Striding

Striding is in my experience a dying art with little emphasis on how to stride a horse in today's riding instruction. By striding, I mean the rider (A) can see a striding distance i.e. strides to a jump, (B) has the ability to establish the "standard" stride for their horse, optimally from a trot transition, (C) has the ability to lengthen and to shorten their horses stride and (D) has the ability to increase or decrease the impulsion while maintaining a specific length of stride.

To me striding is defiantly a "feel" thing in riding. In lessons I use canter poles in a way where a rider must establish the length of the pole distance before they enter a series of 2 to 5 poles set at a certain canter stride distance. I have had young riders who can look at ta series if poles and set the stride exactly 2 or 3 strides before the poles.  This, I believe is a gift. And I have had riding students who have ridden a long time with a lot of instruction who invariably bring their horse to a series of poles way off the striding distance. For them, it seems almost impossible.

These is also the horse side of this topic. Some horses are striding machines with one very set canter stride, and others that can't seem to put two strides together of the same length. I like the latter kind of horse because I can use their "flexibility of striding as versatility, but for other riders that is too much work.

Lastly, there is the work a horse must do regarding striding. One of the things I do not like about Hunter show classes is the monotony of the fixed striding. I think it narrows the ability of both the horse and the rider. We all know that we reached a time years ago when a Hunter horses could no longer actually fox hunt in spite of the fact that these classes were originally for fox hunting horses.  Those show horses with their rigidly fixed striding typically have great difficulty managing terrain, especially areas such as formally lumbered sections of woods where large diameter tree branches are left looking like giant pick-up-sticks.

Moving fast through areas like this, keeping up with a pack of hounds is both exciting and very demanding.