23/04/2026
Sometimes we get stuck with beginner principles like the “triangle” and never move beyond. I view the “triangle” as something to help the human learn basic lunging positioning. But, as this author says, it doesn’t necessarily benefit the horse. This is also why I never use side reins for “developing” a horse.
I was taught the lunging triangle.
Horse on the circle as the base, the lunge line one side, the whip the other, and me standing still at the top. That was what correct looked like. I went through the exams, learned it, repeated it, and for years that’s exactly how I lunged horses, because that was my education and I had no reason to question it.
And if you’ve been taught the same, this isn’t a criticism. It’s simply where many of us started.
But the moment I began to strip things back, to take off the side reins, work in just a cavesson, and actually observe what the horse was doing rather than what I’d been told it should look like, that’s when it started to unravel. The picture didn’t match the theory anymore. Horses weren’t holding the circle, they were falling in, falling out, speeding up, slowing down, drifting towards me or away from me, and no matter how still I stood in the middle, it didn’t improve.
That was the turning point, because it forced me to look at what was actually happening rather than what I thought should be happening.
The whole triangle idea relies on the horse being able to organise its body around you without you truly helping it to do so. It assumes the horse can hold balance, alignment, and coordination on a circle simply because we’ve placed it there, and that by staying still and sending energy from the hind end, everything will somehow come together. In reality, that’s not what happens at all.
A horse on a circle is dealing with balance, asymmetry, coordination, and gravity all at the same time. Most horses are already crooked before you even begin. They don’t carry weight evenly, they don’t step evenly, and they don’t naturally bend in a way that supports correct movement. So when you stand still and drive the hind leg forward into a body that isn’t organised in front, you’re not improving anything, you’re just adding energy into a system that can’t manage it.
The horse then has to solve that problem somehow, and the way it solves it is through compensation. It might speed up, fall further in, drift out, brace through the neck, or become reactive. That’s not bad behaviour, it’s the horse trying to find a way to cope with something it physically can’t do in the way it’s being asked.
This is also the point where side reins tend to get added, because the horse doesn’t look steady, doesn’t look consistent, and doesn’t look round enough. So instead of questioning the process, we add more restriction to try and control the outcome. We fix the head and neck into a position, hoping that the rest of the body will follow.
But all that does is cover up what the horse can’t actually do.
The neck is one of the horse’s primary tools for balance, and when you restrict it, you take away its ability to organise the rest of the body. The horse can no longer lift, lengthen, or adjust where it needs to in order to stay balanced on that circle, so it finds another way. Usually that means more tension, more use of the underside, further dysfunction and more compensation somewhere else. At that point, you’re not developing correct movement, you’re training a more contained version of dysfunction.
And all of this stems from the same starting point, which is standing still and expecting the horse to shape itself around you.
Standing still is not guidance, and a fixed triangle is not communication. If anything, it removes your ability to influence what actually matters. The front end, the shoulders, and the alignment of the neck are what organise balance, yet the triangle system encourages people to focus on pushing from behind instead. When the front end isn’t aligned, the hind leg has nowhere functional to go, so driving it forward simply magnifies the imbalance.
When you step away from that way of thinking, lunging starts to look very different. Instead of controlling from a fixed point, you begin to move with the horse, adjusting your position to support it. You step towards the shoulders when they need guidance, you step away when the horse needs space, and you start to influence the front end first so that the hind leg has somewhere correct to connect into.
That’s where the real change happens, not through forcing a shape, but through helping the horse find one it can actually maintain.
Lunging itself isn’t the problem, and it can be one of the most useful tools we have when it’s done well. It can improve balance, coordination, posture, and communication, but only if we stop expecting the horse to organise itself while we stand still in the middle and start taking responsibility for guiding the movement in a way the horse can understand.
Because horses don’t struggle with circles for no reason.
They struggle when they’re not being helped.
