Building On Basics; Sidepassing
From my previous post on building softness at a stop, you will have learned some of the first things I teach a horse under saddle. Lateral flexion and disengaging the hindquarters are the foundation to creating a soft, responsive horse. You’ve already learned how to turn those things into a stop, now let’s discuss how to turn that into some basic lateral work.
In order to side pass, you want a horse to understand how to flex laterally, disengage the hindquarters and back softly. You will also want to have a straight section of fence that the horse can’t easily hang their head over.
To start, walk down your fence.
Then you will ask your horse to disengage slightly. Keep a feel on the inside(toward center or arena) rein so your horse doesn’t do a complete turn. Your outside(toward fence) rein will ask the horse to bend their horse into the fence. At the same time slide your outside leg back to ask the horse to disengage.
From here you should end up perpendicular to the fence. Wait here a moment, then turn and go the original direction. Repeat this until the horse softly disengages and ends up perpendicular.
When that step is good, repeat the previous steps. This time however keep your leg on and bump if need be. When your horse side passes one step, release, wait then go on.
Repeat this step until your horse side passes with ease. From there start at a standstill perpendicular to the fence then ask for the side pass.
As the horse learns you can also ask the horse to soften to your hand instead of the horse sticking their nose out and wanting to hollow. Like any other movement, break it into steps. Don’t worry about everything all at once, perfect the pieces so everything can come together later.
The next step is to come off the fence.
It is common for a horse to want to lead with the shoulder as the horse in the first photo. To fix this, you may need to go back to disengaging o get your horse moving their hip softly. You can also go back to the fence and use a dressage whip to ensure the hip moves over.
Side passing is the start of all of my lateral work, it’s used for moving off your inside leg on a circle, leg yielding, shoulder in, haunches in, lead changes etc. My starting point is on the fence to set my horse up for success. On a green horse, the horse may simply speed up instead of moving off of one leg. By starting on the fence, the waist thing to do is move sideways.