I believe it is a good practice to teach the horse always to first walk relaxed and focused while longeing.
We make sure we instill this into all of our horses, whether we are starting them from scratch or we get them already further along in their training.
Not only is this an important safety issue, but there is so much to be gained by ensuring this becomes a habit for the horse.
It gives you and the horse the opportunity to “arrive” mentally, check in with each other, and start the work session on a relaxed, calm note. It sets you up better for effective longeing at the trot and canter because you’ve established a solid foundation point.
You can communicate so much in a subtle way to the horse at the walk. You can influence better the bend, carriage, size of the circle, and rhythm/tempo if you begin by establishing it at the walk.
But not every horse is so keen to walk at the beginning of the work session, I know! They have to learn through gentleness, calm groundedness, and guidance. Once they learn how then it becomes a habit.
Novilheiro, a young PSL stallion we are starting under saddle this year
When you can start a horse from the beginning, like this horse here (Novilheiro, a young Lusitano stallion), you have the advantage that they have not developed any bad habits or thinking about the work. You can start from a clean slate.
With a young horse, we always start the longeing with two people. One person stands in the middle holding the longe line. The second person walks with the horse on the circle. As the horse relaxes onto the circle line, the leading person can move gradually away from the horse, letting the longeing person take over. In this way, the authority gets gradually handed over to the longeing person. The leading person still remains nearby within the circle for a while, though, to provide backup whenever needed. Perhaps the horse turns to come in or falls in on the circle- then the leading person is right there to quickly step in and bring the horse back on track. Or perhaps the horse doesn’t go forward- the leading person can gently drive the horse forward again with the long whip. This is how good habits are established without drama or confusion.
When you need to retrain a horse who already has a bad habit of rushing and charging off, you will need to be patient. They are not tuning into you and not paying attention. The first thing you will need to do is get their attention - or better yet, not lose their attention.
This can be done with two people as I explained with training the young horse above, but if you don’t have an additional person to help you, it is still possible.
This is what I do:
I begin by hand-walking the horse in the arena. I walk and halt, walk and halt, repeating at random places in the arena. Every time the horse loses attention, I halt and bring the horse’s attention back to me. If the horse has severely lost attention, I may need to first direct his energy into sidestepping to gain his attention back to me enough to be able to halt. I do this in both directions. In a short time, the horse is very tuned in. Then I walk the horse on a circle line, but I generally start with a circle smaller than I would normally longe on - perhaps about 10 m diameter. I repeat the same process, again in both directions. I use plenty of praise when the horse starts giving me the responses I am looking for.
Then I progress to the next step. Walking the horse, I start to let the horse out a little distance from me, only letting the horse out as much as I can while still maintaining the calm walk and his full attention on me. The goal is to let the horse out to the full-size lunging circle (generally approximately 20m). I keep myself mentally very grounded throughout this. A visualization I use that helps with this is to visualize a cord of energy flowing out from underneath you connecting you to the earth’s core. I find that horses are usually very perceptive and responsive to this.
As I am doing this, I use gentle pulses on the lunge line to keep the horse softly bending around me. I don’t want the horse’s whole neck turning inward - then the horse would be bulging out over the outside shoulder. I just want a gentle bend through the whole body with the poll soft and relaxed. When the horse loses this, I ground myself and gently half-halt to bring the horse back to me. Again, I use praise to give feedback to the horse when he gets it right.
If the horse breaks to the trot, darts off, or does anything that breaks this soft, calm flow, I immediately go back to walking the horse in a small circle. I repeat this patiently as many times as I need to.
If a horse has been doing this for many years, the habit will be very deeply ingrained and you need to accept that it might take patience and time for the horse to replace this old habit with a new habit, but IF you are patient and persistent, this will pay off. Generally, no matter how much they enjoy bucking and running around, reacting to everything they see, they actually enjoy even more connecting with a human that makes them feel good, calm, grounded, and safe.
