Question – Im now going up the dressage grades now, and you know as I am going up those grades I am now required to ride into my corners. What i’m finding is that my horse is rushing around the corner or losing speed, how do I ride deeper into the corner without loosing marks for rhythm a or have him speed around the corner. So how do I fix this?

Answer- That’s a really good question. The question you are looking for is how do I assist my horse to be more balanced around corners.

The reason your horse is rushing out of the corners or slowing down to come in to the corners is that your horse cannot maintain balance at the speed that you are taking the corner.

As you come into the corner, your horse will either slow down to prepare for the corner so that he can maintain his balance, or if your horse is rushing out of the corner he has become unbalanced and and is trying to correct himself;   horse is leaning in while rushing.

This is a photo of my Brumby Sansa rushing as we sent her onto circle in week 2, you can see her whole body is leaning toward me. She is very unbalanced

This photo shows Sansa is a little more balanced, although she does not have perfect bend on the circle you can see that her wither is not leaning quite so much, she has more balance as she learns to bend.

There are 2 things that you can do, really simple things to help your horse become more balanced around corners:

1. Ensure that your balance is correct, we do that by being conscious of weighting our stirrups evenly on both inside and outside legs. If you have the tendency to weight your inside stirrups more, or drop your inside arm, rein or should, then you can make a conscious effort to weight your outside inside to counteract this.

2. The second thing you can do, is to train your horse to find balance in his shoulders and ribs, put simply to teach him to find the centre of your 2 reigns. An easy way to know if your horse is in the centre of your two reigns is to look at where is wither is. It should be directly between your two reins. Try and aim for his wither to be strait up, not leaning in on an angle.

I will put together a video on our You Tube channel Equine Development with some of the exercises that I find helpful.