EVENTING BOOK EXTRACT
TRAINING TO WIN
Winter is the perfect time to work on the basics to ensure clear rounds when the eventing season kicks off. In this extract from her new book, Training to Win, renowned trainer Caroline Moore explains how to teach a horse the fundamentals for success, including straightness, as well as the introduction of skinny fences
TEACHING A HORSE to stay straight on a line, a curve, a circle or around a corner should be ongoing within your daily training. As your horse’s trainer you need to be ultra sensitive and aware of any loss of balance, wilful or not, which can lead to crookedness and evasion.
The importance of staying straight and balanced in your own position and looking up through the horse’s ears to a focal point of your choice is crucial as a rider. With the help of a coach, get familiar with your own positional faults and set up a system to help eradicate them. You may perhaps need to change your natural focal point, altering your comfortable seat positioning to something that feels less familiar. Use objects around your training area, such as a gate post or a dressage marker, which, as you pass them, will remind you to physically correct your faults. Training yourself in this way will help your self-awareness and you will become more sensitive to your own immediate weaknesses.
Once you are riding straighter you can really start to train your horse to put effort into his own balance. Using tramline poles in and out of the centre line will focus awareness of straightness and, as you progress in your training, you will learn different exercises that will challenge and test ongoing straightness. This will help you to achieve your competition goals.
TIP
To help correct a horse who doesn’t naturally stay straight, you need to use the pressure and reward aids. Create an equal feeling from left leg to left rein and right leg to right rein with the horse down the centre of your aids, hopefully in a balanced way. The pressure aids should be kept light if the straightness is maintained but, as soon as the balance wanders, the pressure aids should become stronger to correct and then lighten again when the horse has moved back onto his line. Remember, pressure and release/reward is the only training method that the horse understands.
Using tramlines
Tramlines should be used at all levels as they teach the horse to take off and land in the corresponding spot without moving to the left or right in the air. They are a great reminder for the rider to deliver the horse to the fence in a way that he is straight and balanced and continue riding the straight line well away from the fence. To perform this exercise successfully it is necessary to be riding with a level contact and have a secure focal point throughout the whole line.
Initially it would be advantageous to do this exercise
