On the surface, learning a cloverleaf pattern isn’t difficult. But training yourself and your horse to do it exactly the same way each time takes practice. Photo by Betsy Lynch.

 

Training a horse for any timed event takes time. We talked last month about instilling the basics—giving to pressure side to side, breaking at the poll, responding to your legs and your body position. Those are the tools for learning and correcting any part of a timed-event pattern.

Once we have mastered the basics, we teach the horse the pattern. In a way, this part is simple…if you know exactly what you’re training him to do. In other words, you need to know exactly where you want him to be in any part of a pattern—the approach to a turn, the turn, and when leaving the turn.

In fact, how successful your training will be depends on how exactly the same you can take the horse through the pattern, over and over.

Precision is Everything
If you’re wide one time in one spot, then close in the same spot the next time, you’re teaching the horse that precision just doesn’t matter. But in timed events, precise, correct patterns are everything! Find your perfect pattern and don’t deviate from it—no matter what the speed.

To get the precision you need from your horse, you have to ride painstakingly the same every time you go through the pattern. And that goes not only for where you position your horse, it extends to how you position him. Your hands need to be the same at a walk, as they’ll be at a trot, at a lope and at a full-out run. Your body position, from the beginning, needs to emulate what it will be at a run. Throughout the process, steady hands and quiet, consistent posture create a horse that is smooth and solid.

The opposite is also true. Being too rough or inconsistent with your hands, and not being consistent with your body position, are going to create a horse who tries to avoid the discomfort rather than one who’s trying to be consistent as he goes through the pattern.

From the beginning, even at a walk, be sure to ride exactly like you will at a run. Put your hands forward between the turns, so when you pick up for the turns, your horse feels the difference. As you approach the turn, melt into the saddle and keep weight in the outside stirrup so you don’t lean.

Bring your hands up to help the horse collect, then ask him to bend to the inside. Increase the bend as you complete the turn, then let his head straighten up as he goes to the next turn and as you shift your weight forward.

Promote Precision in Yourself • Put your hands forward as you cover the distance between each barrel or pole. • Use the inside rein to tip the horse’s nose into the arc of the turn. • Pick your hands up to encourage collection. • Keep weight in your outside stirrup so you don’t lean into the turn. • Pick the rein and allow the horse to straighten his head, neck and body as he exits the turn.

Eyes Up
Throughout the turn, look where you are going—not at the barrel or pole. Think of driving a car. When you turn a corner, you don’t look off to the side of the road. You keep your eyes on the road ahead. Do the same thing when you ride and it will give your horse a lot more confidence and security.

You also want the horse to be in position—in a frame that allows him to work the best. We’re often asked how much the horse should be “bent” or shaped in any part of the pattern, and the answer is that his body should fit right on the line of where you are going.

You can check to see if you are correct by imagining that your path is a train track and your horse is the train. If you stay on the track, he’s correct. If he runs off the track to the outside, he’s not bent enough. If he runs off the track to the inside, he’s bent too much.

So, no matter where we are in the pattern, we need good horse position and shape, and the rider should be correctly positioned as we go on an exact path. At this point, the most common question is, “When can I go faster?”

The answer comes from the horse you’re riding. He will always give you a simple answer because the time to increase speed is when he’s consistently perfect at the current speed you’re working.

Add speed sparingly. Once a horse is perfect at a walk, we’ll progress to trotting to the turn and then walking around the barrel or pole. After the horse becomes perfect at a standard trot, we’ll progress to trotting a little faster to the barrel or pole and then, we’ll slow the trot down as we go around it. If we add speed, and the horse makes mistakes, we go back to a slower speed. Then after he’s been perfect for a couple of days at the “easy” speed, we ask for acceleration again.

There’s always a comfort zone, a speed at which the horse can be error-free. In the beginning, that speed will be a walk, then a trot, and so on. Anytime he begins to make mistakes, we go down a notch in speed to his comfort zone speed until he’s consistently perfect. We’ll keep him at that pace to regain his confidence, and then ask for the speed increase later.

Correct Leads
Once we get to a lope, not only do all the previous factors have to be correct, the horse will also have to be in the correct lead—the right lead for approaching and making right turns and the left lead for those left-hand turns.

That starts to be an issue when we get to the step of loping to and trotting around turns. On a barrel pattern, for example, we’ll cue for a right lead, then lope to the transition or “rating” area, where we break down to a trot and turn the barrel. With the barrel turned, we’ll cue for a left lead and lope to the transition area before going back to a trot, then do the same for the third barrel.

Eventually, it will only feel natural to a horse to approach a turn in the correct lead, so when we finally start loping through the whole pattern, it’s easy for a horse to leave the first barrel and change leads for the second. Of course, when we take that step, if the horse takes a wrong lead, we simply break down to a trot on the turn so he never learns to go around a barrel on an incorrect lead. Once the turn is made, we cue for the lope and the correct lead.

Once the horse has progressed to consistently loping to the turn and loping slightly slower around the turn and is maintaining the correct lead, position and posture, and the rider is consistent in cues and body position, it’s time to smooch for a little more speed. Let your horse get used to that speed for awhile before moving up another notch.

At that point, you’re riding a horse that has learned the basics and the pattern and mastered that pattern to the point that he can lope through it.

Now, it’s time to season your horse—which is just a way of saying you’re going to help him learn to do all those things consistently in different arenas, on different  ground, and in unfamiliar surroundings.

Next month, we’ll address that process and the steps that teach the horse to learn to focus on his job in spite of all the distractions and inconsistencies he encounters.