Hi this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride with Karen Loshbaugh and our horse Zoolander. We have just given you a little dissertation on the rising trot and we have shown you what it looks like when its correct and you have a horse that is working through the back. The main point being is the horse working through the back is the main thing that lets you sit to the trot or rise to the trot correctly.

So what we are going to show you now is what happens when things aren’t going correctly. Karen is going to slow the horse down to where he is not really in a working trot anymore and the horse loses that rhythm. Watch what that does to her rising trot,  she has to labor and push her shoulders up and lift herself out of the saddle and the horse is no longer doing it for her because she has lost the thrust through the back. The next thing that people will start doing is they’ll get too far behind the motion sometimes and they’ll start bouncing off the cantle, like Karen shows us in the video. This is all because the back isn’t working, it is no longer working hard enough to push her out of the saddle.

Now lets get the horse working correctly again and swinging through his back. See how the back springs her out of the saddle? She now has rhythm. So once again, a horse that is not working through the back will never have correct rhythm. You can make them nervous, and they’ll kind of have a nervous energy, but that stiffens the horse and also makes problems for the rising trot.

Now of course there are other factors that can affect your rising trot, things like correct saddle fit for the horse and rider. If your saddle is out of balance it is going to make it very difficult for you to ride. It is very important that you’re in a saddle that allows your leg to hang underneath you, so when you go to the rising trot and you lift your toe up it doesn’t just push your weight out in front of you as if you were in a chair.

Now Karen will let the horse stretch all the way down. The importance of practicing this in the stretch is so that we make sure we are not rising up against the hands. Once again, and I say this all the time, the beauty of the stretch is it will erase your mistakes with the horse. The horse will forgive you whacking it in the mouth if you come back and give it a nice stretch. So remember the importance of the stretch is also to establish your balance so that we know that you are balancing not against the reins of the horse. So many people that we see today if you cut the reins off, they would fall off the back of the horse because they’re water skiing and keeping themselves in the correct position, but only by holding against the horse’s mouth with a hollow back.

So once again we are going to show him come back up a little bit into a working trot and get a little more thrust going and look how nicely that brings her out of the saddle. It is so easy for her to rise because the horse is working. Now watch and see the difference as the horse looses the working trot and what happens to her rising trot. See how she is immediately laboring out of the saddle so the horse’s hind end is getting left behind it? Now she sends him forward again into a working trot and see how easy it is for her once he starts springing through the back? It springs her right out of the saddle with each stride. This is Will Faerber, Karen Loshbaugh and of course Zoolander from Art2Ride. Thank you all for joining us and we hope this helps!

back classical foundation Karen Loshbaugh rising trot San Diego horse training spring stretch trot Will Faerber working trot