If you want to improve your horse's paces, your horse has to have a forward attitude. As a human athlete; if you give yourself a workout, you want to come away from that workout feeling that you have derived physical benefit. How do you do that? You try. Anyone who wants to excel in any physical sport has to push themselves a bit, and be willing about their training and really put in and make an effort.

That's exactly the quality we are trying to develop in our forward-thinking horse. You could be schooling your horse every day, doing an awful lot of work on him, and never end up actually developing his paces if that horse is not working with you .

There has to be very good communication between the horse and rider. Every time you school your horse, you need to feel that your horse shares your aim of becoming a more supple, fitter and stronger horse to eventually produce that outstanding performance.

It's a bit like a gymnast or a weight builder, you have got to work on technique, you have got to work on becoming physically more capable; that's what your sessions should aim for.

If you are just working on containing and controlling the horse, you will never end up be ing able to ride the horse in an outgoing - strengthening - way. It doesn't matter how long you spend training the horse, it is not that type of training that will produce that outstanding performance in the end. The best you can hope for is a quiet controlled performance.

Very often a horse that is not ridden forward, ends up stiffer and less athletic. When you are riding every day, and the horse is not truly forward, there's no doubt that you can make the horse physically stiffer by riding him like that.

There are all sorts of different suppling and strengthening exercises that we can perform, but really the issue is how they are performed; that's what makes the difference. It's just like humans. If you had two competing sprinters, the enthusiastic, willing sprinter who is pushing all the time to better his performance, is the one who is going to be on top on the day of the competition, over the sprinter who does the training begrudgingly.

You have to develop willingness in your relationship with your horse.

Most horses all have this willingness within them, it's just a case of them being shown and pointed in the right direction. A lot of the time it is subdued because of the rider's inability to challenge the horse and bring it to a higher level of athleticism.

So you look at a whole range of exercises, but the exercises don't need to be complicated. In canter, for example, you will see in a horse that we have suddenly made go forward, it disunites all the time; simply because it's going forward better. Cantering for that horse is an exercise. Cantering and being forward on that horse, on which you have made that change in attitude, is going to make the horse more supple. It's going to make the horse stronger, and the next time you ride him, you will notice the improvement.

So a simple change like that without having done any specific exercises, just the gait itself, suddenly being forward, is going to change the horse physically a great deal; simply because the horse has been restricted in his attitude to go forward. It has been ridden defensively, and then suddenly it's going forward and stretching out.

As a rider, and I'm sure the same applies to all experienced riders, I can feel lack of willingness in some of the horses I ride. You can almost feel the horse threatening to disunite. You will go down the long side of the arena: the horse doesn't want to go straight, he's very crooked and basically telling you that he can't cope, he's threatening to either disunite or swing his quarters off the track.

So you have to get him going forward; don't listen to his threats. You put the leg on and give the rein away and the horse will take you down the line. You get that basic quality back and work through the crookedness, disuniting, and all the other defences that the horse has built up through being contained and being ridden defensively; then that gait in itself is an exercise.

You might need to ride the canter like that for quite a period of time until you achieve what most horses have when they are broken - free forward movement. And that willingness to go forward in canter is transferred to all the other gaits too. Once the horse develops that freedom in the gait again, then that gait will become a suppling exercise.

The horse will start to loosen up and be much more able to cope, and you end up with a basic gait again, and from that basic gait, in either direction, the collecting and extending, you start to build suppleness and strength, and increase your horse's scope within the gait. This comes from asking questions all the time.

With horses that have gotten a little sticky and haven't been ridden truly forward, the rider may have been doing what they thought was lateral work, but riding those lateral movements with the horse thinking forward changes everything. If the horse has the desire and is swinging through the back, riding a lateral movement becomes an exercise again. If the horse is being ridden defensively, it doesn't matter that you get the horse going sideways, the movement is being blocked.

