In Part Three of our Clinic with Christopher Bartle, he begins to look at the canter and exercises to improve the transitions & the pace. ANN-MAREE LOUREY took the notes while PETER STOOP shot the photos.
Christopher Bartle has clear-cut guidelines for the transition into canter and the work within the pace. Little changes in the basic principles, whether the horse is preparing for canter pirouette work or simply finding its balance on a 20m circle.
“When you want the transition into canter you must put yourself into canter position and then think the rhythm, and then step into canter,” Christopher explains.
“If you are asking for right canter, sit on the right side of the saddle, keeping that line between shoulder, hip and heel.”
“And when you are in the canter, stand up in the stirrups, then sit without pushing.”
“I ask you to stand up to prove to yourself that you don’t need to push.”
“Stand a little higher up, stand on tiptoes, like you are trying to reach a light bulb. Just because you are standing up shouldn’t mean that the horse breaks into trot.”
“Then sit back in the saddle, shorten the reins, reduce the circle. You are not to pull him in – keep him up in his poll. Reduce the size of the circle a little more and then, now and then, test yourself by standing up in the stirrups on the smaller circle, and then sit on him again. Try it at 20 metres, bring it down to 10 metres.”
“If he’s struggling, stand up for a stride, then sit again. Do it all again without pushing or pulling. If you pull, you have to push again to make up.”
“When you stand up in your stirrups, look over a hedge, over a wall that is too high to see over. Then sit again and look between his ears. You do this until you feel like you can ride with one hand, sitting, standing, anything you like. What you mustn’t do is start to pull.”
“You must be able to stand one step, sit the next, depending on what you feel in the hand. If he waits for you, you can sit and open your hip.”
“When you are cantering, you need to half halt on the ‘nod’ phase, taking the outside rein back to the hindleg. And if it’s not working, you walk.”
“Stop the horse from elongating as he steps into canter. Think of your loose hip and loose thigh, try not to rock with your body. Aim to have the elbow in front of your body.”
Christopher’s theory of ‘skipping’ into the canter transition came from his childhood.
“Initially that’s how I learnt to canter my ponies around as a kid, I used to kick them on the elbow and skip and they’d canter, but it was later confirmed to me by my trainer, Hans von Blixen-Finecke,” Christopher says.
“He always used to say that the canter must come from your inside leg, not the outside leg. And you will see it time and time again with horses that come above the bit in the canter transition – it’s always from the stimulus, the prod of the outside spur instead of coming from the inside leg.”
“I talk a lot about systems, and in the canter transition you go through a process of (1) sit to the inside (2) shorten the inside rein (3) bring your outside shoulder back (4) step into the inside stirrup – and then I’ve got the canter. No matter how much time or how little time I’ve got to prepare for canter, I will always go 1, 2, 3, 4, canter, always go through the same process so the horse gets to recognise I’m putting myself in canter position, so they know canter is coming, it’s just a question of when you allow them into canter.”
“In the walk-canter-walk transitions, you must first set up the walk, have him up into the bridle, straight and up into the bridle, and step into canter. You push the weight on your inside leg down into the stirrup and take up canter position and simply move your outside leg back. You must keep the heel right under the hip. And once you are in the canter you can wait, and soften, and wait, and soften with the outside rein. Then you can advance to wait, and soften for two strides and wait, and soften for two strides.”
“The transition back to canter is on the ‘wait’ stride, trying to close up the gap between outside rein and outside hindleg. Don’t go into canter holding with your hands. And when you are preparing to walk, don’t clamp your leg. Push your heel down, don’t warn him that you are about to walk, just walk. The preparation for walk, if there is one, is all about looking after the poll of the horse, checking whether he is trying to drop it. The lower leg stays still. And you keep a light hand and you trust him.”
“In the walk-canter transition you need to feel that the horse’s back comes up to you rather than forward.”
“And in the preparation for the walk/canter transition, you need to feel that he recognises that something is going to happen. If he doesn’t, you keep a light contact and double barrel with your feet.”
