Should I ask for trot-tölt transitions?

Of course it is possible to make the transition. However, it may have a negative effect on your horse’s trot!

For beginners, we recommend the following transitions:

walk-tölt-walk
walk-trot-walk
walk-galop-walk

Of course the order can change. The main thing. both for you and your horse, is to have clear, easy transitions and to make sure there are no misunderstandings between the two of you. Here, the walk will allow us to prepare ourselves and the horse to go to the next gait.

Once a rider has a little more experience and starts to understand the biomechanics of gaited horses, it becomes easier for them to prepare and correct their horse at different gaits without having to go back to walk in between.

It then becomes possible to make the following transitions:

walk-tölt-trot-gallop-tölt-trot-walk

You will have noticed that we still do not go from trot to tölt. What would be at risk by making such transitions is that the horse might then switch to tölt when the rider seeks contact with its mouth in the trot or asks for collection. Also, the quality of the trot is likely to slowly deteriorate: in the worst cases, the trot becomes four-beated rather than two-beated.

This becomes even more important when we have a horse that choses and looks for tölt over trot. The above described scenario can then happen even without us having taught the horse trot to tölt transitions. In this case, the problem lays in a lack of balance in the horse’s trot. The only solution there is to be patient and give the horse the time it need to stabilise itself in the gait. The difficulty of exercises in the trot should be increased very slowly and gradually and trot-tölt transitions should keep being avoided.