(“If he wants to run off bucking and playing, that makes me happy.”)

Years ago I once took a lesson from a (famous international) instructor who made me canter for 35 minutes in a row. To this day I still can’t figure out why. Some sort of weird Teutonic Type A thing, perhaps?

Grinding and drilling find their way into some riders’ approach to their horses. By and large, it doesn’t make them better. It certainly doesn’t make them happier. I am not speaking here of repetitions. But once you have milked the benefit out of any particular exercise, it’s time to move on, and then return to it later that day or another time altogether. Unless it’s the Belmont Stakes or Rolex, there is no good reason to “use up” everything in your horse before he goes back to the stable. If you do that every day, how will he want to see you the next day? If I have had a good schooling session, and when I turn my horse out, he wants to run off bucking and playing, that makes me happy. I don’t worry that I didn’t push him hard enough.

There is also the question of how long you should work your horse without giving him a break. Major Lindgren told me that the old noncommissioned officer who was his teacher always smoked a pipe as he trained. The NCO would take a few puffs and then rest his pipe on a fence post. He tried never to school so long nonstop that his pipe would go out before he came back for another puff. That was his way not to let intensity override common sense.

Getting back to that 35 minute canter, I once taught a woman who could get her horse “round” but only one time a day. This shortcoming presented a complication to her warm up strategy at shows. If she got the mare “on the bit” too early in her warm-up, she couldn’t stop for fear of not being able to get her back. One miscalculation and she would have to trot round and round for three quarters of an hour until her horse was called to the ring. There was no way to say “That looks pretty good. Let’s let her walk and rest for a minute.” Even at its best this approach had one serious limitation—it only ever worked for the first half of the test. After the free walk the horse was going to be above the bit regardless.

Major Lindgren, my coach, was a practical sort of guy. When he competed, he said he wanted his horse to be right enough that he could hand the reins to his groom three minutes before the test if he needed to pee and still be able to have the horse on the aids and show-ready when he remounted.

Like I said—practical!