Interesting thing just happened yesterday. Another boarder and I were discussing Working Equitation in a text exchange. I shared a couple of pictures of me in the obstacles course. The boarder said, “Oh, what a nice cob. What breed is she?’ I replied, “she” was my Lusitano stallion. I didn’t hear back from her.
So yes…I hear ya.
Well, that’s an interesting exchange!
Someone thought that one of my PRE’s (I was leading him through a main stable are) was a Quarter Horse due to his dorsal stripe. 
There are some great exercises listed here. I would have a construct to see an improvement in a month (not in one training ride) and see changes by the end of the first week or two. I dont think this is a halfpass issue. I think this is more of a strength and balance issue and if you touch up those areas your halpass will be wonderful. I think this because he would rather drop to his forehand and pull with his shoulders to canter it than sit and trot it. Is he really up in a third level balance without leaning on your hand? If he leans on the bit at all then we dont have the self carriage strength yet. Just touch up a few basics.
My favorite exercises listed above were the turn on the forehand in the walk to get those hind legs moving (adding a reinback to it to get his balance back too, in hand would be great too) and checking the bend by doing leg yield to half pass changes.
The one exercise I didnt see mentioned that I would incorporate is trot canter trot on a 6 to 8 meter circle. That would really help me know where that hind leg is and if it is goes out wide on the canter to trot down transition. If that happens then I know the horse needs strength and we will be living in that exercise for a few weeks. I think a few minutes every day of that might really help - also help get on the same page for when to trot and when to canter. It sounds like a placement issue with the outside hind. Cantering is sometimes easier than placing and thrusting so this exercise would help add more of that push strength he needs to actually sit on that outside hind and trot it instead of blow through on his forehand cantering it. He thinks collection is hard!
I dont want to get into the halfpass sementics but I do want to share a story because i was taught very incorrectly. I was taught the haunches in on a diagonal line thing and then a shpulder in thing and got very bad scores because my haunches were always leading. There uis booksmart and there is feel and I can only halfpass by feel.
On my current horse I dont do anything with her haunches in a halfpass. I just come around that half turn and set the bend where i am going and line up the o utside shoulder with the letter and just kind of drift. If I am fixing anything its more bend up front. If I want more volume then I push her shoulders over and make them take bigger steps. But I cant touch those haunches or she will shift them and they will lead. My best halfpasses are when I do nothing.
Folks, please don’t feel that I am picking on @lorilu. I am genetically predisposed to being a skeptic. I can only go by what I see written here.
Regardless of how many medals or paper credentials someone has, I want to see a trainer work with a horse and the horse will reflect on the trainer and their methods. Call me the “show me” rider.
Example….About 20+ years ago I saw an Olympic medal winner singlehandedly destroy a horse’s piaffe. One afternoon, I was at Dressage at Devon wandering around and watching the warm-up field. Off in the distance I saw a lovely grey horse doing a beautiful piaffe……so I went closer to watch. The trainer was on the ground schooling the rider. It was spur the horse and ask for more…and more….and more. They never gave the horse a walk break, never patted it, never acknowledged the horse’s effort. I walked away.
A bit later a friend asked if I knew who I had been watching. I said no. She proceeded to inform me that I had been watching Robert Dover schooling Betsy Steiner riding Ranier. Ok. Interesting. Not impressed.
The next evening was the GP Freestyle at Devon. When it was time for Ranier to do the piaffe, the horse took two half-hearted piaffe steps and then stopped. Betsy spurred and spurred. The horse stood still. I guess Ranier figured if he was going to get spurred whether he did the movement or not….so why expend the effort.
So, medals and other paper mean nothing to me. It is the horse that tells truth about the trainer.
Late to this thread but chiming in because I encountered this evasion with my horse after he injured his shoulder. Specifically, he broke his scapula and did who knows what fascia and muscle damage (but thankfully no to minimal apparent nerve damage).
He also has trouble bringing that front leg up and out to the side. SI/HI and leg yield all work pretty much as normal. This horse had no problems with HP this direction prior to the injury. If anything it was the better side and the other side might get some head tilt and not enough bend.
Now he’s like, it would be so much easier to canter, even canter in place, than half pass right. You need to work on that front leg mobility and independence.
However, if you also can’t get a good HI, then that means your driving leg for the half pass is not strong and doesn’t want to carry enough weight. This would be my issue with my young horse who also collapses on the right shoulder, but he’s not ready at all for HP…we are still working on basic leg yield and SI without losing forward. If it is a basic strength and balance issue, then it is too early for HP until the other movements are easier and fluid. I do work on the idea of what he needs to with the hind legs as well as opening up that inside leg with the baby horse with walk pirouettes.
So do not forget to work that left hind leg. He has to carry weight on it as well as push in order to get the RF lighter. It’s probably also why he doesn’t want to stretch the ribs on the left side and give you more bend.
I would do a lot of leg yields with bend to work on this. Leg yields both ways. Then to SI. Both have to be able to be ridden pretty forward in trot because if he wants to get tight with the body that’s where your unintentional canter comes from. Once you have that feeling then you can probably go from SI to HP back to SI. Or leg yield towards the wall then HP away. Then try HP away and as soon as you might lose it, half halt then leg yield back, keeping some energy. Try to be loose/relaxed/minimal with your body. Light enough in the seat the hips can move. This is hard for me because my horse is more a push type but pushing or trying to block the evasions here doesn’t work…just makes him tight and he thinks canter is easier. Those exercises have given my guy more confidence to try the HP again and don’t get too ambitious with how many steps you do in the beginning because he may fall back out of balance and then try to fix that again with canter.
This ^^
Then you were doing HI with too big an angle.
That doesn’t invalidate doing HI on the diagonal with a more appropriate angle.
