GallopaSee every gait, automatically.
How long did you actually trot today? Most riders can only guess. Gallopa answers precisely: it detects walk, trot, canter and gallop on its own and shows your minutes in each gait after every ride, with no buttons to press while you ride.
How automatic gait detection works
Gallopa fuses two independent signals from your iPhone or Apple Watch:
- GPS ground speed. Each gait lives in a characteristic speed band: a walk is roughly 6 to 8 km/h, a working trot around 10 to 15 km/h, a canter around 16 to 24 km/h, and a gallop beyond that.
- Motion rhythm. The sensors feel the beat of the gait through your seat: the two-beat bounce of a trot has a different cadence and intensity than the three-beat roll of a canter. This separates gaits that overlap in speed, like a strong trot and a lazy canter.
Speeds are smoothed over several seconds, so one noisy GPS point cannot invent a phantom trot inside a walk, and short genuine bursts, like a quick gallop stretch, still register. The output is a per-second gait timeline for the entire ride.
Time in gait, and bouts
After the ride, Gallopa shows a breakdown like: 24 minutes of walk, 16 of trot, 8 of canter, 52 seconds of gallop. Next to each gait you also get a bout count, the number of separate stretches in that gait. Six canter bouts of 80 seconds tell a very different training story than one continuous 8-minute canter, even though the totals match.
Why riders measure time in gait
- Fitness work: conditioning plans are written in minutes of trot and canter. Now you can actually follow them instead of estimating.
- Bringing a horse back into work: after time off or injury, controlled and gradual increases in trot and canter time matter. A record keeps you honest.
- Young or green horses: track how much canter work you are really doing week to week.
- Plain curiosity: that "we cantered loads today" feeling, checked against the numbers, is often a surprise.
It learns from real rides
Gallopa's thresholds are tuned on real rides, not lab treadmills: hand gallops up a hill, lazy school canters, big-striding trots. Every ride is recomputed with the newest detection logic, so your history improves as the app does. If your horse is unusually fast or slow, max speed and the speed chart are always there as ground truth, and you can export the raw data of any ride.
Frequently asked questions
How does Gallopa detect my horse's gait?
Gallopa combines two signals: your GPS ground speed, and the rhythm of your movement in the saddle measured by the device's motion sensors. Speed sets the candidate gait, and the bounce cadence separates gaits that overlap in speed, like a brisk trot and a slow canter. The result is a per-second gait timeline for the whole ride.
Do I have to press a button when my horse changes gait?
No. Gait detection is fully automatic. You start the ride once, and Gallopa classifies every moment as halt, walk, trot, canter or gallop on its own.
What is a gait bout?
A bout is one continuous stretch in a gait, at least a few seconds long. Alongside total time per gait, Gallopa counts bouts, so you can see that your 8 minutes of canter came from 6 separate canters, which is useful for interval-style fitness work.
Why does time in each gait matter for training?
Conditioning plans for horses are usually built on time in gait: so many minutes of walk to warm up, trot sets for fitness, canter work for stamina. Measuring it removes the guesswork, helps you build fitness gradually, and gives you an honest record of how demanding a ride really was.
