In this exclusive article for H&H subscribers, World Cup champion Becky Moody explains why good circles start with knowing your arena, your horse and yourself
We ride more circles than anything else in dressage. So it’s a bit of a problem that many of us don’t fully understand how to ride a circle for optimum benefit, whether that’s in tests or during our dressage training.
The 20m circle looks innocuous on a test sheet. Easy, even. You pick it up at the marker, swing round, and from the saddle it feels fine. Then the sheet comes back: “Loss of bend.” “Not round.” “Falling in.” “Falling out.” Sometimes the full set – or my most common comment: “Not 20m.”
The 10m circle, meanwhile, is where a lot of riders first learn the hard way that a circle isn’t a steering exercise. It’s a test of balance, suppleness and awareness rolled into one.
How to ride the perfect circle
Becky Moody is, by her own admission, a geek about riding a circle.
“When I was younger and even more of a geek, I used to have my little to-scale arenas that I would draw, and then I’d draw my tests so that I could really understand the distances,” she says. “I’m quite a visual person.”
The work, in other words, starts long before you actually start turning. Here are Becky’s tips to help you ride the perfect circle – and they’re relevant to riders at all levels.
1. Know your arena
“My first thing is, know the dimensions of an arena,” Becky adds. “And I don’t just mean 20×40 or 20×60. I mean the distance between the letters.”
In a 20m by 40m arena, the markers down each long side sit at 6m, 14m, 14m, 6m from the short side, shown below.
The distances between markers in a short dressage arena.
(Image credit: creditUnknown)
In a 20m by 60m arena, it’s 6m, 12m, 12m, 12m, 12m, 6m.
The distances between markers in a long dressage arena.
(Image credit: creditUnknown)
Which means K, F, M and H sit only 6m from the short side – they’re not where a 20m circle from A or C should touch the long side. That point – where the circle brushes the track – is 10m from the short side, which is four meters beyond K, F, M or H in both arenas.
This matters because most circles drift towards markers. They feel like circles, but they’re really ovals with squared-off ends. A correctly ridden 20m circle from C in a short arena (shown below) touches the track at C, momentarily touches the track on the long side halfway to B (or E), crosses over X, then mirrors that on the other long side and returns to C. No straight lines. No corners. You should, in effect, never not be turning.
There are no corners in a correctly ridden 20m circle.
(Image credit: creditUnknown)
“If you understand technically where it has to go, then it’s about having your horse between two legs and two reins so you can actually steer properly around where you’re trying to go,” Becky says.
2. Know your horse – and yourself
This is where the most-repeated phrase in dressage – inside leg to outside rein – needs a closer look.
“The whole inside leg to outside rein thing really depends,” Becky says. “A lot of horses tend to over-bend on the left rein and fall out through the right shoulder.
“So if you ride inside leg to outside rein on that rein, and you’re not on it enough with your outside rein, you can actually make it worse. You can push that outside shoulder out further.”
A correctly ridden 20m circle from C touches the track only briefly at C, brushing each long side 10m in from the short side – never at the corner markers.
(Image credit: Isabel Pearce)
But no single rule fits every horse. “Horses are like us,” Becky adds. “They’ve all got a bendy side and a straighter side. It’s understanding that, and then that will help you know what you need to do.”
Riders have a dominant side, too. “If you’re a bit dominant with your left hand, the likelihood is on the left rein you’re going to bend the horse too much to the inside and let it fall out the outside,” Becky says.
The fix isn’t something that’s easy to put down in words as a simple formula. It’s awareness, feel, of where your horse is genuinely supple and where they’re compensating, and of which of your own habits are making things worse.
3. Bend, not neck-bend
A circle asks the horse to bend uniformly along the curve. The judge wants to see the body follow the shape, with just enough flexion at the poll to glimpse the inside eye, ear and nostril. That’s it.
The classic error is hauling on the inside rein and producing a neck-bend – the horse’s head turns in, while the shoulders, and ribcage carry on in the original direction. The horse falls out through the outside shoulder, drifts wide, and loses the very thing the circle is designed to show: that your horse is actually supple and listening to the rider’s leg, not their hand.
Riding out of a circle is just as revealing. The return to a straight line should be immediate – shoulders in front of the quarters, neck straight, body aligned. If straightness is a problem, riding on the inside track rather than against the wall or edge of the arena stops your horse from using the boards as a crutch to lean on.
How to ride a 10m circle
A 10m circle is quite an effective test of a horse’s balance.
“One of the biggest factors in being able to turn a really good smaller circle is balance,” Becky says. “If a horse is out of balance, then it’s difficult to turn on a smaller circle. So another thing to come back to is think about your scales of training and how it impacts your ability to influence the horse.”
In practice, that means a 10m circle exposes whatever is missing further down the scale. A horse lacking in rhythm loses a regular tempo on the turn. A horse struggling with suppleness resists the bend and pops the outside shoulder. A horse without honest contact down the rein hollows or curls. The circle isn’t the problem, it’s a diagnostic for the problem.
Flexion at the poll, not neck-bend: the judge wants just enough inside bend to glimpse the eye, ear and nostril.
(Image credit: Isabel Pearce)
When your circle keeps going wrong
Some riders – like myself – ride consistent 16m circles and call them 20m. Some ride lopsided shapes and never realise. The fix, Becky says, is honest feedback.
“If you rode a 16m circle despite everybody telling you that you were riding a 16m circle and you needed to make it bigger, you have to understand, or your coach has to help you understand, why.
“Is it because the horse is falling in? Is it because you’re being idle and not forward-planning and steering properly? You have to understand what is causing your circle to go wrong consistently, and how you’re going to fix it.”
Good eyes on the ground are the gold standard. Failing that, Becky rates video.
“You can think as a rider that one thing is happening, and then when you actually see it back, you understand that maybe that’s not what’s happening at all,” she says.
“You think you’re riding a horse that’s between leg and hand, and aligned in the suppleness, and then you watch a video, and you’re like, ‘Holy crap, I’m bending their neck way more than I think I am, and I just need to take better control of that outside shoulder’.”
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).
