Rhythm, suppleness, contact, impulsion, straightness, collection. Most riders meet the scales of training as dressage theory and file them away. Read them again as a jumping rider and they are something more useful: a description of the canter you need before you can see a stride, and a checklist for why you cannot.
The canter does the seeing. Streyed puts you on a horse who is always in a perfect canter, so your eye learns its job from the canter the scales describe, hundreds of approaches an hour.
Try it freeThe scales are six qualities of a correctly working horse, set out in the German training system and now used almost everywhere. In the usual order:
They are usually drawn as a pyramid, rhythm at the bottom and collection at the top. The picture is right about one thing: the higher scales cannot exist without the lower ones. It is wrong if it makes you think they are stages you finish. You work on all of them, all the time, and the order only tells you where to look first when something is wrong.
Because a distance is not found, it is made. Seeing a stride is reading, several strides out, where the canter you are in is going to put your horse at the fence. That only works if the canter is something that can be read: regular enough to predict, forward enough to carry you, and adjustable enough that the read can be acted on. Each of the six scales is one of those properties. A hole in any of them does not show up as a flatwork problem. It shows up as a stride you could not see or could not ride.
So the rider who says "I just cannot see a stride" is very often describing a canter that is missing one of these. The scales give you the words for which one.
The beat. In canter, three footfalls and a moment of suspension, repeated at the same tempo, stride after stride. Rhythm is not stride length: a horse can shorten or lengthen and keep exactly the same rhythm, which is the whole point of the later scales. It is the bottom of the pyramid for a reason: nothing above it can be judged while it is changing.
At the fence: A distance is what the canter you are riding will produce at the fence, and rhythm is what makes that canter predictable. If the tempo builds on the approach, the fence arrives early and presents the long one; if it dies, the horse chips in. Either way the distance you read three strides out is not the distance you get, because the question changed after you answered it. Every other scale is in service of this one, which is why Streyed's first level is nothing but holding a canter.
A supple horse bends through his body, swings through his back and lands and turns without stiffening. He can be put on a line and stay soft on it. A stiff horse braces, and a braced horse cannot keep the same canter through a turn.
At the fence: Most lines start out of a turn, and a stiff horse tends to change his canter in the turn: shorter and quicker through the bend, longer and flatter coming out of it. The distance you see on the straight depends on a canter that only existed for a moment. Suppleness is what lets the canter you had on the long side be the canter you present to the fence.
A steady, elastic connection the horse accepts and goes into. Not strong, not loose, and above all not changing. The horse who leans, or who drops behind the hand the moment the rein is touched, has not got a contact; he has an argument.
At the fence: An adjustment to a distance is made with seat, leg, balance and rein together, but the rein is where it is most easily spoiled. Without a contact, the rein's share of the adjustment costs you the canter: you ask him to wait and he comes up against the hand and loses the rhythm, or you soften and he falls onto his forehand. Then the read was right and the ride still went wrong. A contact is what lets the rein's part of a small adjustment stay small and quiet, so the seat and leg can do the rest.
Energy from behind, carried through a swinging back and into the hand. The horse is taking you. This is the scale jumping riders know best and misread most, because impulsion is not speed. A horse can be running and still behind the leg; a horse can be cantering slowly with so much energy that you feel it under the saddle.
At the fence: On a horse who is genuinely in front of the leg, your decisions shrink to almost nothing: he is already going, so you sit and wait for the stride, add a fraction because the engine is running anyway, or sit up and ask him to wait a fraction. On a horse who is not taking you, you have to create the canter at the same time as read it, and it is hard to read well with your leg on. Forward first; then the stride starts to see itself. It is why Napoleon carries you to every fence himself: your eye learns on the horse you should be making at home.
The hind feet travel in the tracks of the front feet, whether the line is straight or curved. Every horse is naturally crooked, like every person is right or left handed, and straightness is the work of evening him up so that both hind legs push equally.
At the fence: A crooked horse tends to drift. He lands and falls out through a shoulder, or he jumps a little left of where you aimed, and a drift on a line can change the distance because it changes the length of the line. A crooked horse also often has two canters, one on each rein, so the stride that measures a distance on the left rein is not quite the stride on the right. If the same line keeps riding differently on each rein, the eye is probably not the problem.
The horse carries more of his weight on his hind legs, so his front end lightens and his strides can shorten without losing energy. Collection is not a slow canter; it is a canter with more in reserve. A balanced, engaged working canter already has a good deal of this, and collection develops it further. With impulsion, it is what riders mean by a bouncy canter: the energy goes up as well as along.
At the fence: This is the scale that gives you choices. A flat, running canter leaves you with very few: you cannot add because he is already near the end of his stride, and you cannot easily wait because there is little to wait with. A balanced, engaged canter can shorten a stride or open one, and the more collection it has the more it can do so without losing the rhythm, which means a distance you see as slightly wrong can be made right instead of lunged at. Seeing a stride is only worth anything if the canter can act on what you saw, and this is that ability. Streyed's Stride control level is it in isolation: the same line ridden from three long, open strides up to eight, with the rhythm held throughout.
You do not finish rhythm and move on to suppleness. All six are being worked on in every canter. But when a distance goes wrong, the order tells you where to look, and it is always from the bottom. There is no point asking for collection from a horse who is not in front of the leg, no point asking for impulsion from a horse who is braced against the hand, and no point asking anything of a canter that does not have a rhythm yet.
In practice, for a jumping rider, it comes down to three questions in order. Is the rhythm the same stride after stride? Is he taking me? Can I shorten or lengthen him without losing either of those? Yes to all three and your eye has a canter it can read. No to any of them and it is being asked to read one that keeps changing under it.
The boards around Streyed's arena carry the scales for a reason. The horse you ride there, Napoleon, is the horse the scales describe: in rhythm, in front of the leg, straight, and adjustable. That is deliberate. Your eye learns pattern recognition fastest on a canter that can be relied on, and once it has learned the pattern it can find it on a real horse whose canter is still being made. Level 1 is rhythm and nothing else. Stride control is collection and impulsion, the same line from three strides to eight. Everything between is reading the distance that the canter produces.
The scales are the horse's half of seeing a stride. Streyed trains the rider's half. The exercises page has the work to do at home on both.
Are the scales of training only for dressage?
No. They describe a correctly working horse in any discipline. For a jumping rider they are the ingredients of the canter a distance can be ridden from.
Which scale matters most for seeing a stride?
Rhythm, because a distance is what the canter you are riding will produce at the fence, and an uneven rhythm makes every distance a moving target. After that, impulsion and balance together, which give you a canter you can add to or wait in.
What does a bouncy canter mean?
A canter in which the energy goes up as well as along: forward, but carried on the hind legs rather than running on the forehand. Impulsion plus a degree of collection. It is the canter with choices in it.
Do you work through the scales in order?
They overlap and you work on them together. When something goes wrong, the order tells you where to look first, and it is always from the bottom.