The Art of Natural Dressage

My favourite exercise... I am starting this exercise diary to share our progress and get some inspiration from all of you who are working on the passage. Please feel free to write in here also if you are not working on the passage itself but other things to improve the trot.

Titum has learned the passage in 2008 and since then we have been doing it whenever he feels like it, but we haven't really done any serious work on it. Having hardly any flat areas in our pastures, we usually do it when we go for walks. This is also why I have almost no video material of it (and probably won't be able to document our progress in as much videos as I did for the school halt). I want to do some refinement on Titum's passage now, but at the moment I am not sure yet what that will be.

My main focus in this exercise diary will be Pia and Summy. Neither of them can do the passage (unless they are very excited while we train ), but with both of them I have done some preparatory work. Whereas with Titum I started from the Spanish trot, for the other two I am using the energy from the rear-like hops they are offering when walking next to me. The difficulty is to turn those hops into elevated trot steps instead of canter jumps. This does not work at all yet when we are walking (whereas with Titum I always initiate a passage from walk), because then they just hop. To get an elevated trot step, we have to move in a slow and focused trot already and then I have to make a suspended step myself. I can increase the chance that they will do their step in trot instead of doing a canter jump by holding my hand between their head and chest, which seems to make them focus downwards and round their backs instead of pulling up their head, hollowing their back and hopping up.

So the point where we are now is that they can do a single passage-like step. I am not sure yet whether from here I will have to puzzle single steps together or try to get the trot more suspended as a whole. My guess is that the latter can work with Summy as he focuses nicely on the suspension in my own moves, whereas with Pia I think it will be the first option. I hope to write an update soon, but it won't be so fast this time because we can only do this when we go for a walk, and then only when they are in the right mood. But I am looking forward a lot to reading about your experiences with this exercise.

I love this exercise too .
I would love to do this with Bear but at the moment he is so excited about rearing that when I ask for more energy thats pretty much all he offers. Once he gets it on cue I might go back and try and get the spanish trot he was trying and work from there. At the moment though he offers something different every time so I am just pretty much rewarding anything cool rather than trying to influence how he does it.

Pops sort of passages - she does a bouncy suspended trot but she gets a bit hollow and flat. I think I origionally taught her by just slowing down her trot and being more bouncy myself. At the moment i am hoping if I can teach her to do a school halt and go school halt to trot that might help improve it. That and getting her to bend the right way on the right (since she has is so unfit she has started counterbending again).

So cool that you are joining us, Marina! Today I thought of you and "being more bouncy myself" and I tried it with Pia. For us this didn't really work, but I guess that's simply because she is so small, so that I cannot use my body in a useful way with her during faster exercises and gaits, because I am always doing a mix between being bouncy and bending down to her, which doesn't really help her.

I also noticed that Pia has a canter side and a trot side. When we move on a counter-clockwise circle, she does not offer any suspended trot steps at all but does single canter jumps instead when I give an upwards cue with my bodylanguage. However, when we move in a clockwise manner, we get the bouncy trot steps. It also seems that she is doing these steps more easily on the circle (given that it's clockwise) where she is already bending her body in trot than on a straight line. I don't know whether this is a bodily thing or just the fact that when bending on a circle, she usually is in some sort of prancing mood already, but for now that does not matter. We will simply focus on that clockwise side and then once she has understood what the exercise is about, perhaps I can move to the other side and ask for a suspended step, and then perhaps in that way she will start to combine two steps in a row.

I don't think I will have a lot to contribute to the passage exercise - Mucki is still a long way away from the passage I think.
We can only shorten the trot a bit, but usually Mucki loses energy while doing so. I get delayed steps with more upward tendency though when Mucki is trotting over poles on the ground. He likes that, maybe I'll play with them a bit and see how it turns out.

I'm very interested in your progress and would like to know more about how you envision the end result. I mean, I know how a passage looks like, but maybe you could show some pictures or videos of your vision of it. I always find that interesting...

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Volker

The horse owes us nothing.

I don't really know. I could say the standard things now, like engagement of the hindquarters, a rounded topline and so on, and of course I would like it if our passage was biomechanically correct. But actually I am not even sure whether with my "movement blindness" I would see it quickly and reliably enough when Titum is moving correctly. Therefore, I have to go with the general expression, and so I reward more when the horses look powerful and a bit wild, hoping that this is correlated closely enough with the use of their whole body, instead of just hopping with the legs. To get that wild passage, I often try to include it into our more playful activities instead of doing something like a pure, focused passage training.

