Teaching flying change

[LaurenB]

As the title reads, trying to teach my boy with the only result being I can get him to do it when we jump very occasionally

 

[PingPongPony]

There was a very very good article about this in Your Horse magazine this week. I'm trying to achieve the same thing and all i achieve is a disunited canter what they said in the article is to make sure your canter is nice, calm and bouncy, to achieve this do lots of transitions, another step is to teach your horse to react to each leg seperately so that when you put your right leg on it means canter on that leg, once you have done this, try to put your horse in counter canter, then on the corner put your inside leg on slightly, the horses natural instinct to canter on the right leg will come through and it should in theory change legs. I'm going to try this once my horse is back in work. I think it sounds as if it makes sense, whether it works, have no idea Good luck!
PS. you will probably get other replies with techniques that work and have been tested before

 

[trendybraincell]

A good change can only come from a quality canter, how are you trying to do them at the moment?

 

[mil1212]

I have been teaching my 2 youngsters, 1 got it straight away, the other is taking longer thought the article in your horse was very good too.
My instructor gave me a good exercise to do, laying poles accross the centre of the arena like /\/\/ and go through them on canter figures of eight, obviously asking for the change on the pole. Worked brilliantly for me!

 

[somethingorother]

I started to teach my last loan before he went back, first I started by doing a change if rein into counter canter and using the aids I would to strike off in canter on that rein, but you have to allow through your hips so you don't block the step through. Then once he knew the aids we did some over poles on a change of rein. Then his owner wanted him back so that was the end of that. I felt it was working though.

 

[LouS]

I wouldn't teach to change over a pole/raised pole unless you are planning to purely show jump as it encourages them to jump into the change and sometimes they forget their hind legs and change late behind.

This link has some good advice.

http://www.horseandcountry.tv/ask-the-expert/help-how-do-i-teach-my-horse-flying-changes

 

[LaurenB]

Thanks for the advice everyone.

Currently being trying by schooling with lots of transitions, get a good even canter across the diagonal before asking for an opposite bend and canter aid, Im going to try to get a good counter canter as I think that will help him,
Also if I can I'm not going to do so over poles like said above, don't want him to be jumping in changes as we show
I find he rushes when I ask and just feel like he hasn't been understanding what I'm asking. But hopefully if I can get a good counter canter it will come naturally, thanks again everyone x

 

[LaurenB]

Thinking about it I may also try the figure of 8 with the poles at the very start until he understand what I'm asking before taking them away, will have a try 2mro see what suits him

 

[marmalade76]

I managed to train one of mine to do them buy cantening figures of eight and changing through trot. I worked on reducing the number of trot strides until we eventually did none. Hope this makes sense!

 

[C&C]

I managed to train one of mine to do them buy cantening figures of eight and changing through trot. I worked on reducing the number of trot strides until we eventually did none. Hope this makes sense!

I do it this way to. Will have to start teaching new horsey soon