Collected, Medium and Extended Paces: The Gears

Each dressage gait is shown in up to four variants (collected, working, medium and extended), which function as the horse’s gears: the rhythm and, ideally, the tempo stay constant, while the stride length, the frame and the balance change. The extended trot, the most photographed of them, is the gear in which the horse covers as much ground as possible, lengthening frame and stride to their utmost without quickening or falling onto the forehand; the collected trot is its opposite, shorter and higher with the weight carried behind. The gears, and above all the transitions between them, run through every test from the first lengthened strides at novice level to the Grand Prix, and they expose the state of a horse’s training faster than any single movement.

One gait, four gears

The variants are not four different paces; they are one pace shown at four settings. What must not change between them is the essence of the gait: the footfall sequence and its regularity — four beats in the walk, two in the trot, three plus suspension in the canter — and, as nearly as possible, the tempo, the number of strides per minute. What does change is everything wrapped around that constant:

The system is symmetrical around the working pace. Collection redirects the energy upward: the steps shorten and heighten because thrust is converted into carriage, not because energy is removed. Extension redirects the same energy forward: the strides lengthen because the hindquarters push further, not because they push faster. Both directions draw on the same account — the engagement of the hind legs — which is why a horse with a genuine collected trot almost always has a genuine extended one, and neither can be produced from the hand.

The walk is the exception in the bookkeeping: it has no working variant. The medium walk is its base pace, flanked by the collected and extended walks and by the free walk on a long rein. Because the walk has no suspension and no impulsion in the technical sense, its gears are the hardest to ride well and its rhythm the easiest to spoil — the reasons are covered in the walk article.

The key: the tempo does not change

The single most useful fact about the gears is the one least visible in photographs: from collected to extended, the tempo ideally stays the same. The horse covers more ground per minute because each stride is longer, not because the strides come quicker. Watch a well-ridden medium trot against the collected trot that preceded it and the beat is unchanged; the horse has lengthened the stride and the frame around a constant rhythm, like a gearbox changing ratio at steady engine speed.

This is what separates a lengthening from running. A horse that quickens into its “extension” is not extending at all: it is falling forward, catching itself with faster steps, and trading balance for speed. Judges mark it under the rhythm and balance criteria rather than crediting the ground covered, because the quickening announces that the hindquarters are pushing the horse onto its shoulders instead of carrying it — the base of the training scale failing under load. The same logic runs in the other direction: a collected pace that has merely slowed, with the energy gone rather than redirected, is a loss of activity and not a degree of collection.

The transitions are test movements in their own right

The gears matter less as states than as changes of state. From the second tier upward, tests prescribe the transitions between the paces at named markers (collected to medium at H, extended across the diagonal, collected again at F) and the transitions are judged as sharply as the paces they join. Many tests hang a separate mark on the transitions themselves, and where they sit inside a movement’s mark, the FEI’s directives make clear that the movement is judged from its first transition to its last.

The downward transition is the diagnostic one. Any strong horse can be sent forward across a diagonal; only a horse genuinely carrying weight behind can come back from extension to collection within a stride or two, uphill, soft in the rein and without a haul from the rider. The medium-to-collected and extended-to-collected transitions are, in effect, collection tests: the horse must re-engage the hind legs under a moving mass, and a balance that was faked on the way out collapses on the way back. The aid that makes the transition possible is the half-halt, delivered before and through the change of gear; the connection it travels down is the subject of contact and “on the bit”.

Transitions within the pace are also the primary tool by which the gears are built in training: a few lengthened strides out of working trot, forward and back, thousands of times over — the everyday exercise from which the production timeline accumulates pushing and then carrying power.

How the gears develop through the levels

The gears enter the tests gradually, and the ladder tracks the collection each rung requires — the same logic that orders the movement index.

The sequence is not stylistic. A lengthening asks only for thrust; a true medium asks for thrust with the balance kept uphill, which needs the beginnings of collection; an extension asks for maximum thrust with the balance still kept, which needs confirmed collection. This is why extensions enter the tests at the same tier as half-pass and the flying changes — all three stand on the same foundation — and why asking a young horse for “extended trot” before the collection exists produces only running. The national ladders are aligned in the level equivalence chart, with the detail in the US, British and German level articles.