“I talk a lot about target setting, and to try to make things clear to the horse as well as to the rider, what I’m expecting them to do, I find it helpful to put out four poles to make a box, and you can make that box whatever size you like. In a practical sense in these type of training sessions I make it 15m, 12m, 10m, something like that. Obviously then, you set your target according to the level of the horse, and a horse that’s competing at elementary should be able to cope comfortably inside a 10m box – 10m square. Horses competing at advanced ought to be able to cope inside a box measuring 8m square, or even less, and so a Grand Prix and a Prix St Georges horse should cope within a box 6m square.”
“And one of the ways of using that box, for example in the trot before the canter, first of all I just get the horse to walk around in the box, use the maximum available space, but it is still a circle not a square. In other words you don’t let the horses fall in, you keep them on the outside rein, inside leg to outside rein all the while.”
“First you walk, then you do the same exercise in trot, then if they find it difficult to keep the rhythm and keep the line, I say OK, trot a circle, walk a circle, trot a circle, walk a circle, and if they can do one circle I ask them to do two circles. Gradually I build up the demands.”
“The same sort of thing can apply in the canter, where you do walk to canter in that box, and initially you will find that even those horses that are struggling can maybe only do two or three strides before they’ve lost it, so I come back to walk, and I set my next target.”
“Smack them with the whip, tickle with the spur, anything that makes them jump about on the spot a bit, then relax, no comment, settle again, step into canter, and then I say ‘I dare you!’.”
For the horse (or rider!) having problems getting into the canter pirouette work, Christopher again used his box.
At walk, he asked the rider to turn properly into all the corners.
“Don’t use the outside leg too far back, you don’t want to push the quarters in, do you?” he asks, and stands up in the stirrup in an effortless demo.
“You are not going to be doing the work, he is!”
“Look ahead, so that you are not surprising him, so that he doesn’t try to jump out of the poles.”
“It’s like being in a circus, isn’t it? Such a small arena! Your dream is that you are at the circus, the crowd is high up on all sides, you are cantering around the arena, you have two hands on one rein, you are waving to the crowd, then your hands are on your shoulders, and he’s still cantering, then you’re standing on his back and he’s still cantering… dressage is all about elegance, it’s not a wrestling match.”
“Imagine that when you are in that small arena, you have a cliff edge all the way around you, you are on top of a mountain. But make sure you nearly touch the poles, stay out there, ride it like a circle.”
“And as you ride around that circle you are trying to put your pennies in the slot, in the slot of the machine. By that I mean that there are lots of little actions, not so much that they cause a bigger problem in the next step. Give the outside rein, even when it feels as if you will go over the poles. Fix the inside hand against the saddle to help the inside bend. Lighten your seat and soften your hands when the horse gets a big bumpy (threatens to change out and so on). Don’t be intimidated into using a stronger leg.”
“Then you can bring it down to an 8 metre box, half-halt and turn, half-halt and turn. How many steps of canter are there in an 8 m circle? 10 to 12 steps. And if you find it too difficult, you can canter a circle, then walk a circle. Don’t bring the quarters in because it makes it difficult to turn. By definition, if the quarters are in on the circle, the shoulder is out and then how can you turn?”
“When you can do the perfect 8 m circle in 10 strides, you can come down to a 6 m circle and when you can do that, you can come down to the canter pirouette.”
“The origin of the pirouette was to get out of trouble in a hurry – the bull was coming towards you or you were in battle about to be killed.”
As Christopher explains, there are number of ways to work yourself to canter pirouette stage.
“One way is ride a small square, so that you are saying to the horse in one stride turn, then taking a half halt in the next one and saying ‘straight’, and turn in the next one and straight in the next one, and turn in the next one so that you really feel that in riding your canter pirouette you are still always on the outside rein,” he says. “There are other ways of developing the canter pirouette, for example from the walk pirouette directly into canter pirouette for a few steps and then walk again.”
