Working out the ‘McLean Method’
Story by Shannan Makauskas and photos by Alex Makauskas
Last month we sat in on a lesson with one of Australia’s favourite dressage larrikins, Tor Van Den Berge, and the renowned academic horse trainer, Andrew McLean.
Various techniques were used by Andrew to address shying and a lack of response to turning and stop aids. After the lesson I sat down with Andrew to discuss the outcomes of training the ‘McLean method’ as opposed to the German Training Scale.
The German way of training involves riding with leg into a restraining hand. This sees the use of two opposing aids, leg and hand or stop and go. But this is something Andrew is completely against. So how does the rider slow the rhythm, while increasing the activity from behind, without using opposing aids simultaneously?
“That comes down to timing and feel. I think that’s where you see, with the good riders, the aids come really close together. But you mustn’t do it at the same time. For example I can talk very quickly and you can still understand what I’m saying, even if I talk very fast. But if I put all the words into one sound byte there’s no information at all for you to hear.”
“That’s why rein aids and leg aids can come very close. And the more advanced the horse, the closer they get. But as soon as they come all at once, it’s not good for the horse.”
I took Andrew’s theories to Grand Prix riders, Tor Van Den Berge and Anita Scampton, to get their thoughts.
Tor doesn’t believe in using a restraining hand: “I’m always thinking of an allowing hand and it’s my first thought when I get onto the arena, to get them through the neck. When you first start the half halts with the three year olds, sure you might have to help them a little bit with the hand but once they’re four I expect them to react.”
Grand Prix rider Anita Scampton, who has been trained by Thomas Meullhenbeck and Tina Fairweather (a former student of Edgar Lichtwark), also believes in keeping hand and leg aids separate: “Even though there’s a lot of talk from top trainers about riding horses into a restraining hand, I don’t believe the great riders actually do this. I think that with their timing and feel they actually ride the horse into an allowing hand.” 
“It might seem like leg and hand are working at the same time. But in actual fact their timing is so good that this is not the case. If they truly were forcing the energy of the hindquarter into a closed hand the horse would lose the freedom of his frame. Then he would come short in the neck and open his mouth.”
Andrew explains the process of riding the half halt: “It isn’t that difficult in the sense that I think it’s just half a halt. Why it is difficult is we have this concept of making the answer to every problem to ride forward, forward, forward. And not many people then do enough downward transitions to balance it up.”
“It’s important to remember the half halt will only ever be as good as the halt. If the halt is not light then the half halt is always going to be a struggle, because the horse doesn’t hear it. I think if we get the horse light in the mouth and really nice and reactive to the seat as well, then a half halt becomes an easy thing.”
Andrew expands on the topic of ‘raising the legs’ which he brought up at the end of the lesson: “I learnt this in the French classical way. It gets them to just show the odd cadenced step so they learn a little bit about a collected trot.”
“When you do higher steps the first ones will show when you’re doing a really short, slow trot and the horse keeps going back to the walk. When they go back to walk you say, ‘No don’t walk’, and you push them forward. When they go forward you immediately slow them again to the point where they would normally walk.”
“When you get them to actually be able to trot at this walk speed, the only way they can sustain the trot, is to jump from one leg to the other. Then they show a little bit of cadence. When you establish that you can add leg, and you nudge with your leg for a longer stride.”
“It develops from the slowing and the little trot. In the beginning it’s really quite ordinary and boring to look at, because the horse is just doing a shuffle. But if you keep saying you’ve got to trot it comes, if you do the slowest trot you can.”
Tor reflects on creating cadence from a ‘little trot’: “I don’t do that. I worry about losing the power coming at it from that way. Because when you make it hard for them they lose their confidence, I use the activity from being forward and get the swing from there.”
Anita said: “There’s a lot of emphasis on developing the big, forward, ‘fancy’ trot for young horse competitions. But at some point, if a horse is going to go on to the Big Tour, that horse needs to learn to shorten and hover. This comes from slow, waiting trot steps. It’s just another version of the half halt, the waiting half halt. This is the beginnings of passage. Once the waiting is developed expression and lift can be enhanced by the use of the bigger trot.”
Andrew’s method includes four different responses from the rein and three different responses from the leg. But each aid is different: “If you want more activity it’s a squeeze, as well as going up a gait. If you want to go longer it’s a much more brief aid, more of a nudge. The rein aid for slowing is a squeeze from the reins, which is the same for a downward transition. But if you want to go shorter in the stride it’s a very brief ‘Woo’.”
“I like to teach them that if you squeeze it means go more active, but if you nudge it means step longer. Then you can choose to go around the corner and say I want to go bigger. Or you can say I want to go quicker, for the ones who get slow behind.”
Tor’s approach to separating the aids is similar: “For me the go aid is more of a lifting leg with the ankle and to slow the rhythm it’s a squeeze with the calf.”
The purpose of Andrew’s training is to break things down so any rider can understand the mechanics: “Well the trouble is when you know something really well and you’re a gifted person in any sport, it’s often hard to tell someone what you really do, because you don’t actually know.”
“A lot of good teachers can do it, but they all have different methods. I think it would be good if coaching systems can get to the point where they can distill it all down as much as possible. I mean, there’s a certain amount of feel and skill that maybe you can never directly teach, but you probably can break things down an awful lot. I just believe you can always make progress.” 
