Speed Control – Basic | By Keith Hosman

Teach your horse that there are as many speeds within each gait as there are shades of color.​

One way to teach your horse to travel at a myriad of speeds within a specific gait, is to move up in your gears and then ease back down over and over. Ease up, then cut your speed ("throttle back") and repeat. While doing so, remember that adding speed adds emotion, and that probably means increased stiffness through his body.

Be on the lookout for this and employ a zero tolerance policy toward any sort of resistance in the form of bracing, stiff muscles, lurching, etc. That is, if your horse becomes stiff as you increase speed, fix it before preceding. Cancel your plans to work on speed control per se and instead work on softening. (Do serpentines: Pick up a single rein as he turns, hold the rein till his neck relaxes or drops, walk forward, repeat the other way - again and again with an eye toward calming your horse. Even better, if the two of you are practiced at disengagements, practice those. Repeatedly turning the back end is the quickest route to softening the front end.)

​In a safe environment, get on your horse and walk off. Don't pull back on the reins, but really sit down in the seat and concentrate on slowing him down. Your "dead weight" may naturally slow him down - or not. Either way, ask yourself how many miles an hour you're traveling and remember it. Now, lean forward a bit, "ride faster" with your seat, move your arms (and thus the reins) forward, kiss, cluck like a chicken, whatever it takes to move your horse faster. You want to push your horse up as fast as it'll travel in a walk. If it breaks into a trot, that's okay, just ease it back down. Now, remember that fastest speed you were just given. Let's say the slow speed you clocked was three, the faster speed six. Your horse is capable of traveling in that range of speed (3-6) today. You'll set it as your goal to broaden that range.

The article above is an excerpt from my book "What I'd Teach Your Horse: Training & Re-Training the Basics."