Lengthened or extended trot strides are often seen in a dressage test across the diagonal. The consequence is that many of us practise them by speeding across the longest straight in the arena, inadvertently encouraging our horses to become flat, hollow and rushed. The trot strides don’t so much lengthen as simply speed up.
Instead, we want to encourage our horse to push off the hindleg, with the strides getting longer but, crucially, not quicker. To do this successfully, the horse needs to be supple, which will produce longer steps with more airtime thanks to a looser back and more engaged hindleg.
This flatwork exercise works on suppleness alongside lengthening the steps to improve the latter.
Aims
Longer, but not faster, trot strides
Increased suppleness
The setup
No setup required. All you need is sufficient space – and an arena is ideal. If you are riding in the field, it’s helpful to lay out arena boards, poles or other markers so that you can be disciplined about where you make transitions.
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How to ride the exercise
Warm up in all paces, incorporating plenty of upward and downward transitions to ensure your horse is responding to your aids or cues.
Establish an active working trot and go large, riding around the edge of the arena.
As you come round the short side, turn up the quarter-line in the same trot, and leg-yield to the track.
When you reach the track, ask for a few lengthened strides, thinking “bigger, but slower” to prevent rushing. The leg-yield should help loosen your horse’s back, while engaging the inside hindleg so that it can push off more for bigger, longer strides. This is particularly helpful if your horse has a choppy trot.
Before you reach the end of the next short side, collect the trot again, keeping the energy but containing the stride length.
Do this exercise the same number of times in both directions. Because it loads the inside hindleg more, you need to work both sides equally.
Tips and troubleshooting
1. Tempo control
If you do this exercise in rising trot, you can use your rising to help control the horse’s tempo. This is useful if your horse tends to go faster, not bigger, when you ask for the extension.
2. Rushing
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For horses that rush or hollow, you can practise lengthening on a circle. The curve of the circle will encourage you to ride from inside leg to outside rein to engage the hindleg. You can change between rising and sitting trot to help your horse by allowing the back to swing more in the longer strides.
3. Trouble re-collecting
For horses that struggle to come back into a balanced more collected trot after lengthening, ride a 10m circle at the end of the lengthened strides. This will encourage you to keep your horse in balance so that he is ready to do a small circle, rather than allowing him to rush down the side of the arena.
Martha is an experienced journalist who is mad-keen on horses and dogs. Her reporting CV includes the Paris Olympics, European championships, Aachen World Equestrian Festival and World Cup finals. After growing up with assorted liver and white springer spaniels, she enjoyed 14 years with two rescue dogs. Now, her constant companion is Fidget, an extremely energetic and habitually muddy black and white springer. Martha has written on topics as diverse as a top horse’s clone to the best GPS trackers for dogs, as well as equestrian and rural matters for Country Life, The Field, The Times, The Spectator and The Telegraph alongside Horse & Hound.