Additionally, I sandwich Titum's passage with exercises that are opposed to a movement I would not like him to do (stiff and with a hollow back and so on). That is, for example I intermix the passage with asking him to trot long and low or we do something like an extended trot in between to prevent that he is pulling himself together, and I intermix it with shoulder-in to get his focus off the frontlegs. I also hope that our current passage cue, a touch of his chest with my finger, suggests to him that he can do the passage in a rather upright way instead of bumping down on the frontlegs. I tried pointing to his hindlegs while he does his passage, but I think he does not like that very much, so I will have to find other ways to make sure he is using his hindquarters.

But actually I must say that I do not have a clear picture in my head, so we will have to form that picture as we go.

This morning Pia and I had the most fantastic passage training ever. We were practising in the big field surrounding our pasture. After I had found out last time that it works better for her on a curve than on a straight line, today we varied direction a lot. We did not trot circles as in lunging (because I find that awfully boring and I think Pia as well), but we varied the bend and direction and curvature of our path all the time, almost as if you take a pencil and make random moves on a sheet of paper, with the only restriction that there are no edges. This made her really try to collect in trot and offer her hops, all at the same time, so in between all the crazy hops we got a lot of nice suspended trot steps, and two or three times she did a little passage sequence of about two and a half steps. It felt as if it came rather accidentally, but of course I rewarded big time and hope that soon she will realize that this is exactly what we want to do.

Another thing that we did and that seemed helpful ist that we seamlessly intermixed the passage training with a search for corncobs. So we were trotting our irregular figures and whenever Pia saw a corncob on the ground, she stopped and bit off a piece and then we continued running, partly to train the passage and partly to go looking for the next corncob.

I feel that this training is not only beneficial for Pia but it also seems to be exactly what I need. With all my focus on body language, I have paid way too little attention to creating a training situation that is purposeful for the horses. Now that body language doesn't work for us in this situation, I get the chance to learn again how to combine the component activities in such a way that it becomes fun for the horses.

Haha, Romy, that's a nice way to train for the passage! I wish I could see you two in the cornfield

In the meantime, I was browsing YouTube for nice passage videos. Not so easy as I thought...
This one looks so calm and flowing to me - it's Nuno Olivera: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgS0YEMqUVQ

_________________
Volker

The horse owes us nothing.

Well I'm not sure that I can really say that I am attempting to train this as I am really not sure how I will go about it and I doubt we are anywhere near ready for it.
But nonetheless we had a little play with shortening and 'bouncing' his trot steps the other day. He has always been really great at varying his speed with mine so it will be really interesting to see if he will mimic my bouncy energy or not. Even if we don't ever get passage, it will be great if this begins to collect his trot a bit, by slowing the movement but keeping the same impulsion.

I think I will probably continue by doing lots of slow trot, fast trot, slow trot transitions to see if we can get that buildup of energy and impulsion.
Looking forward to working on this.

Marina and Romy, you sound like you are making wonderful progress, look forward to hearing more.
Marina and Zoe, are there any videos of BJs passage on here? Can't remember if I saw it on here or only when I came to visit you!

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Jessie and Little Billy

I had a look and realised we haven't put up any of BJ passaging for a year!
This is the most recent one I could find: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zRTZgnw8Yc&feature=plcp. He is much more smooth now and bouncy (especially on a good day). I'll have to remember to do another video of him.

Hi all, Have not been here for a very long time, but the ideas in AND have once again become very important to me. I saw this topic and figured this was a good place to return, as I have been playing with teaching what I call "fancy trot" with my Icelandic horse, starting at liverty, though we have begun to transfer this to under saddle.

At liberty:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUunZhuZ_-g

He is a five-gaited horse, and in this video he is still doing the "hop", but this has smoothed out considerably, and he does not do much hopping under saddle now. Our big challenge is finding the balance between going straight UP (where he usually hops) and covering more ground (which at some point just goes back to being "normal" trot).

I will say this has been the single most rewarding exercise for us in terms of how the effects have rippled through to everything else he does. And he certainly loves it.

How we got this initially:

I was NOT able to shape this step-by-step incrementally from any form of trot. As a gaited horse, he has almost no natural suspension and is meant to have one foot on the ground at all times (even in canter). While I had taught him to trot "proudly" -- which got him to arch his neck and put more effort in -- mostly at liberty, taking it to a higher level of those "pause" steps in passage-like trot were not something he ever managed to offer to increase (my lack of skill probably).

