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We're going to cover the opportunity to start training a horse towards his lateral work.
Sometimes lateral work sounds like a dressage term, but we know that everything that we
do with our handier western horses, all that fancy footwork comes from the basics of dressage.
Our rider is going to begin to ask this horse to just simply cross over, or we might also
call this a leg yield. You can see she's putting pressure through her lower leg and heel to
the horse's left side. She's creating an indirect ring with her left ring, which means she's
simply moving it slightly over towards the saddle horn as her right rein was opening
up. Laura, we'll do one more of those. That was very good. So she puts herself in the
straight on position and then begins to ask him to go from the right to the left by closing
the right door, opening the left. In other words, applying pressure from right to left.
That would be one of the very first and basic things we can do with the horse to help them
understand this concept of moving side to side rather than straight on. A young horse
would be taught first to do straight forward, straight on, straight lines, round through
the corners, but then we would soon like to move them to this position where they understand
how to cross over. Laura right now is starting to show how he would then go to side passing.
The difference being, of course, she's asking him to remain in one track from left to right,
as his legs cross over, keeping him on that nice, straight line. We call this side passing,
it's very common to be used with western horses in a number of disciplines. We want to make
it a pleasant and easy experience, recognizing on a young horse that he may have an attention
span that we finish up with before he gets too nervous about it. We always start on a
good note; we always end on a good note. From this point, we could start to ask the horse
to even go one more level of lateral work where we now want him to keep his haunches
in place or his hind legs not moving. And that would take us to the beginning of what
you might consider a spin. Spinning is very common in the practice of reining horses as
well as our world of cutting, team penning, ranch sorting, and not to mention even for
the class of trail class. There are often times we have to do a turn on the haunches.
So those are the three different examples of ways that we can introduce lateral work.
Each time it's the degree of forward that we're trying to either to change in the transition
between a leg yield, a side pass, or a spin. Asking the horse to maneuver and cross over
without going forward will change whether it is those things, the leg yield, the side
pass, or the spin.