It goes back to the quality of being able to allow the horse forward. When you are riding a lateral movement, the minute you feel you are holding the horse into the movement with the rein, that you are taking too much with the hand, then the lateral movement has become a block again. You can have the horse going sideways and be deriving absolutely no physical benefits from the exercise whatsoever, if the horse isn't thinking forward.

This brings us to the importance of the half halt. Obviously to make a half halt you have to use restraining aids, you have to use the rein. But when your horse is thinking forward and working through, that half halt comes through immediately. You close your hand, and as you close your hand the horse softens through his jaw. Now that takes a long time to achieve as easily as that, but if you have your horse truly forward, by closing your hand on the rein, you can change your horse's shape: make him rounder, increase the amount of bend. But the quality of the horse flowing forward doesn't disappear because as soon as the half halt has come through, we allow again with our hands.

When you have developed your feel for when your horse is willing, and you have developed the try-factor, and your horse is really putting in for you, you are going to enjoy the sport a lot more because you have a willing partner.

When I'm told, as an instructor, 'my horse is a bastard', I know that rider feels that their horse is different, that their horse lacks willingness and has a bad attitude. It is very very rare that you actually find that sort of horse; usually the horse is a mirror image of the way it's being ridden.

I'm not saying that is easily overcome. Everyone can fall into that trap, you can end up feeling that your horse is a real so-and-so, doesn't want to do it, can't do it . Really a lot of the time the horse just hasn't been let do it.

Once you have developed the ability to feel when your horse is forward, you are also developing a feel for exactly what your horse is capable of. If you have a willing horse, if you know you have the horse who is putting in the effort for you, you will also know exactly what your horse is capable of. If you know what your horse is capable of, and you know he is working to his limit, then you can make progress. You know when you walk away from a session, that the horse has really put in, and over time he is going to be better for it.

Then as the work progresses, it's really not more demanding because the horse is always trying, and as one thing becomes a little easier, straight away you are moving on to something else. So really it's the horse that dictates progress, how quickly he moves on with his education.

The rider has developed the feel that the horse is trying: you will feel something get a little easier, it might be the degree of collection, or it could be your trot to canter transitions have just been slowly improving so that the horse is starting to make effortless trot to canter transitions without any change in the trot rhythm or change in the frame, then he is telling you, 'I am ready to start walk to canter transitions'. So the minute that starts to happen you are taking another step.

Physically the horse is telling you he is ready, and then you have got to get on with the understanding side of things. It could be just the way the horse's trot develops. He could develop more swing and more strength, and the stride could have another six inches in length, just waiting to be asked for. He has developed, and you need to be feeling, assessing and saying, 'I wonder what more he is capable of, can I push a little more?'

That will start to happen on a horse that tries for you, with a rider that has really grasped what it is to have a horse that is forward. But even the best riders get surprised. Even in training, someone might get on one of my horses and show me something I didn't know that the horse was capable of.

If there is something that the horse is capable of, and you hadn't been asking for it, then in a way you are treading water. That's why getting instruction is so important; getting someone else's point of view of what the horse is actually capable of. We all get surprised when a great trainer gets on a horse. You may be surprised by what your horse is capable of, if you get someone to work him forward for you, that's the biggest change of all. It's greatest step of all when you as a rider actually grasp of what working a horse forward and through is about.

When we've got the horse forward and through and willing, even then sometimes we get into little patterns in our training. We become happy with something and school it every day, and it just becomes the norm. We need someone to come along and give us a little kick along and say 'hey, look what's available to you'. 'You should have been asking for a little more angle in your shoulder-in or a little more collection in your collected trot' or whatever.

Once you have achieved the basics, you have to keep progressing. It's a constantly on-going sport. You hear a lot of riders saying 'if only I could get it'. The thing is once you suddenly get it, it doesn't suddenly stop. You spend your whole life trying to 'get it' because the development of the horse is a progression, it never stops. Understanding that can get rid of a lot of frustration. Don't keep waiting to arrive, first you have got to have enjoyed the trip.