Muriel asked another really good question (thank you very much Muriel) that comes up a lot when people are new to clicker training, and that I wondered about myself when starting. I partly answered it in 'comments', but I thought that I would make it part of the main body of the blog, and add more thoughts on the subject.

Muriel wrote: "Thanks for your answer. I find it fascinating the so many transitions.
But don't you find disrupting?

It is something I notice on one of your video. Do you never get in a "zone" when the horse keeps the pace relaxing into the rythm.

One of my instructors was an endurance rider, and she used to get us into a "rythm" which must have been natural for the horse, it is very relaxing.

Do you do that?"

I answered: "I do when riding out but not when schooling. I'm going for balance before movement, and then clicking, hopefully, before we start to lose that balance. I do go for more duration now, than in that very early video, with movements that are well established, but if I am going to click them, then I have to try to click the best of the movement.

It did feel very strange to begin with, because I used to be one of those riders who trotted around for half an hour trying to get balance through movement, but that seems like such hard work now, for me and for the horse, and so hit and miss.

It CAN still be quite hard, to click and end something lovely, like when Bella starts to offer some passage, but I KNOW that this is the way to make sure that I DO get more of it, and that she's happy to volunteer more of it, which she probably wouldn't be nearly so keen to do if we didn't stop before it became really hard work.

The frequent transitions are also making real improvements in my riding too, because I find that if I can ride the transition well, the rest is easy, and I get a LOT of practise at riding transitions!!!!

Of course there are many roads to Rome (as Hilary would say, if she's reading this!) but, for me, this is the easy, most successful, least physically stressful and most fun way for me and for my horses."

The other thing that I should have said is that when you follow the 'Riding With The Clicker' programme you are, as Alexandra Kurland says, "taking the horse's training apart and putting it back together again, only better". In effect this means that you are teaching the horse a completely different way of going, holding himself in the "exquisite" balance that the flexions help him to find, and that all happens quite fast, so it would be totally unreasonable of me (I think) to expect him to keep it up for more than a few strides at a time, between clicks, to begin with, until his muscles get used to this new way of carrying himself and his rider.

With Bella and Jack I have built this up gradually, a few steps more each time, so they find this self-carriage quite easy to maintain now, but Grace has made massive changes very fast and is using muscles she has never used before, and her body is older and more set in it's ways, so I need to build duration even more slowly and carefully with her.

A couple of days ago I watched a very old video of me schooling one of my previous horses. She was a part bred Arab (palomino - really beautiful) and had a nice, naturally fairly well balanced trot and I was trotting her around for ages. Eventually she produced some really lovely strides and I thanked her and gave her a break in walk.

We had spent about twenty minutes trotting around, practising very average (for her) movement, to get a couple of minutes of beautiful movement.

If I had known then what I know now, we could have spent a couple of minutes warming up with the very average movement, then spent the next twenty minutes practising only the beautiful movement (in short bursts between clicks, to begin with), and I can only imagine how much more we might have achieved, and how much more effortless we might both have found it, if we'd been able to do it that way around.

I used to show her with moderate success. If clicker training and 'Riding With The Clicker' had been around then .................