Ray Hunt and Buck Brannaman have a couple of different exercises they have had us go through to really focus and bring horse and rider together. One is to ride very tight serpentines at a walk, overbending in each direction so that they are more like s-shaped snaketrails rather than serpentines. When you start, one 's' might be 30 feet long but you slowly tighten it up so that by the time you get to the end of the arena, an 's' might be 4 or 5 feet long. If you can do this with a soft rein, asking less and less each time to get the same bend, by the time you hit the end of the arena, your horse will be listening very intently to you. The idea isn't to overdo the suppling but to progressively refine how subtly you are communicating and how carefully your horse is listening back to you.At the clinic in Chico last weekend, Buck emphasized how important it was to have your horse walking unified, having all four corners reaching equally, as you do the snaketrail exercise. Here are a couple of sequence pictures showing my filly Emma and I doing our serpentines:
As you can see, we weren't quite reaching evenly in the last picture. We still have some work to do.
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