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Two steps forward, one step back: improve your horse’s balance and responsiveness with this simple walk and rein-back exercise
Practising your walk, halt and rein-back is key for teaching horse to respond promptly to the rider’s aids, while improving the rider’s position and accuracy
Transitions – as Olympic dressage rider Becky Moody always emphasises – are the most important part of daily training, whatever pace you are working in. This flatwork exercise incorporates rein-back as well as transitions to increase the difficulty level.
It improves your horse’s balance, engaging the hindquarters to carry more weight while lifting the core. Rein-back is also useful for testing your horse’s response to the rider’s correct seat, leg and hand aids.
We may think that we can’t make much progress in walk, but this is a great exercise that really helps develop your horse’s way of going and your own riding skills. Furthermore, it can be done in an arena or out hacking, and is useful when the ground is hard or your horse is perhaps older or lacking fitness but still needs stimulating work.
No setup required. You can do this exercise in a field or an arena.
(Image credit: Future)
How to ride this exercise
Establish an active walk in a straight line, concentrating on your position as a rider – your posture, straightness, soft hands and weight in the heels.
Count approximately eight steps of walk, then halt for five seconds, squeezing the rein and legs, while sitting tall so that the horse steps into the contact. How early you have to prepare will depend on your connection with your horse.
Analyse your halt – is it square? Did you horse respond when you gave the aids?
Ask your horse to go forward to walk for eight steps and halt again.
Now, rein-back for four steps or as much as is comfortable for your stage in training – pressing with the inner thigh, keeping your abs tight and gently half-halting, softening as soon as he responds.
Analyse your rein-back as you go. Does your horse move straight back with his legs in diagonal pairs? Does he remain soft and consistent in his outline or resist?
Go straight back into walk and go large.
Tips and troubleshooting
1. Level up
If you are working in an arena, you can start this exercise alongside the fence (or out hacking along a hedgerow). This will help keep your horse straight.
Next, try it on the centre line without any fence keeping him from swinging quarters out or in. Concentrate on maintaining a straight line both in the walk, through the halt and the rein-back.
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When you can do this exercise easily, vary the number of steps in walk and rein-back. Be strict with yourself on achieving however many strides you decide so that you don’t drift.
2. Poor halt
Preparation is paramount. If your horse is late to halt, prepare earlier and give clearer aids.
If he halts crookedly, analyse your own position: are you sitting with your weight on both seatbones, with your hands level? Visualise keeping your horse’s shoulders and quarters aligned, rather than forcing the head straight with the reins.
Use the arena fence to help keep you straight.
3. Poor rein-back
If your horse is new to rein-back, try teaching him rein-back from the ground first. When ridden, start by asking for just one step and immediately release and praise him.
Again, this is easiest to attempt initially at the side of the arena, using the fence as a natural barrier. You could also set up some poles to ride between.
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.
