The Trot in Dressage: Variants and Judging Criteria

The trot is a two-beat pace on alternate diagonal pairs of legs, separated by a moment of suspension, and it is ridden in competition in four variants: working, collected, medium and extended trot, with lengthened strides as a preparatory form at the lower levels. The collected trot shortens and elevates the steps as the hindquarters take more weight; the extended trot covers as much ground as the stride allows; and every variant must keep the same even two-beat rhythm, because regularity is the first criterion of every trot mark. Of the three gaits, the trot is the most improvable through training and the one in which modern breeding has changed the sport most visibly.

The mechanics of the gait

In trot the horse springs from one diagonal pair to the other: left hind and right fore rise and land together, then right hind and left fore, with a moment of suspension between the two beats in which all four feet are off the ground. That suspension is the trot’s defining resource. It is what gives the gait its elasticity and expression, what training amplifies into cadence, and what, prolonged to its extreme, becomes passage.

Two properties follow from the mechanics. First, the trot is the most symmetrical of the gaits, a simple alternation of matching diagonal pairs, which makes it the steadiest platform for gymnastic work: most of the sport’s lateral movements are developed and shown in trot. Second, the same symmetry makes the trot the gait in which any unevenness is most visible: a step shorter or lower on one side breaks an otherwise perfect mirror, which is why soundness is conventionally assessed at trot and why a judge’s remark of “unlevel steps” carries a weight beyond its mark.

One rulebook note concerns the rider: rising (posting) trot is permitted in many national lower-level tests to spare green backs, while FEI tests are ridden sitting except where a test sheet states otherwise.

The variants

The trot’s variants are its gears: the same rhythm and tempo throughout, with the length, height and carriage of the stride changing. The system of collected, working, medium and extended paces applies across walk, trot and canter and is treated as a system in collected, medium and extended paces; the trot-specific picture is below.

Level placements are approximate across systems; the level equivalence chart aligns the national ladders.

Two ideas hold the table together. The variants are produced by collection and impulsion, not by speed: the horse lengthens or shortens the stride at the same tempo, never by hurrying or slowing. And the transitions between variants are judged as strictly as the variants themselves, because shifting gear smoothly, through the half-halt, is precisely what the gears exist to test.

The collected trot

The collected trot is the trot the upper levels live in. The horse carries more weight on lowered, engaged hindquarters; the steps shorten but gain height and spring; the neck rises and arches with the poll the highest point; and the forehand, relieved of weight, becomes light and mobile. Ground cover per stride shrinks — the rhythm and tempo do not. A collected trot that merely slows down, or that is “collected” by shortening the neck while the hind legs trail, fails the definition however compact the outline; genuine collection is carrying power behind, visible as self-carriage in front.

From US Second Level and British Elementary onward the collected trot is the default: shoulder-in, travers and the trot half-passes are all ridden in it, and the test sheets score the pace itself wherever it appears between movements. What judges reward in it is the combination the definition demands: engagement and lightness together, with the elasticity of the working trot preserved rather than traded away. The characteristic faults are the trades — activity lost (an earthbound, dutiful shuffle), or carriage faked in front while the base of the neck drops and the hind legs push out behind.

The collected trot is also the gateway to the high school. Compressed and animated further, its steps become the half-steps from which piaffe is developed; filled with suspension, they become passage. Both Grand Prix trots are, in the FEI’s own framing, trots transformed by maximum collection, which is why the quality of a horse’s collected trot at eight predicts its piaffe-passage work at ten better than the flamboyance of its young-horse trot ever did.

Medium versus extended: the real distinctions

Medium and extended trot are commonly described as “big trot” and “bigger trot”, which misses what judges actually separate them by. The differences are in degree, frame and balance:

• Degree of lengthening. The medium trot is a moderate, round lengthening with clear impulsion from behind. The extended trot asks for the utmost: the horse covers as much ground as the stride allows, lengthening steps and frame to their limit.
• Frame. In medium the horse remains relatively round, the nose carried a little more in front of the vertical than in collection and the neck lowering slightly. In extension the whole frame lengthens with the stride; a horse extending in a collected outline is not extending.
• Balance. The uphill tendency must survive the lengthening. The classic extended-trot failure is the horse that pours onto its shoulders down the diagonal and cannot be brought back; the downward transition at the end of the line is where that fault is exposed, and judges treat the transitions into and out of the pace as part of the movement.
• Overtrack and reach. In a true extension the hind feet clearly overtrack the prints of the forefeet, and the reach of the front legs is matched by the reach of the hind legs. The traditional check is that the forefeet should touch the ground on the spot towards which they point: a foreleg flicked out to land short of its gesture is front-leg spectacle without hind-leg support.

