Training pirouettes is a long road that goes on for the entirety of your horses riding career. You start the basics when they are young and as they develop in their training you make it more advanced. So, how do you train your horse to do a pirouette? I'll walk you through it step by step. 

Walk Pirouette Exercises 

Walk pirouettes... how hard can they be!?

HAA! Well anyone who's tried to train walk pirouette KNOWS just how challenging these little suckers can be. When training walk pirouettes the first thing I like to think about is: what pace do I want my horse in?

The answer is that you want an active, marching, collected walk. That's your must-have, non-negotiable foundation. So let's start with that and I’ll take you through the road to pirouettes!

Why are walk pirouettes the most complicated movement on paper? 

• The walk is a four-beat pace that must stay regular throughout the pirouette. In walk our horses need to move through the back and bob their neck up and down as part of the natural walk gait 
• Our frame control aids must set the appropriate frame and posture for the horse without blocking the movement of the neck 
• Our shoulder control aids must turn the shoulders, 
• Our aids that control hindquarters ask them to step in through the turn but are careful not to overpower the turn causing the pirouette to be too large 
• Our horse must be in front of the leg going by itself yet answering the half halt without stopping 

In a walk pirouette, the hind feet are supposed to move around the sides of a dinner plate and the front feet move around a bigger arc. In a dressage test, we are asked to do a half pirouette and they usually complete it in 4 to 5 steps.  

The requirements of the movement itself gives us a hint as to what aids we should focus on. The fact that the shoulders turn on a bigger arc than the hind legs, tells us that this exercise is more about turning the shoulders than the hindquarters. 

How can you apply your training to this technically difficult movement?

It's important that we can break down each movement in dressage and think carefully about how we apply the correct aids. Having a system is one thing, applying it to your everyday riding and training is a whole new area. The goal is to take everything you have learnt from it so far and use it to achieve dressage tests and exercises. 

Everything you do in dressage can be broken down into three foundational pillars. Frame, Feet and Pace. These don’t need to be your foundational pillars, it's a suggestion to help guide you to your own system. It’s all about doing what works best for you.

Frame control, feet control, and pace control are how we can take a difficult exercise like a walk pirouette and make it correct and reliable for competition.

To use the example of the walk pirouette, this is how you should go about it.

• Frame 

  The frame in the walk, your horse needs to use the neck to function through the back. If we try to set our frame and posture with a hand that is too rigid it will stop this function and negatively influence the walk. If we're too loose in the connection, we won't achieve the correct posture. So, there's a fine line between what is enough control over the frame and what's too much.

•  Feet 

  The feet, as discussed earlier, the front feet in a walk pirouette step around an arc that is larger than the back feet. Therefore, our shoulder control aids need to be well refined to turn the shoulders correctly. We must also think about how we control shoulders to assist ourselves in controlling the hind feet. On some occasions your horse will try to avoid stepping the hindquarters in and under and as an evasion will try to step out. Our first instinct as riders is to use the outside leg harder to create a better response, but instead, we can slow the shoulders turning for one step with our shoulder control aids. As we simultaneously use that outside leg by slowing the turning of the shoulders, we give ourselves the chance to isolate the hindquarters and nudge them in the direction we want to achieve the result. 

• Pace 

  Then there is Pace. Riders must be sure not to allow the horse to get behind the leg when you start working on walk pirouettes. We also don't want to drive them crazy about being overactive and make them nervous. However, a walk pirouette should be alert, active and energetic and never tense. In front of our legs and in our rhythm is the starting point and then we maintain this feeling when we start incorporating our half halts. The strain of the walk pirouette exercise will sometimes result in the horse slowing down and losing energy, at that point we should apply our inside leg to see if we get a reaction. If not, reduce the walk pirouette positioning momentarily back towards straight and create a better reaction off both legs then repeat the walk pirouette exercise until you feel your horse keeping its energy whilst doing the exercises. 

Canter Pirouette Exercises 

As your horse moves up the levels they will be introduced to canter pirouette exercises. The foundation for these comes from the walk pirouettes exercises. Although canter pirouettes are an advanced movement, like many things in dressage the training for the pirouettes starts quite early on and progresses through all the years and levels with your horse.  

Pictured is Emma Weinert riding Zidane. 

A great universal canter pirouette exercise that I love is to work on travers (haunches-in) in the canter down the long side. Once everything is working nicely, vary the tempo of the canter, from collected to medium and back again. 

The next step is to ride up the track in that same travers position canter, then move onto a half 10-metre circle retaining the haunches-in. Keeping exactly the same angle you had down the long side into the half circle. The circle can be larger than 10 metres if you need it to be to ensure you keep the angle. This is the beginning of working canter pirouettes!

Once your horse is comfortably established with that exercise you begin to challenge them. Start by cantering down the long side, then collect the canter to the best of your horse’s ability. The size of the pirouette is going to be determined by the amount you collect the canter. Ideally, you want to collect three strides almost on the spot before you start to turn into the pirouette. You then turn the shoulders to do your pirouette and then head off back down the long side. 

I find the long-side/track to be a great place to train these exercises because it allows you to evaluate and refine the size of the pirouettes. These exercises are some of my favourites on the road to pirouettes.

Please take this little road map and use it to give you some direction on your road to training pirouettes in the dressage arena! 

Pictured is Brett Parbery riding DP Weltmeiser.