Pole stride length exercise

This weeks exercise is for learning how to feel your horses' stride length at the walk, trot and eventually canter.

You can do this at Liberty, in hand, and mounted. First you will set up two poles on a straight line 20, 30, or 40 feet apart. Establish a good walk rhythm and then walk over both the poles three times and count how many strides are BETWEEN the two poles. Start counting the number of steps ONLY after you are completely over the first pole and STOP counting BEFORE you go over the second pole. This is important and takes practice.

You want to count 3 times because you want to get an average number of strides for your working gait. Once you have established that number you can set about lengthening your horses stride around the arena by asking with your legs and allowing the energy you create to come through your hips. Get what you think is a longer stride before you go through the poles and then go through them and count the same way as you did before. What you will find is, the number of stride will go down as the stride lengthens. For example if your working walk gave you ten strides in between the poles on average, when you successfully lengthen the stride, It would go down to 9 or possibly 8. The same would go for collecting or shortening the strides between the poles but the opposite. The number will go up ie. 11-12 strides because you can fit more in between the poles.

The role of the poles is to give you instant feedback about the whether the stride actually changed or not. If you keep getting the same number of strides make a bigger change as you go around your ring and experiment. Don't worry if your horse breaks gait. You may be at their maximum ability for now. Try to get the longer stride 3 times in a row, but if it is too difficult, work up to it. It will get better with practice. At Liberty, you can practice this in Companion movement. On line, you can walk or trot with your horse next to you. Once you have it at the walk, try it at the trot and when it is easy try it at the canter. Try to get it smooth and rhythmic as possible by the end. Don't worry if it's a bit inconsistent at first. Practice and repetitions will help you and your horse get comfortable with the exercise. Let me know how it goes in the comment section!