Mary Wanless explains how to get the correct canter lead: check which shoulder the horse is leaning on, avoid over-bending inside, and use an outside whip if needed. Straightness from groundwork means you don't have to be biomechanically perfect.
If you've got a horse that is going off on the wrong leg, sometimes the. The whip on the outside can help with that. Secondly is kind of notice what shoulder your horse is leaning on. The sequence of canter, here, here, here, here, going to the left is set up in a way that the horse has the longest base of support to the inside so that he is able to. He doesn't just lean over and fall over going around a corner. If you're asking for canter and your horse already has too much weight on the outside shoulder going round the corner and too much bend to the inside, what might happen is the horse may strike off on the wrong leg because he's already weighted in this direction. And we had this with Tinker. Tinker would go into the corner and she'd be falling on the outside shoulder and she'd strike off on the wrong lead. Millie was very, very slight at the time and just didn't have the stability to keep to go rising to sitting to keep the horse straight. And at the same time then ask it to canter on and still keep it straight. Because she would ask Tinker to canter, she would come in straight, ask Tinker to Tinker would go bleh. Like this fall on the outside shoulder as Millie was asking for the canter, and then still strike off incorrectly. So Millie kind of couldn't coordinate the keeping the mare straight and all that sort of thing. Which is why really, you know, we use groundwork to help us as much as possible because that would solve that particular problem by getting the horse used to being straight and requiring less good rider biomechanics to make it happen. You know, often the advice to get the horse on the correct lead is to bend it to the inside. If you bend it to the inside and it'll know it's going to the right, for instance, here, and therefore it will go on the right lead. That is sometimes true. But if you bend your horse right and it falls off in this direction, as far as the horse is concerned, it's going off in this direction. So it's really important that you don't over bend your horse to the inside. And it's really important you realize where the horse's weight is in its shoulders. And that will kind of give you a clue as to where, which leg it will naturally want to strike off on.
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