The world of dressage is filled with people who know everything and particularly those that seem to think they know how your horse should go, or what you should be doing, or feeling, or achieving. Typically the people who tell you they know the most, don't always have your or your horse’s best interests at heart.
The problem in training, however, is learning to filter out the good advice from the bad, while also remembering one fundamental rule: you are the only one who can feel how your horse is on any particular day, or moment, or competition, and therefore you are the only one who can decide what is best at any point in time.
Lately my training has been suffering under what I call the "overthink/underfeel" philosophy and after reading and watching and listening to so many different dressage views and philosophies, I found that instead of riding I was sitting on top of my horse thinking too much about how it should be.
At some point you have to learn to trust your own instincts and while a good trainer will recognize your faults, they will also motivate you to become your own trainer! This means learning to listen to the horse and also your own instincts as to when to ask more, what is feeling good, when it feels strange. If you think too much on the horse, you never learn, as you never make the mistake and allow yourself to filter that information. Same as a child learns from a mistake, a good rider will feel what went wrong in the bad transition, and ask again.
I have found that sometimes we think so much on the horse about what we should be doing, we forget that each horse is different and every day is different. Just because the best rider in the world can do it, it doesn't mean you automatically can, nor does it mean that that rider would automatically achieve it on your horse.
While a huge part of dressage is in planning and data collection, this must be combined with a rider's ability to feel and sometimes, even let the mistake happen deliberately and learn from it. If we spent our riding lives preventing ourselves from feeling the awkward transition, how will we know to reward the horse when we both feel it good?
For example, if we are attempting to collect the canter and we feel the horse is losing impulsion and we allow the horse to go forward, how do we know how much we could have asked? Is it not on occasion better to ask that bit more, use our instinct and feeling to see what happens and together with our horse push a new limit? If we always think what we do, how do we grow together?
This being said, no direction at all just means you end up floating around the arena, usually relying on the walls instead of the outside aids to steer the horse, resulting in a bored and confused horse and a tired rider. The real art lies in finding the balance between planned exercises and instinct: that middle ground between working the horse specifically to the way he feels on any given day, whilst also having some guide as to what you are setting out to achieve with each lesson. Easier said than done.
While a good trainer can instruct us on what to do and tell us when it's good, a brilliant trainer will set the rider up to learn the feeling of the movement themselves, so that the rider's instinct will be moulded into knowing how naturally to act on the horse. "Expressive and relaxed collected work shows that the rider has understood the steps that led up to it," said Klaus Balkenhol.
This then implies that while there must be some structure, there also has to be some degree of self-awareness and reflection and one must not only feel what is good but understand what happened in getting there. If we are simply relayed a set of instructions, without feeling/failing/repeating/learning, we may have reached, for instance, the collection but will it be expressive and relaxed?
So, to begin, decide one important exercise to focus on during the lesson and set clear goals about what should be achieved during this exercise. Then, allow yourself to feel what is happening, stop and reflect on your first attempt and as it improves ask yourself why it improved? Did you have a better connection with the outside rein? Did you have more weight down your inside leg? Did you use more seat and a more relaxed leg aid?
For example, I began the below exercise with the goal to improve the use of my outside aids and to engage the inside hind leg more, particularly in the canter. When I began, I was using too much inside rein and letting him fall out through the outside shoulder, meaning that in the down transition he would plop in a heap and in the up he would come back off the contact as he was not in balance. So, I focused on opening my inside shoulder, relaxing my inside leg and making it long and strong, not touching the horse but just with weight down and then using my outside aids to guide the horse on a good 20 meter circle (not an oval/oblong/square or a potatoe as my mother calls it) I found once I got the outside connection, my horse found his balance and I was able to do the transitions simply by relaxing my seat into the trot and putting my outside leg back to go into canter. So good, done correctly ? No, then start to vary it!
What happens if I lask him to be more collected, does this alter his contact or his over the back tendency? What happens if I do it in a stretch frame? If he falls flat on his face in the down transition, then he must be on the shoulders when I let him stretch and I must then use small circles and half-halting to lighten him in front, as well as allow the stretch to come from over the back, not from dropping the wither. If you have a great trainer, don't just do what he tells you, ask why is he telling me that? What happened for him to ask me to do this exercise. Nuno Oliveira was one of the greatest masters of all time, and yet he did not say much. The brilliance of his method was guiding the rider and allowing them to feel it for themselves.
Probably the most experienced riders, the dressage greats, know which exercises will help their particular horse on any given day and they know the feeling they should or will achieve. So they do them automatically and at the correct moment. For the rest of us, we need to learn by feeling and to feel we need to plan, but also acknowledge when it goes wrong, and think why?
We are still learning, and thus need to focus on an exercise each day to learn to ride it correctly, feel what affect it has on the horse and put it in your data collection box to remember to do it again on another day when that particular problem is raising it's ugly head. This gives purpose to your riding each day and also gives you a bucket of "tools" to pull out when things aren't going according to plan.
Dressage is not a theory, riding is an art, feel what your doing, think why, plan, but also let it happen.
by Sarah Warne for Eurodressage
Photos © Astrid Appels
Related Link
Data Collection and Repetition: The Art of Decisive Dressage Training
Sarah Warne's Classical Training Articles