How can I improve my canter? I get this question a lot from my students. Sure, there are a lot of great exercises that you can work on within the canter to improve your canter quality, but the key to a good canter is to first get a good canter transition.
The canter transition is where I see most riders having trouble with their horses. Either they ask at the wrong moment, their horse isn’t round in the trot, or they aren’t balanced when they give the canter aid. If this is you, don’t worry! In this week’s video, I have a few great tips to help you achieve smooth canter transitions.
Quality of the Trot
Before you get ready to ask for the canter, it’s super important to check and make sure that you have a good-quality trot. To make a smooth, balanced transition to canter, your horse needs to be round and lifting their back. Check in with how your horse is going, and focus on getting a nice steady contact, with a forward trot rhythm. If you find that your horse needs to get rounder, take your hands wide, and push them off your inside leg into your outside rein, using your inside rein to supple the bit and help them relax and bend to the inside.
Sitting Trot
Once you’ve checked in with the quality of your trot, now you’re ready to ask for the canter! Because the canter is naturally an asymmetrical gait (meaning it has a left and right lead) the timing of your aids to ask for canter is a lot more complicated than say for example, just asking for the trot from the walk. The biomechanics of the canter make it so that your horse has to lift three of their legs off the ground while pushing off their outside hind to make a balanced transition and pick up the correct canter lead. This means that you have to ask at the exact moment in the trot when the outside hind leg is on the ground to get a good canter transition. To ask at the correct moment, it is super helpful to sit the trot a few strides before asking for the canter.
Sitting the trot before you ask for the canter really is the key to getting a good-quality canter transition. Why not post the trot into the canter? You can post the trot into the canter transition, but because of the way posting trot works, you’ll end up asking for the canter at the incorrect moment, which will cause your horse to become unbalanced in the transition and maybe even pick up the incorrect lead. Plus, if you can sit the trot well into your canter transition, it makes it so much easier for you to stay connected to your horse through the transition and then to sit the canter!
If you’re thinking “But the sitting trot is so hard!” I recommend checking out my Free Before the Sitting Trot PDF where you’ll find five exercises to help you prepare for the sitting trot. And…super secret sneak peek…my Sitting Trot Challenge is coming up very soon – it starts on May 1st!
I hope this helps you with your canter transitions!
Happy Riding!
Amelia
P.S. My NEW Sitting Trot Challenge just opened for enrollment! Check out the details here.
