I’m fortunate enough to be riding a woman’s Quarter Horse mare. The mare is green, but kind, and has a good walk/trot. However, her canter needs to be developed. She mostly struggles with maintaining it for longer periods of time. Lessons aren’t an easy option at the moment, so any books or videos you could point me to would be wonderful!
Thank you!
Time, poles, hills.
It takes time for a green horse to develop the physical strength to sustain a canter.
Pole work, and there are plenty of online resources available with patterns and exercises, assists in many areas of training: suppleness, balance, teaching the horse where to put its feet, getting it to think more quickly, improving suspension, adjustability etc etc and is also interesting to do for both horse and rider. There are just so many useful things to do with poles.
Hills are ideal for building muscles and stamina and balance, both going up and going down. Getting the horse out of the arena into the big wide world is hugely beneficial for opening up the stride, getting the horse thinking and moving forward and having FUN. Fun is often forgotten or ignored in training horses.
In general QH like to canter, but more as either a Western lope or a fast short bomber run. In general it is more difficult to develop their trots.
How does she canter on longe or at liberty? How does she canter on the straightaway on trails or in a really big field?
Cabtering a circle is really hard work for a green horse. I would suggest going somewhere straight outside of the arena and letting her do a quarter horse lope or whatever comes natural to her until she is balanced and stronger.
Otherwise you could trot the short end, pick up canter on the corner to long side, and then transition down to trot on the short side. If she can only hold canter a few strides then only ask her to.
My registered Appaloosa has just as much QH blood as Appie blood, so I’ll speak from experience having raised, broke, and trained him. He’s got a nice, rhythmic, comfy canter (he’s got western pleasure breeding on the bottom side), but when he’s out of shape, circling and even just the confines of a large dressage arena is almost too much for him at the canter. He needs wide open spaces to canter in mostly straight lines (like, fence lines) and gentle arcs. And he cannot hold it together too long at first, so I do a lot of canter-trot-canter-trot transitions. I try to bring him back to trot before he falls apart at the canter. Eventually he gets strong enough to hold the canter longer and longer. I work on circles and figures out in the field, and we do short sessions in the actual dressage arena, but I don’t expect as much there while he’s still building strength and suppleness. Eventually he gets to the place where he can w/t/c in the arena without falling apart, and can do a 20 meter circle at the canter and so forth.
He still prefers the wide open field though. He thinks the dressage ring is no fun at all.
*Edited for typos.
Canter to walk transitions are hard work and build strength and balance. Canter the long side, trans to walk before the corner, pick up canter before the next long side and sometimes not until either B or E, rinse repeat. Also, on a 20 m circle canter walk canter walk as you ride the 4 quadrants. Don’t do too much too long, it’s hard work.
As Tmares says Transitions, transitions, transitions, done equally on both reins. But, do not drill. If you need corners to do your transitions, so be it. Let the corners help you.
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