I'm going to give you a bunch of words that describe how a horse should LOOK. I say Look because a horse communicates via body language. So they SHOW you what they think you are asking for with your body language. When you are on his back you will FEEL these words and when you are on the ground you will SEE these words. These are descriptions of "milestones" that you are looking for in your training. The term MILESTONES is a little misleading because these descriptions are what you look for but as you go through training they become more expressive and easier to see. So there is the initial scale and then after each word is what it LEADS to becoming what it looks like, got it?

We are basically looking for a CALM...FORWARD ... SENSITIVE and SMOOTH riding horse. To train for that we need to tackle these things ALMOST one at a time.

To SEE a CALM horse the horse needs to have RHYTHM and BALANCE to his gaits.

RHYTHM is merely a steady beat. The walk has 4, the trot has 2 and the canter has 3. Just like the rhythm in music. Now also like in music there is a TEMPO to the rhythm... how FAST those beats happen. A fast tempo is not very relaxed, just like when you dance. A slower tempo and you can relax and start to flow or float across the dance floor and really enjoy your dance partner. <lol> Too slow and you look like a stick in the mud swaying in spot. This is when the leaning and such happens... All of this is the same with a horse. You can SEE it happen and CERTAINLY you can FEEL it happen when you ride.

We are basically looking for a CALM... SENSITIVE... FORWARD and SMOOTH riding horse. To train for that we need to tackle these things ALMOST one at a time. .

BALANCE is getting all 4 legs to carry an equal amount of the horse's weight. The horse is divided in 3 sections... The head/neck/shoulders or the Stuff in front of the saddle. The second section is the ribs/back/loin or the stuff under the saddle. The third section is the hips/tail or ... you guessed it.. the stuff BEHIND the saddle. The front legs have the first two section touching them and the hind legs only have the third section touching them. SOOO the front legs SEEM(remember you can SEE this stuff) to carry the first 2 and the hind legs carry the last.

When you add a rider you put a 4'th "third" and it doesn't go on the hips to make everything even it goes in the saddle.  To make things more even we need to get the hind legs stepping under the saddle and the hips to drop down a bit so the hind legs can take most of the weight of the saddle and rider. The horse can look like an upside down old fashioned scale. The front, back and eventually the rider are evenly balanced between the front and hind legs.

Now if you have the right tempo to the rhythm and the horse is balanced... you should see a CALM horse. Horse is looking pretty cool now isn’t he? :-)

Now the next thing we want is a horse that seems to GO somewhere, a horse that is FORWARD looking... not rushing around like a chicken with its head off because then we would no longer have a CALM looking horse. Remember we want a CALM, FORWARD, SENSITIVE ***AND*** SMOOTH riding horse.

So now we are on to the FORWARD looking part of what we want our horse to do. Now you may be asking "BUT... when we were selecting the tempo we wanted a horse that floats and flows, that seems to GO somewhere... is that FORWARD?" YES IT IS but just in a small degree or the beginning stages of what is truly "FORWARD". Remember when your horse first started out with walking and trotting on the lunge and he would go fast one stride and slow the next? That was the beginning of finding rhythm ... same as what you saw there for FORWARD. When you got him more balanced you started to see him move a little more effortlessly while still in the same rhythm and tempo right? That was a little bit more of FORWARD coming through. So the basic beginning training of FORWARD you have already done.... Cool HUH?

But that is JUST THE BEGINNING training THERE IS A LOT MORE yet to do.

Now to have a FORWARD looking and still maintain the CALM looking horse, we need two more things; one is IMPULSION and the other is CONTACT. One can’t happen without the other.

IMPULSION is that amount of "push" that is happening from those hind legs. You can see this "push" by the bulging and relaxing muscles in the hip and though the top line. At first this is a "flip" of a muscle on the hip under the tail, the muscle over the croup, the stomach muscles right in front of the stifle, maybe along the spine under the saddle and portions of the crest. The head should stay relaxed, hanging from the poll and swinging forward with each hind step.

CONTACT is when the IMPULSION (push) is FELT(not so much seen) through the rein and into the tummy and lower back. It is not a pull or lean or heavy feeling. But you need your trunk muscles toned a TINY bit to keep the IMPULSION from pulling your upper body forward. You will first feel this on the lunge and then in the saddle with your hands on the reins. CONTACT is best described as when two things meet. When the horse’s head or jaw comes FORWARD and MEETS the cavesson or bit and flows THROUGH that back to the rider. It doesn’t come away again it just stays there.

CONTACT is like contact paper lining your kitchen shelves. The horse is the shelf, IMPULSION is the glue, reins and hands are the paper. The paper doesn’t need something on it to hold it down to make it to follow the wood shelf, the glue does that. When the glue gets old or is missing then the paper doesn’t follow the shelf. The paper needs to be held in place to make it follow the shelf again. Even Cooler, huh?

Now to have a FORWARD looking and still maintain the CALM looking horse, we need two more things; one is IMPULSION and the other is CONTACT. One can’t happen without the other.

Now the next thing we need is SENSITIVE. We don’t want our calm and forward horse making us kick and tug before he hears us. SOOOO Now we need to start to soften our aids before we kick and tug and see how fast our horse will respond to how light of an aid. If we are consistent in asking for a slight weight shift before we kick to increase impulsion then soon our horse will listen for the weight shift. When we increase the IMPULSION while still having a CALM looking horse our reins get shorter and the horse begins to arch through his top line more. When he is arching more we can also feel an unevenness in the amount of IMPULSION in each rein.

STRAIGHTNESS is what will allow the IMPULSION and CONTACT to come evenly towards the CONTACT and will allow the horse to ARCH through the body even more.

This brings us to the last thing we want our horse to be... SMOOTH riding. For a horse to be SMOOTH he needs all of the components of CALM, FORWARD and SENSITIVE as well as two more components: STRAIGHTNESS and COLLECTION.

COLLECTION is this ARCHING of the body. The more COLLECTION a horse has the more his weight has shifted to take ALL of the rider’s weight (like in BALANCE but more so) evenly on both hind legs due to STRAIGHTNESS.

Why do we want this COLLECTION? Because as the horse takes our weight on his hind legs and hips, the hind legs bend more. The more those hind legs bend and the hips get to the ground the more IMPULSION we can feel. This increased IMPULSION doesn’t surge like ocean waves but tends to more or less flow constantly like a river with ripples. It is smoother but more powerful Like drifting in an ocean rip tide versus gliding down a river in a canoe.

So the shortcut way of remembering this is a quick outline picture...

CALM          {RHYTHM }
                      {BALANCE }
FORWARD {CONTACT }
                      {IMPULSION}
SENSITIVE {STRAIGHTNESS }
SMOOTH    {COLLECTION }

Now basically start at the top and you will get to the bottom... but as we have read... all of it goes together to create one partnership between horse and rider. "