What judges reward — and the classic faults

The judging criteria for the gears are unusually concrete, and the fault vocabulary around them is well worn.

Judges reward, in each gear and between them: a clear, unmistakable difference between the variants — a medium that is visibly more than working, an extension visibly more than medium; the rhythm and tempo unchanged across the shift; the frame lengthening with the stride, the nose coming slightly more in front of the vertical as the horse extends; the lengthening ridden uphill, from the hindquarters; and clean, balanced transitions at both ends of the movement.

The classic faults mirror the list. Running — quickening instead of lengthening — is the cardinal one, marked as the rhythm and balance failure it is. No clear difference between the paces is the quiet one: a test whose collected, medium and extended trots look alike scores modestly everywhere, because the differences are precisely what is being examined. Flicking (the forefeet thrown forward while the hind legs push out behind, so the diagonal pairs no longer match) produces the spectacular-looking but broken extended trot; the FEI’s definition anticipates it by requiring the forefeet to touch the ground on the spot toward which they point, and judges read the mismatch as front-leg spectacle without hind-leg carriage, frequently with tension underneath. A short frame with reaching legs signals a hand-made extension. And falling onto the forehand in the downward transition (the horse hauled back over several strides, leaning on the rein) retroactively reprices the extension that preceded it, because it proves the balance was never carried. Where the shift of gear breaks the gait itself (a walk going lateral in the collected steps, a canter going four-beat) the fault is graver still, and belongs to the rhythm faults.

The gears also echo in the collective marks, whose impulsion and submission scores track exactly the qualities the transitions expose; the mechanics of the marks are in judging and scoring.

The vocabulary

Test sheets, trainers and sale adverts mix languages around the gears, and the German terms travel furthest. At decoder level:

An advert claiming a horse “shows all three gears” or “has an established Mitteltrab” is making a level claim as much as a gait claim, since the table above maps onto the competition ladder; the full multilingual advert vocabulary is in the advert decoder and the glossary.

The gears as a diagnostic

Professionals watch the gears, and especially the changes between them, because they compress the whole training scale into a few strides. A clean shift from medium to collected trot requires rhythm (unchanged tempo), suppleness (a back that swings through the change), contact (a connection that stays soft under the half-halt), impulsion (energy that survives the shortening), straightness (both hind legs taking the load evenly) and collection (the weight actually shifting back). A horse that can move through its gears cleanly in both directions has, demonstrably, all six — before the judge has seen a single lateral movement or change, which is why experienced observers can place a test’s likely percentage within the first long side. Adjustability is not one quality among many but the sum of all of them.

The gears for the buyer

For a buyer watching a sales video, the gears are more informative than the movements. A spectacular extended trot on its own proves little — it is the easiest thing to produce for a camera and the natural home of the flicking fault — but the transitions around it are hard to fake: whether the tempo holds as the horse lengthens, whether the frame lengthens with the stride, and above all whether the horse returns to the shorter pace uphill and within a couple of strides, or is hauled back onto its shoulders. Adjustability within each gait, shown in both directions, is the single best video evidence that the training is genuine and the collection real; how to weigh it gait by gait is covered in evaluating gaits and movement, and its effect on price among the value factors.

Sources

• Fédération Équestre Internationale — FEI Dressage Judging Manual (definitions of the paces and their variants), effective 1 January 2025. https://inside.fei.org/sites/default/files/FEI%20Dressage%20Judging%20Manual%20-%20Effective%201%20January%202025.pdf
• United States Dressage Federation — Purpose of Tests (introduction of lengthenings, mediums and extensions by level), 2023. https://www.usdf.org/EduDocs/Training/purposeoftests.pdf
• United States Dressage Federation — Pyramid of Training, 2019. https://www.usdf.org/EduDocs/Training/Pyramid_of_Training.pdf
• British Dressage — Dressage defined (pace requirements by level), 2026. https://www.britishdressage.co.uk/get-involved/what-is-dressage/whats-involved/
• Deutsche Reiterliche Vereinigung (FN) — Leistungs-Prüfungs-Ordnung and trainer education materials, 2024. https://www.pferd-aktuell.de/turniersport/regelwerke-und-merkblaetter/leistungs-pruefungs-ordnung/neue-lpo-2024