(“The answer he wanted to hear was The First One.”)

A few posts ago I wrote about a canter conundrum with a green horse. It had to do with mistakes—permissible and impermissible ones. The horse that fell out of canter capriciously had to learn to stay in the gait until invited to trot—no questions asked.

Once he agreed to this premise, if his rider’s experiments with various rebalancing half halts occasionally prompted an unintentional break, that would be acceptable. Put it in the “nothing ventured, nothing gained” department.

As for fixing the green horse’s canter, I recall Major Lindgren posing the question, “What is your horse’s most balanced canter stride?” The answer he wanted to hear was The First One. You’ve got to be on your toes, but here’s an exercise which takes advantage of this observation. It’s simple.

Before your nascent canter gets less good, you stop doing it. Gathered, thoughtful walk directly to three steps of canter and immediately back to walk. Your horse will have to be sharper to the aids than he’s used to. And you will need to do some serious planning and organizing. To get a clean downward transition after exactly three canter steps, you practically have to be making the down transition before you make the depart itself.

Everything happens fast! You can’t make the third canter stride and then start thinking about the transition. That will invariably produce a counterproductive, dribble into walk. When this exercise works, canter the three steps while making the preparation to come back to walk, but change your mind. Before he breaks, make a new “first three steps” of canter. In other words, make all his steps the “best first three.”

Among the benefits: your horse spends more time practicing good canter rather than scaring himself with bad canter. A little good beats a lot of bad every time. And it requires you to keep the horse in an uphill balance and in front of your seat and leg at all times. Because he’s more engaged, you can better make the downward transition in balance, and you get in the habit of a back to front transition downward after an uphill “no dive” depart.

Sometimes you can use the same principle to good advantage when teaching flying changes. If the quality of the canter is deteriorating on a long diagonal as your horse anticipates the change, take advantage of those first good strides. Plan well, and then as soon as you make the depart, immediately count down the three strides to your change. When it’s successful, walk and pet your horse. No fuss, no muss. Circumvent his anticipation, and make the flying change as mundane and casual as a simple canter depart.