“The spiralling in onto a gradually smaller circle, I don’t feel works so well – people tend to lean in and try to drag the outside rein across the neck. The other thing you see people do, which has some value I suspect, is working on a circle quarters in (travers), a strong feeling of the inside hip forward. I don’t see that as an exercise directly related to producing the canter pirouette, it’s more an exercise in giving the horse the understanding of bringing the inside hind forward, and when it actually comes to riding the pirouette, if you bring your outside leg back and push the quarters in, you’re straight away pushing the horse off the spot and pushing the shoulder out.”
“So my approach to the actual canter pirouette in the test is always in a slightly shoulder-in position, rather than a travers position, and again, inside leg into outside hand is a preparation.”
“As I say so many times to the riders, don’t bring your outside leg so far back , talk with your outside leg to the horse as if you were directing it towards to the shoulder. I don’t mean by that, that the rider’s leg has to be stuck forward, because it has to remain in contact with the horse’s side.”
“If you were to see the rider side on, there is still a shoulder-hip-heel line down the outside, just as there is on the inside, it’s just that the pressure and the touch of leg is timed to coincide with the outside shoulder coming off the floor.”
“In the pirouette, look down the outside rein (a mental exercise to help keep the horse straight through the neck). Ride the pirouette more like a 6 metre circle with the inside hip open and vibrate the outside rein, hardly sit on his back at all. Keep your inside foot underneath you, take some of the weight out of the saddle into the stirrup.”
“You try to hug him as you are doing the canter pirouette. He is your dancing partner, and if you gave your human dancing partner a big hug in the middle of your waltz he would probably stop!”
“Go into some medium canter after the pirouette, sprint on a bit, then stand in the stirrups and collect, sit, sprint, stand and collect, sit, pirouette, making sure you don’t get left behind when you sprint. Try not to pull on the mouth when you come back, give little vibrations on the mouth instead. The closer you get to the canter pirouette, the lighter the contact. Don’t lift him with your hand, and keep it lively.”
Want more from this master trainer? Sorry you’ll have to wait till next month for the last amazing episode in this series…
Wily Trout is still Britain’s most successful dressage horse, and took Christopher to the dizzy heights of Olympic dressage!
“I think back to Los Angeles and the Games and the feeling of going into that Olympic stadium. Wily Trout was a fairly electric sort of horse and it could have gone either way, he could have gone in there and blown, and as I went in the tunnel I really focused on how I was going to ride it, what I was going to do in terms of checking on his lateral submission, blah blah blah, all the things I planned to do and I just stuck to my plan and as I went in there I felt him tighten for a few steps and then he grew six inches and he was fabulous, gave me the best ride. That will stick with me for the rest of my life, that thought, that memory.”
“We went very well the next year at the Europeans, and the World Cup, but that performance at the Games is the one that will stick in my mind as far as dressage is concerned.”
“There’s time enough, I’m fairly young at heart and fit. There’s time enough for dressage if the right horse comes along.”
There was, of course, more to the basis of Christopher Bartle’s dressage training system than a year’s training in France. Originally he was taught by his mother, Nicole Bartle, “who taught us the basics and irritated us enough to make us want to prove her wrong”, but really his training was from the coach his mother organised, the great Swedish rider and trainer, Baron Hans von Blixen-Finecke.
“He won the 1952 Helsinki Olympics gold medal in eventing and he also happened to train in that year, for those Olympics, the horse that won the gold medal in the dressage, ridden by Henri St Cyr, called Master Rufus”
“The Baron first came to us in 1975, about the same time as I got Wily Trout. At that time Wily Trout was eventing, he did quite well eventing, he was an advanced level horse and he should have gone to Burghley and Badminton but due to an injury he didn’t go.”
“It was at that point in time that I switched him to dressage and so it was through the late 70s that Wily Trout was coming up from medium to Prix St Georges to Grand Prix and so on, and the Baron was coaching me.”
“He was living in England by then, had retired from the army in Sweden, had done a spell in Canada as the national trainer for the event team, given up on that, had his own place in England for a while and was travelling in the same way I do.”
“Three times a year he would come up to us for two weeks at a time. I can’t say he taught me all I know, because I have picked the brains of lots of other people as well, but he’s the basis of it, the basis of the system, and if anyone listens or watches Kyra Kyrkland she says very much the same sort of things I say, or vice versa.”