Think about how you can continue to train your horse yet add some fun and variety to his life.

Carla Varasso writes: My friends and I, who like to hilltop with the local hunt club, use the phrase, dressage by the mile, all the time, referring to our rides on the trails. We use leg yielding, and haunches in/out when negotiating trees on the trails, and turns on the forehand when asked to open or close a gate. It’s quite fun, and of course it all comes in handy when negotiating questions on a x-country course.

My friend and I rode today — she on her very tall (16.1) QH — who is not going to run barrels because he is getting too tall. As she was riding around in circles she complained of his right shoulder drifting out — I (to my surprise and delight) was able to demonstrate counter flexion for her, and she tried it, and liked it very much — so did Jet, her 3 year old!!!!

Needless to say, I was proud of Chico for being such a good boy while we demonstrated — I was visualizing you with Moshi in the DVD (on Making Your Horse Straight) the entire time.

I always tell my students, you really know when you understand something when you find that you can teach it to someone else — what fun!

Then we went outside and rode around the big hay field, and did our “dressage by the mile” — shoulder fore, some leg yields, and some upward and downward transitions — what a great day in the saddle it was!

Click on dressage training for more info on training your horse in a systematic program.

Your goal for lateral movements in dressage (and everything else you do with your dressage horse!) is to strengthen his weaker hind leg, make his stiff side more “bendable”, and his hollow side less “soft”.

So, for now, let’s just talk about making the weak hind leg stronger.Your dressage horse’s weaker hind leg is the hind leg on his soft side. There’s nothing wrong with your horse! Almost every horse has a weaker hind leg because few horses are ambidextrous. The weak hind leg is the hind leg on your horse’s “soft”or hollow side. His strong hind leg is on his stiff side.

The weak hind leg doesn’t step directly underneath your horse’s body. Your horse displaces this leg slightly to the side to avoid carrying weight with it. On the other hand, the hind leg on the stiff side carries more weight. The issue here goes back to that old saying “use makes the muscle”. If you don’t work on strengthening the weaker leg, the weak hind leg gets weaker, and the strong hind leg gets stronger.

This can lead to all kinds of problems with dressage movements down the road like having an uneven contact with the bit, uneven lengthenings, and difficulty doing lateral work in one direction.

Avoiding carrying weight with the weaker hind leg can be very subtle. Often your dressage horse will put his hind leg only an inch or so to the side. An observant ground person can tell you which hind leg your horse is “unloading”. Walk and trot straight away from her. Then change direction and do the same.

If your dressage horse’s left hind leg is weaker than his right hind leg, he’ll carry it slightly to the left regardless of which direction you’re going. Since this evasion can be subtle, your correction can be subtle as well.

The solution is to ask your horse’s left hind leg to do a little “weight-lifting”. Do this by moving his hindquarters an inch or so to the right so his left hind leg has to step under his body. Ask for this position in both directions on all lines and curves. This will give his weaker hind leg an opportunity to get stronger. One word of caution here. Since you know this leg is weaker, be sure you give your dressage horse lots of walk breaks so he can relax his muscles. There’s a fine line between strengthening muscles and making them sore.

If your horse is a bit more educated, you can do the same sort of exercise by always placing him in a very slight shoulder-fore or renvers position when you track to the left. When you track to the right, put him in a very slight haunches-in position. Every position should place his left hind leg a hair to the inside of his left front leg. Once again, moving the hind leg over an inch or two is more than enough to do the job.

If you do these “hind leg strengthening” exercises thoughtfully, over time your horse will be able to do the dressage movements like leg yields, shoulder-in, haunches-in, renvers, and half pass equally easily in both directions.

Click here for more info on leg yields shoulder-in.