“If we breakdown when an aid should be applied and the coaches know, they can be the eyes on the ground for riders who don’t have that natural feel. If you watch what good riders do, whenever they use a go aid, it’s always during the stance phase of the same side leg. So you say, ‘Go’, just when the horse pushes off the ground. If you do it halfway through the air you just get tension or quickening of the steps.”
Taking responsibility for the way you ride is the basis of the McLean system. Andrew said: “Every horse solves its problems in the paddock without a problem. The only thing the horse can’t sort out is when the pressure from the rider comes off. This is why certain behavioral problems can occur; they’re the only dark moments in a horse’s life.”
“We have to dispel the myth that you need strong contact to make something happen across the horse’s back, because if that’s what it is, it’s not good for horses. Surely all the things horses are doing are learned responses. That’s why we call it training. And if they’re learned responses you should be able to teach horses to do it on their own. If you tell me you have a bird that’s trained to sit on your arm, well you’ve got to let go of its wings and prove it. You’ve got to teach horses to do things on their own.”
Proving the horse can go on its own is important to Anita: “We must allow with the hand to keep the frame open and the mouth quiet. After all, the aim of the German teaching is self carriage, and self carriage is the horse carrying itself, not the rider carrying the horse.”
Anita reflects on the benefits of Andrew’s work: “The McLean method treats horses like horses. It doesn’t humanise them. Horses are not human. They don’t have our reasoning abilities. They react. Training them by addressing their instinctive behaviours makes a lot more sense to me.”
Andrew insists his method of riding is for competition, not just leisure riders: “It will produce accurate tests. That’s why I always say my work is really down in the engine room, because you can’t get a good performance out of a horse if the basics aren’t there.”
Developing a rider purely trained by the ‘McLean method’ is not a goal of Andrew’s: “There are heaps of people who have shown bits of it and I’m not expecting anyone to go out and do just my system. I would just like riders to maintain the principles of keeping the aids separate and making sure they release when the horse gives the right reaction and all those sorts of things. That’s what good training is. But I think there are a lot of roads to Rome.”
Andrew talks about the future for Equitation Science: “There are quite a lot of projects I’m interested in doing but we don’t have any funding. I’m the only person on our council who isn’t employed by a university so I have to fund myself, which makes it really difficult for me to do research.”
“I’ve got a PhD student at the moment who I supervise and she’s looking at the interaction of biomechanics and learning theory. So what she’s looking at in the beginning is all the aspects of the horse’s stride, along with some saddle sensors that go under the saddle. Then we’ve got pads underneath the rider’s legs to check those pressures and the rein devices to check those pressures.”
“So what we’ve got are those things that are the basic interfaces of all the aids. Once we get all those based on data we can compare that with different disciplines, or elite riders compared to amateur riders.”
Whether or not the work of Andrew McLean really is another method of riding is debatable. For me, it’s mostly a study of classical dressage and a dissection of what makes a great trainer, great. Building on these theories he has molded the aids so they are better received by the horse.
It’s a methodical guide to training that will help the rider not only have a better understanding of the way the horse learns but how and when to apply the aids.
What remains unclear is whether a horse produced purely within the framework of Andrew’s learning principles will be ‘through’, the outcome of the training scale which has always been associated with using leg into a restraining hand.
Whether or not our elite riders restrain or allow with the hand is a matter of perception. Perhaps the restraining hand is merely a contact? With the use of pressure measuring devices on the leg and rein, we will find whether elite riders do inadvertently release the rein when coming with the leg or maintain a light contact. Useful studies like this will ensure Equitation Science has a future in Dressage and the training for all Equestrian sports.
Here’s what one of the greatest German riders and scholars, Dr Reiner Klimke, has to say about the aids and how to use them.
Putting the horse on the bit: It is practically impossible to explain this in just a few sentences. It is not enough to just take hold of the reins and make contact with the horse’s mouth. Through ignorance the horse would react in exactly the opposite way to what we were hoping. It would resist and set its jaw or bolt. The only way to achieve success is by combining the weight and leg aids with those of the hands. The secret influence man has over the horse is based on the combination of weight, legs and hands.
Schwung: A major principle of basic training is to build up the schwung, to add cadence and impulsion to the gaits. A horse which is fresh in the field can have schwung, but only for a few steps, and what we want to do is to cultivate this natural ability by correctly developing the muscles which run over the back and the neck. The schwung can only be built up when the horse moves in rhythm and the rider has contact with the horse’s mouth. If we just push the horse, it runs and loses it’s rhythm. It may be trotting forward, even have the desire to go forward, but there is no schwung. A condition for schwung is contact between the rider’s hands and the horse’s mouth. First we must train the horse so we can establish contact with the mouth, and then we can influence it. We need contact to produce the schwung, to develop all the ability which is in the horse.
Collection: To collect the horse we need to restrain and change the distribution of the weight. Collection entails putting more weight onto the hindlegs through the lowering of the quarters and hocks which enables the horse to use its full potential strength. The more weight there is on the hinglegs, the freer are the shoulders and therefore the easier it is for the horse to shift its point of balance backwards.
From Basic Training of the Young Horse – Reiner Klimke
This article first appeared in the April 2010 issue of THM.
Want to read more articles by Andrew McLean? There are lots on this website – go to his Who’s Who entry for a directory of them: