Speeding up a SLOW walk: Road to the Tevis Cup # 41

My current short-term goal for Fantazia is speeding up her SLOW walk. I’ve come to a new appreciation (if you can call it that) of how slow she walks because my Morgan gelding, Beroni, can do the same 5 mile loop Fantazia and I do… in the same time. She trots up all but the steepest slopes. He walks 90% of the time. And she trots fast. But she walks very very slow.

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How to speed up a slow walk
Dealing with jigging

The Tower Loop

The ride is one I do frequently because it is ideal for conditioning. It’s just out our back gate, about 5 miles with a total elevation gain of about 1,400 feet (it varies a bit depending on how we go up and down the hill just outside our property). That means about 1,400′ elevation loss and Fantazia walks especially slow downhill. It’s not quite half a mile from the training barn to the gate. Just outside the gate, there is a steep but little hill: 80′ up and 80′ down in about 0.15 miles. I tail them up and lead them down before getting back on. We then walk the remainder of the first mile (total elevation gain ~360′).

In the next 3/4 of a mile, you climb around 700′. That’s a grade of about 17.7% on average (see my post on how to calculate grade). Then it’s fairly flat between the two utility towers that are the reason for my naming it “The Tower Loop.” Then DOWN steeply, then up and down again.

Fantazia

The last time I did the Tower Loop with Fantazia, our total time was 1:38:00 (Moving time 1:28:32). 5.04 miles; average moving speed 3.4 mph. Max speed: 10.5 mph. She trotted up most of the slopes.

Beroni

The last time I did the Tower Loop with Beroni, our total time was 1:35:33 (Moving time 1:26:28). 5.00 miles; average moving speed 3.5 mph. Max speed: 8.1 mph. He walked up all the big hills.

Clearly, Fantazia needed to walk faster! I had a new goal: speeding up her slow walk!

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How to speed up a slow walk

Speeding up a slow walk isn’t easy, but it’s something I’ve had to do with many horses. All babies walk slow–and when I say babies, I am thinking of yearlings at the track (Hipodromo de la Zarzuela) or the 3-5 year-olds I’ve saddle-broke for my mother. Most horses walk slowly at first under saddle. In the early days after mounting, this is partly because they aren’t used to carrying a heavy human on their backs. And in the very early days, as long as they go forward without bucking, we’re all happy. But as soon as they are comfortable carrying someone in the saddle (once they are trotting and cantering!), it’s time to work on speeding up that baby-walk.

Extension vs. tempo

At some point when I was a child, I learned to extend the walk by using my leg just as the horse lifted its front leg on the same side. This does work to speed up a walk, but! First, extending a gait is not the same as speeding it up. To extend a gait, you get the horse to lengthen its stride, without changing the pace, or tempo, of your horse’s stride. To lengthen its stride, the horse must take longer steps.

Stride vs. step

Note that stride means all the steps the feet take. So, a walk needs four steps to get through one stride, a trot needs two, a canter needs three. If you extend a horse’s stride, it will move faster (cover more ground in the same time), even if the tempo of its steps does not change. If you increase the tempo and extend the stride, the horse’s speed will be that much faster.

I am most interested in increasing Fantazia’s tempo, especially when going downhill. She has to be able to accommodate her stride to the terrain. In particularly technical terrain, she might have to vary each step (and she does, to avoid rocks and other obstacles). Extending her stride, which requires regularity of steps, is not the most efficient way of speeding up her slow walk on the trail. However, I do ask her to extend in the arena.

How I speed up that slow walk

For extending, I do cue with alternating legs in time with her stride. It’s important to cue as the leg leaves the ground (whichever leg you are asking to extend). Much easier to move a leg that’s in the air than one that’s on the ground!

For increasing her tempo, I speed up the extension cues and I use my entire body to encourage her to move more quickly. Speeding up a slow walk is a lot of work! I’d rather just relax and enjoy the scenery when I’m walking on the trail. That’s why Fantazia’s walk is still so slow, after months.

A week ago (when I started working on this post), I rode Fantazia 13.4 miles with the sole purpose of working on that slow walk. We did 3,215′ of elevation gain (and loss), which allowed me to ask her to move along at the walk on a variety of grades and terrain. Yes, it was excruciating. Her response to my ask is to trot (especially when heading home, or when she thinks we might possibly be heading home). I’d ask her to speed up, then check her before she started trotting. The check-before-trotting is similar to what you have to do with a horse that jigs.