What neither variant is, is faster in rhythm. Quickening the tempo down the diagonal — running — converts a lengthening into a rhythm fault, and an unspectacular medium in perfect rhythm outscores a hurried, flashy one.

At the lower levels the ladder starts with lengthened strides: a clear lengthening asked before the collection exists to support a true medium, and judged as a development question — can the horse show a difference and come back in balance? — not as a smaller extension.

Cadence, and the road to passage

Cadence is the quality the sport’s vocabulary reserves for a trot in which even rhythm, impulsion and a marked moment of suspension combine: the beat becomes accentuated, elastic and unhurried, as if the horse had more time in the air than physics allows. Cadence is what separates an expressive collected trot from a merely correct one, and it is among the qualities young horse classes score most directly, because natural cadence predicts the high-school work.

Taken to its extreme, cadence becomes a movement in its own right: passage is the trot with the suspension prolonged to the limit of collection, and piaffe the same trot brought almost to the spot; both belong to the Grand Prix and have their own articles. One boundary matters here: cadence is rewarded where it is asked. A horse that offers passage-like elevation in the medium or extended work — the passagey trot — is evading the forward question, and judges mark the intended movement down rather than crediting the suspension.

Rhythm faults in the trot

The trot has no equivalent of the lateral walk or the four-beat canter — its two-beat sequence rarely breaks outright — so its rhythm faults are faults of regularity and tempo rather than of footfall order:

• Unlevel or irregular steps. One diagonal stepping shorter or lower than the other. Judges mark what they see; the observer’s question, training fault or soundness, stays open, and persistent irregularity is a veterinary question before it is a training one.
• Hurrying. Tempo quickening under pressure or into the lengthenings, the classic green-horse and tension fault, treated under tension.
• Loss of suspension. The trot flattening in collection until it approaches a jog: correct geometry with the gait’s defining quality missing.
• Breaking. Falling into canter in the lengthenings, or into walk in collection — at the mention level a balance fault, marked in the movement where it happens.

All of them are marked by the same logic set out in common faults: rhythm sits at the base of the training scale, so a trot that loses its regularity caps every movement ridden in it.

Expression versus correctness: the modern debate

Modern breeding has transformed the trot more than any other gait, and the sport has spent two decades debating what it produced. Spectacular, extravagant trots win young-horse classes and dominate auction footage; the question judges, trainers and welfare commentators argue over is how much of that expression is correct.

The trainers’ vocabulary for the distinction is neutral and useful. A back-mover produces its expression from behind: the topline swings, the hind leg steps under the mass, and the front leg’s gesture is the result. A leg-mover produces it in front: high knee action with the back held rigid and the hind legs pushing out behind. The two can look similar for a few strides; over a career they diverge, because the back-mover’s trot develops with collection while the leg-mover’s mechanics resist exactly the shortening and lowering collection demands — the documented pattern of horses that win at the basic levels and stall when the collected work begins.

The judging system’s official answer is that correctness outranks expression: the FEI’s guidance instructs judges to mark down severe basic faults regardless of how impressive the rest of the picture is, and a passagey medium or a flicking extension is scored as the evasion it is. The persistent criticism is that in practice expression still earns marks that correctness alone does not, particularly in young-horse and lower-level classes. Recording the debate is enough here; the fault vocabulary it turns on (swinging backs, trailing hind legs, frames held in front) is catalogued in common faults and the contact articles.

What the trot tells a buyer

For a buyer watching a sales video, the trot is the gait to watch with the most discipline, for one structural reason: it is the most improvable of the three gaits, and the market prices it as if the opposite were true. Sale footage sells trots; professionals weight the trot last, behind the walk and canter, whose faults are close to permanent. The practical tests (watching the hind leg and back while ignoring the front leg, and asking whether the horse can sit rather than float) are set out in evaluating gaits and movement, and an ordinary, correct, elastic trot on an otherwise excellent horse is closer to an opportunity than a flaw.

Sources

• Fédération Équestre Internationale — FEI Dressage Judging Manual (definition of the trot and its variants), effective 1 January 2025. https://inside.fei.org/sites/default/files/FEI%20Dressage%20Judging%20Manual%20-%20Effective%201%20January%202025.pdf
• United States Equestrian Federation — Rule Book, Chapter DR: Dressage Division, 2026. https://www.usef.org/forms-pubs/F3p8pgrWgAo/dr-dressage-division
• United States Dressage Federation — Pyramid of Training, 2019. https://www.usdf.org/EduDocs/Training/Pyramid_of_Training.pdf
• United States Dressage Federation — Purpose of Tests, 2023. https://www.usdf.org/EduDocs/Training/purposeoftests.pdf
• Wikipedia — Trot (gait mechanics), 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trot