a lot of pressure on your horse, so try the trail on your own first or with someone who can wait for you to catch up.
Horses are Heather Toms’ passion and she enjoys sharing her extensive knowledge through her 100’s of articles with other horse lovers… like all things about stable rugs
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