Absolutely 100% impossible to do that way if, as is correct, the bend is uniform through the entire body. The face of the horse looks directly at the mirror on the end of the long side. None of the rest of the body can line up directly with that mirror if the bend goes correctly through the entire body. If it does, there is a mistake in the bend of the horse somewhere, or the ground person has faulty vision, or the rider cannot get their head around a whole-body bend of a 3-dimensional creature.
Take a loaf of bread or some plasticine smooshed into a long tube with some width to it and mark 4 legs on it. The stick a popsicle stick on to represent the front of the face. Now, try to get the head and front legs perfectly aligned and the back legs to the inside track without displacing the front legs and face. The only way to do it is to make a kink just in front of the hind legs. That is not a correct bend and has no place anywhere in dressage no matter who taught it or how you interpreted what was taught.
Right, that’s my point - that there are trainers out there teaching and using HI to bend and supple the hind end only. Not bend the whole body. There are other exercises for that. Why have two exercises have two names (HI and HP) if they are the same thing?
Anyway, not here to argue with you about it. You do you, and all. But I think a few of us on here do NOT find the “haunches in on the diagonal” easier to ride than just learning half pass as an independent movement (see responses above).
It doesn’t matter if you find it easier to learn it one way or another what matters is that it is, in fact, the same thing whether you choose to believe that or not, whether misinformed trainers have taught you otherwise or not.
And clearly this
Was not your point.
As HI and HP. Well, if you really want to get down to it. Haunches in is not a movement found in any test anywhere. Technically it is a leg yield movement that is performed on the wall. It can also be used to describe any movement that has the haunches displaced to the inside whether that exercise is a bending movement or a leg-yielding movement.
The correct term for haunches in that has bending to it, is travers, which, lol, derives from the word cross as in cross over something, not something religious. Half pass describes the same movement made across (passing) the school, same as full pass describes the same movement made on a virtually straight line across the school (B to E for example). They are different terms that describe different locations or as in HI and travers, slightly misplaced interpretations of the original meanings.
Sascha, you strike me as the kind of person that really likes to argue, and I just don’t have the bandwidth at this point in my life 
Apologies to the OP for high jacking the thread. Good luck with your trot half passes 
I’m sorry you don’t have bandwidth to learn what is correct. That’s a big problem with the sport, sadly. It makes the whole thing more difficult when it should be straightforward and simple to understand, even if it’s not simple to execute.
I thought of this thread when I was teaching yesterday. My student has her (giant, big moving Dutch) gelding going solidly at second level (I thought). We worked on some basics and then she asked if we could play with the trot half passes again. I thought, OK, why not. So I had her do some shoulder in on the rail and that went well. Then haunches in on the rail and that did not go well at all! The horse was willing, but she was collapsing her inside hip, taking her inside leg off, etc. All the stuff people do when they haven’t mastered HI yet. Hmmm. So I had her do some turns on the forehand to get him moving his hindquarters off her leg. Same issue with taking the inside leg off. So we spent the rest of the lesson working on that. Then we tried the HI again and it was improved, but will need a lot of practice before I let her work on HP again. The good news is that while her horse is generally very forward, he didn’t offer to canter during any of her failed attempts. 
The point is that the rider needs to have sensitivity, feel and self awareness. The question is HOW does that rider have motivation to learn? Kind horses just put up with whatever contortions the rider presents…and the horse is blamed for not paying attention to the rider.
Hot sensitive horses, especially stallions and mares, may not take kindly to clueless riding. With some of these horses, it is “learn or die”…eg., you might find yourself on the ground. Those horses will the rider teach a lot…if the rider wants to learn.
I have to say I learned to feel when a horse was using its back after I got bucked off my stallion a few times…ok, more than a few times. Once I learned to feel, he never offered to buck again. I miss that horse dearly.
Due to some back/nerve compression issues my riding got off track about 2 years ago. Weakness in the legs was the major problem. I have a saint of a horse (Lusi stallion) and his reaction to my issues was to say “hey what? I dont recognize those aids - or lack there of” and he would simply keep going in one direction or sometimes just break to the walk. I literally could not get a shoulder in from my I-1 horse…
But after a long run at PT/home work things improved but the hardest was re-establishing the half pass. What worked best for me was to think haunches in on the diagonal…
Not to derail the thread but THANK YOU pluvinel. Your responses to this thread have helped me a ton. I have a rather interesting “princess” at this time. He just turned six and is coming two. The reason is because I haven’t had enough sensitivity, or to be totally honest, an open mind to his needs with respect to where he needs support from me and where he needs me to be light. I can muscle most any horse through but it’s not always been pretty despite having a really nice mover which just gifts me points. I’ve been experimenting around to see just how much of each he needs - rebalance back and move forward - preferably over the back, please. I haven’t found the exact balance of each but it’s been enlightening as to how much more balanced I can get him when I do stop long enough to listen to him by feeling and realize what I need to do with my body to find that special goldilocks moment during certain exercises. Instead of riding him around repeating an exercise ad nauseum (not like I’m really guilty of doing that too extremes but you get my point), I’m doing better at listening to some of his ‘comments’ and placing my half-halts (mostly from the seat and only occasionally from the hand) when and where he’s starting to tip forward at whatever gait we’re in to end up with some better moments. Then we move on to something else before coming back and testing to see ‘what we’ve learned’. Oddly enough, this guy could almost half pass at birth at any gait. He’s a gumby of the stiff kind LOL (I’m sure you’re surprised).
Thank you. Just paying it forward. These were hard lessons to learn taught by a stallion whose sense of fairness was unique.
All I can add is to continue to “play” with your guy and explore how he reacts to your “adjustments.”
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