Telling tölt and trot apart on an Icelandic horse?

Hi! How lovely that you are riding an Icelandic horse. Learning to feel the tölt when it is clean in rhythm takes a while, and you will want a good, knowledgeable trainer to learn it properly. The short version of the difference between tölt (when clean, though it can also tip towards pace or trot) and trot is this. In trot, you let the horse stretch forward and push off with its hind legs. In tölt, shorten the walk and aim for the feeling that the horse shortens its body, thinking of the energy going more upward than forward. Ride both trot and tölt on a soft rein contact, and never carry the horse up in tölt.

The canter depends a little on what your horse is built for. On a four-gaited horse with a strong trot, you can ride it much as usual, but on a five-gaited horse with a lot of pace you need to give the back some room and, at first, roll over into canter more gradually. As the horse grows stronger and better schooled, you can teach it to strike off into canter and take a bound. Wången's YouTube channel has clips from Hippologen live where we show a bit about tölt and pace.

Do come back with any more questions 🙂