NHT Magazine Spring 2018

The
Scales
Of
Training
An Introduction
To Rhythm
& Suppleness
With Tom Fray
One of the biggest challenges
facing most riders is working
out what to do when you ride
in the school. Whatever your
chosen discipline there are
some fundamentals of training
horses that will help you to
improve your horse’s way of
going and give you a
framework to base your
schooling on.
The scales of training are a
process you should follow to
train your horse in the short
and long term. You should
consider the progressive
scales every time you ride
and develop the elements
over the life of the horses
training. You need to ensure
you achieve each one before
moving on to the next.
The Scales are:
1. Rhythm
2. Suppleness
3. Contact
4. Impulsion
5. Straightness
6. Collection
Consider a newly backed 4 year old being ridden
away; in the beginning there is little chance of
suppleness let alone impulsion or straightness.
Your key focus should be on establishing rhythm,
which can be described as the ‘regularity of the
beat’.
Unridden, a youngster will happily trot around the
field in perfect rhythm; rhythm is efficient and
therefore saves energy which is essential for
survival in the wild. Introduce a rider and all of a
sudden he has to balance himself in a completely
different way, he will lose his balance and also
rhythm. He must be given time to re-balance
himself, build strength and find his natural
rhythm. Your job as a rider is to stay in balance
to allow the horse to find his balance. It is so
important that youngsters are taught to move
freely forward to help develop independence,
confidence, balance and strength. Think how it
may be best to achieve this, hacking out and
showing him the world will have a greater effect
on this than constant circles in an arena.
As his confidence and balance improves, he will
find his rhythm and start to build his strength, you
can then start to think about suppleness.
What is suppleness?
There is a difference between suppleness and
flexibility. Flexibility is the range of movement,
suppleness is the ease of the movement.
Imagine we have two identical hinges, but one is
rusty. They both have the same range of
movement but the rusty one is less easy to open
and close. Both hinges have the same amount of
flexibility; the non-rusty hinge is more supple than
the rusty one. Suppleness in horses can be
thought of in two directions, lateral (sideways)
and longitudinal (lengthways), both can be
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developed together. As you embark on teaching
your horse rhythm and suppleness under saddle
it is essential that he understand your aids. He
needs to know that when you nudge him with
your heel you are asking for increased activity
from the hind-leg, either in a forwards or
sideways direction. He needs to know that when
you close your fingers around the rein and apply
pressure to his mouth through the bit he should
yield to that pressure.
Let’s think for a moment about the relationship
between the aids and the response. If a fly lands
on your horse while he is out grazing in the warm
sunshine what does he do? He will twitch his skin
or swish his tail. He felt the fly and reacted; what
does he do when you apply a leg aid? He can
certainly feel your leg, but does he react to your
leg? How will you improve his reaction to your
leg? This is where training horses actually
becomes simple, providing you keep it simple!
Horses are creatures of habit and become a
direct reflection of their environment and
experiences. So, if every time you nudge him
with your leg and he does not respond how you
want him to and you do nothing to change it then
it will never change. You are effectively training
him to be unresponsive to the leg.
You are training your horse all the time you are
with him, training is not reserved for your
schooling sessions or lessons, your horse does
not know the difference, he is simply becoming
the product of his experiences. If you want him to
become sharper to the leg aid then you need to
be very consistent and clear in your expectations.
You must ask in the same way every time you
ask, you must back the aid up with an artificial
aid if required in order to sharpen the reaction to
the aid. This is the key message here, you need
to sharpen his REACTION to the aid, not
sharpen the aid. Simply put, you must ensure
when you put your leg on the horse moves
quickly from that aid; if he doesn’t you back it up
with a sharper leg aid, voice or the crop. You
then repeat the transition with the original aid you
are aiming to achieve and reward the horse if he
does it well; or back it up again if he does not.
Keep repeating this until you have achieved a
sharper reaction to the original aid. It is important
that whilst working through this exercise you
focus on the simple lesson you are teaching him,
which is to improve his reaction to your leg. So
you might forgive him if goes a bit hollow at the
beginning providing he is improving his reaction
to the leg. Keeping him round at the same time
may become confusing for him. Once you have
taught him to move forward from the leg you will
be able to develop a more supple horse and
improved contact and therefore stay rounder
through the transition.
Here you will see that I have alluded to the third
‘scale’ on the scales of training and can hopefully
appreciate the value of developing each scale
progressively. Work firstly on rhythm, develop
suppleness and the contact will follow.
Likewise, if you have a horse that is over-reactive
to the leg then you must ensure your leg is
consistently around the horse; you must give him
confidence that your leg will always be in the
same place and will always be there, he will learn
to accept the leg and eventually soften to it. From
there you will be able to train him to be
reasonable in his reaction to your leg. Horses like
routine and dislike surprises, so if your leg is a
constant in his life he will accept it; if it is
inconsistent and makes him jump then he will
struggle to understand and accept it.