So... I used ground poles, and as inefficient as this sounds -- it took only ONE session to start him doing his "fancy trot". I trotted him through unevenly-spaced poles until he sort of tripped and had to to hop up with one front leg to suddenly get over it. My click timing was luckily perfect that one time, and that was literally all it took.

He began doing ONLY that ONE FOOT up hop, looking horribly lame, but we have been down this road many times, so I trusted that over time the hop would start to fade and he would do the work evenly on both sides which has -- mostly-- already happened.

I do have a dressage trainer whose mentor is Manolo Mendez, and she uses long bamboo sticks for body awareness and guidance, in order to transfer this to under saddle, and my horse absolutely loves this. He is a horse that will not hesitate to kick, buck, or just refuse if you are what he considers rude, but he somehow finds the bamboo to be very interesting and stimulating. I think it is just all part of what goes along with doing proud/badass movements, which is why he particularly LOVES this fancy trot.

He began displaying it in the pasture with more and more frequency, and now we are trying to slowly take his love for doing this and transfer it to other gaits.

Some of what I do may not be appropriate in this forum, so I will try to be thoughtful about that. I DO use a combination of both +r and some -R, though almost never in combination. And I have realized that with my horses at least, the Parelli style of liberty -- which is to get the behaviors solid online and THEN at liberty was exactly backwards. I now try to do everything at liberty first, then a little online in-hand, then finally under saddle.

I am still just barely past a novice, though, so I do have help. Both my trainers are not big fans of using c/t, but they have begun to see the benefits in at least this one specific case.

So nice to read from you again, Kathy! Please do not worry about anything you do not being appropriate for AND. We are a study group, so everyone is welcome to share his methods that may help us in improving our own training. And we can always try to adapt what we read to purely R+ training if we want. So please do share your experiences, I am very thankful for that.

Draumur looks absolutely stunning with his fancy trot, and it's really nice to read that ground poles helped you in giving him the idea of offering this. That's certainly something I am going to try with my horses as well now. Thank you!

Yes, Marina, please post a recent video of your passage! I'd love to see an update!

Kathy, what a lovely video! I really like what you're doing with Draumur - he looks so expressive and proud!

There's nothing inappropriate about that at all. In fact I'd say you'll probably have a hard time finding a member here who does not use -R at all.
Furthermore, like Romy, I see this group as a pool of knowledge from which you can draw for finding your own way of interaction. As long as there is no harm done to the horse, who can objectively say what's right or wrong in training?
I can only speak for myself, but I would definitely like to see more of your work here on this forum

Ah and BTW, I also used trotting over poles to get a fancy trot with Mucki and it worked fine.

_________________
Volker

The horse owes us nothing.

My Pini-Pony now reacts to body language (me hopping beside her). She used to either ignore that or even find it a bit scary when I made any exaggerated movements next to her. I have no idea why now at once this is working so well, but it is making the passage training much easier for us now. This is because it turns out that with my own movement I can influence her movement much better than when I am basically just walking next to her, hoping that she will passage and not just hop. And another good thing about it also is that in this way we are able to start the passage-like steps directly from walk, which makes it easier again because I do not have to get her to do a relaxed, even trot first before asking her makes any sense at all. I was so happy about her progress today.

Kathy I loved that video - what a gorgeous trot (he looks like he grows a hand taller )
My sisters horse BJ also started off with a funny hopping step that made him look a bit wonky.

BJ hasn't been very interested in training lately so he has mainly going for walks. I did get this video of him the other day, but not a very smooth passage and mostly just pretty trots. I've always loved the way he tries to sink down when he does it though . I wish pops would bend her hocks like that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6mBGeml7ZU

It was neat that I decided to pop in today and that I was led here! How lovely!

Kathy, so NICE to hear from you! You know (perhaps you remember) that I am a huge fan of Dramur and all you've done for him. I love his fancy trot. Really, it IS a soft passage and so lovely! I love how you got there. You have SO much patience!

Marina, you have it as well! Lovely video!

Romy, you can collect the arabian trot to passage perhaps by asking for backing up, then launching forward into an animated trot several times. Also, if you can do a little giravolta to a nice forward trot, this too tends to get a horse a little more under himself and you may get a step or two of that soft passage happening.

Tam started off hopping in front too...throwing his front legs I think though, that any lateral steps behind or backing up a little, just before offering the passage, helps get a little more engagement and bending of the hind legs?

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"Ride reverently, as if each step is the axis on which the earth revolves"