Fantazia does not usually jig, though she will at a ride if I try to make her walk when she wants to go after other horses… Or whenever she hears another horse coming up behind us. Horses that jig are particularly annoying, because their jig is almost always slower than a good walk (and certainly slower than their walk).

Dealing with jigging

Beroni was a terrible jigger. That’s one of the reasons his show career fell apart when he was put in a stable that focused on teaching kids rather than training horses. Hot horse + anxious kid = jigging every day of the week. He’ll still jig in an arena, when he gets worked up, but he’s good on the trail now. At first, he was terrified of everything: cattle, rocks, water… That caused anxiety that resulted in jigging. Wet saddle blankets and a lot of exposure to the Dangers of the Wild have pretty much eliminated that problem.

Get off and lead

Often, the best way to deal with jigging is to get off and lead. One of the trainers I rode for at the track in Madrid always told gallopers to do this when he saw a horse start jigging. Too often gallopers get irritated with jigging, and the more irritated a rider gets, the more the horse jigs. If you feel yourself getting cranky, it’s always best to dismount.

Things to do from the saddle

If you can remain calm, there are things you can do from the saddle. You can check the horse and keep it in a four beat gait, but be prepared to walk very slowly at first. You can stop and back up. Sometimes this works, sometimes it makes them more anxious. When Fantazia does jig, backing makes it worse.

Stopping her does nothing (she just starts jigging again when I ask her to move off). However, sometimes stopping does work, if you have the time to spend several minutes standing still. Fantazia can stand for ten minutes and then proceed to jig. This has happened more than once.

Beroni didn’t really do stopping when I brought him to me in California. Like many show horses, he has had the bad habit of moving off as soon as he feels you hit the saddle as long as I’ve known him. Yes, I’ve worked on it, and yes, he will now stand still for mounting, but it required time. This is one of the many reasons I always insist my horses stand still whenever asked from the first day I sit on their backs. It’s easy to teach if you start that way, much more difficult to untrain learned bad habits.

You can also turn around and go the other way every time your horse starts jigging. This only works if the other way isn’t the way home, and/or you are riding with other people. Be prepared to repeat this many times, and have the horse get even more worked up when you turn around at first. They do learn eventually though, if you are patient.

The little circle trick

Turning in little circles works with a lot of horses, including Beroni. I hate it, because it makes me dizzy, but they figure out pretty quickly that whenever they break into a trot, they’ll have to do a little circle. No horse likes that. Be prepared to do more than one circle. In Beroni’s case, it takes two full mini-circles to make him think.

Little circles work for all sorts of things. I refused to use them until I was in my thirties, and for the first I had a horse that no one but me could ride. I started doing little circles with him when he got naughty (I had to provoke him) because it was something I could tell other people to do. It worked (that horse would refuse to go forward, something that stemmed from a history of anhidrosis at the Hipódromo Presidente Remón in Panama).

Any other ideas?

If you’ve got a tried and true method of speeding up a slow walk and/or dealing with jigging, please let me know!

Suggestions from other riders:

1. Saddle fit. Two people on the Facebook AERC page have pointed out that getting a saddle that fits can solve some slow walks. Excellent point: a saddle that restricts shoulder movement can keep a horse from striding out. A saddle that is placed too far forward can do the same thing.
2. Walking races. Do them with other rides in the arena or any flat open space. This is something you see kids in lessons do all the time, because it teaches them to ride the walk. It will also teach older people and their horses to do the same!
3. Dressage lessons. A few people have pointed out the value of practicing dressage (with a good instructor). From the beginning levels (used to be Training Level when I was a kid, now there is something called introductory too), dressage puts a premium on a good walk. “Free walk on a long rein” (sometimes loose) means a forward moving, relaxed gait with the neck and head stretched down. Learning how to get a good free walk can help with speeding up a slow walk on the trail. (I already use the techniques I learned decades ago).
   It doesn’t need to be traditional dressage! Cowboy Dressage puts even more emphasis on the walk. As its founder, Eitan Beth-Halachmy, frequently points out, very few riders train at the walk: they just use it as warm-up and in-between-other-gaits. To have a good walk in varying frames (extended or long, medium–thinking working, or short or collected), you must work on it as much as you work on the trot or canter.