How to ride better flying changes for dressage – with advice from Becky Moody
In this exclusive article for H&H subscribers, Becky Moody explains why the secret to a good flying change is almost never the change itself
The intuitive response, when your flying changes aren’t going well in your dressage tests, is often to ride more of them. The instinct makes sense – practise the thing that isn’t working – but it’s rarely where the fix actually lies.
“Very rarely is getting a flying change, or fixing a tricky change, about doing more changes,” says Becky Moody. “It is nearly always about improving the canter.”
This is the bit that catches most riders out. The change feels like the problem – it’s late behind, or your horse runs out the front door, or swaps and then immediately falls into trot – so the change is where they put the work. But the change is a symptom. The canter underneath it is the actual job.
Becky is the 2026 FEI World Cup dressage champion and one of Britain’s leading dressage riders, with more than 30 national titles, an Olympic team bronze and a European team silver medal to her name.
“It’s the quality of canter, every time”
The canter you need for a change is not the same canter you might ride elsewhere. It has to be collected but full of energy, straight, balanced, and – most importantly – adjustable.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean the problem is with the rhythm of the canter,” Becky says. “It’s very often the straightness of the canter, the balance of the canter. And for me, the adjustability of the canter. I think you have to be able to have a horse that is collected, but stay full of energy.”
A useful image: watch a top showjumper coming into a big vertical. The horse collects, but the energy doesn’t disappear – it gathers. The hindquarters come under, the frame shortens, and the canter gets bouncier. That’s the feel you want before a flying change Becky says. Not slow. Not steady. Loaded.
The springboard step
Here is Becky’s most useful idea, and it isn’t in any textbook.
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“I like to have a springboard step,” she says. “The horse doesn’t change on the first part of your change aid. You have a springboard step – it’s like a spring then change, not just a change.”
Translated: your aid has two parts. A preparation stride, where you ask the horse to gather and bounce, and then the change itself. The whole sequence has the rhythm of “Are you ready? Change.”
This is the difference between a change that arrives flat and late, and one that lifts cleanly through the body. Riders who get into trouble are usually applying the aid in a single motion – leg on, change, hope. The horse hasn’t had a chance to load the spring first.
It’s also where anticipation comes in. For Becky, a horse learning changes should be thinking about what’s coming next – not nervous, but expectant.
“You almost need to create a degree of anticipation,” she says. “The horse is a little bit like, ‘Oh, what’s coming? This is good fun.’ Instead of you cantering across the diagonal in a lovely, nice, balanced, steady canter and then putting a change aid on, and the horse is like, ‘What?’”
Don’t lose the counter-canter
A common trap, once a horse can do changes, is that they start offering them unprompted. The rider asks for counter-canter, and the horse, helpful and over-keen, swaps.
“I’m quite a big believer that when you start teaching the horse changes, you shouldn’t stop being able to ride counter-canter,” Becky says. “You should be able to be like, ‘Now we’re doing counter-canter. And now we’re going to do a change. And now we’re doing counter-canter again.’ They have to be listening to what you say.”
The discipline matters because, in a test, you’ll be asked for both – sometimes within strides of each other. A horse that assumes every straight line means a change is a horse that will throw one in at exactly the wrong moment.
Build the change before you ask for it
Long before the change itself, the foundations need to be there. Canter-to-walk and walk-to-canter transitions are the bedrock – clean, on the leg, with no drift through the shoulders. The horse should be able to come back to walk with the outside hind genuinely stepping under, and step up into canter on a specific lead from a specific aid, without hesitation.
A good marker: can you ride around the outside of the arena and pick up eight to 10 walk-to-canter transitions, on the correct lead each time, on a straight line and in balance? If not, that’s where the work is. The change will come from this groundwork, not from drilling changes.
The walk half-pirouette is also useful here, because it asks the outside hind to stretch and step under, and it sets the horse straight before coming back into canter – the same body shape, in effect, that you need before a change.
An exercise: the figure-of-eight at the short end
When the foundations are in place, Becky’s go-to exercise is a small figure-of-eight at the short end of the arena.
“Imagine there’s a row of poles across the 10m line at the short end,” she says. “Then you’re doing your little figure-of-eight within that 20x10m box.”
You come out of the corner as if to ride a 10m circle at M, then take a small diagonal line across the centre line back towards the short side, change rein, and pick up the new circle on the other side.
The point of working in a small box is that it stops everything getting away from you.
“One of the most common things when both horse and rider are learning about changes is that everything gets a bit too forward and away,” Becky says.
“Doing it within a smaller area helps keep everything organised in a positive way without the rider having to do so much with their hand.”
The hand is the giveaway. A rider whose changes have unravelled is usually a rider whose changes finished with both reins pulling. Working in a smaller space buys you the discipline of riding the change with the leg and the seat, because there isn’t room to ride it with the hand.
A note on poles
Poles get used a lot for teaching flying changes in dressage, and they are a lot of productive exercises – but Becky uses them sparingly.
“I’m not a fan of the pole,” she says. She’s used one once, with a client’s horse that genuinely couldn’t grasp what was being asked. “We did what we could to help make it easier for them. It definitely got them more understanding of what we were trying to do.
“Then the changes were late behind, but at least it was doing changes, and we were then able to work on it. It then came back to the quality of the canter.”
Which is, of course, where everything in this piece comes back to. Poles or exercises won’t fix a change if the canter underneath isn’t right.
Build the canter. Then the change will be there.
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Oscar joined Horse & Hound in October 2023 and is the magazine’s dressage editor and sports manager, overseeing coverage of equestrian sport. After studying equine science at Myerscough College, he spent four years working for leading dressage rider Emile Faurie, competing at the 2015 National Dressage Championships and travelling with the yard to CDIs including Aachen and Saumur. He holds a master’s degree in Literature from York St John University (2021).