How do you fix a horse that anticipates transitions and breaks gait before being asked?

A horse that breaks gait before being asked — dropping from lope to trot before the rider has signaled, or trotting before the walk was requested — has learned to anticipate the rider's requests rather than wait for them. Clinton Anderson and Pat Parelli both identify anticipation as a training issue that benefits from unpredictability in the rider's requests. Anderson's explanation is straightforward: a horse that consistently receives the same sequence of cues — always asked to trot from the same spot in the arena, always asked to lope after the same number of trot strides — learns the pattern rather than the cue. When the horse correctly predicts the transition is coming and makes it before being asked, it has demonstrated that it is managing the ride rather than responding to the rider. Anderson addresses this by deliberately varying every element of the training sequence — ask for the transition at a different spot each time, from a different gait, at a different speed, after a different number of strides. The correction for a horse that has already broken gait before being asked is to immediately put the horse back in the gait it was asked to maintain — if it drops to trot early, trot it actively and energetically for several strides before asking the lope again. The horse learns that breaking gait early results in more work in the broken-to gait, not in the rest it was anticipating. Parelli frames anticipation as a horse that is thinking ahead of the rider — which he identifies as actually a positive sign of an intelligent, engaged horse — but one whose intelligence needs to be redirected into responding to the rider's actual communication rather than the rider's predictable pattern. His response is similar to Anderson's: become more varied and interesting in the requests, and correct early breaks by returning to the requested gait immediately.