Dressage training is about repetition, patience, and repetition. This does not mean that we keep doing the same thing over and over thinking that the horse will learn himself how to do it perfectly. If you want to win a dance competition you don’t do the same move over and over until your arms fall off. You work on balance, rhythm, strength and harmony, until you can perform the dance without hesitation.
The difference between learning a dance yourself and teaching your horse to dance is that in the dance of dressage, you have to lead or else you’d end up in the carrot bucket; perhaps down wind from a pretty mare. So how do you ensure that you are always leading the dance? By keeping your horse guessing!
I’ve realised recently that if I do the same thing on Batialo more than twice, then on the third time he has decided that he knows how to do it and he can lead the dance from here on. So how then do we repeat the exercise without replicating what he did before? The answer lies in anticipating where your horse will anticipate, i.e. ensuring you are always dancing a half beat ahead of him.
For example, you begin the half pass at F and make your way across to X, with that clear goal in mind. You realise that the half pass lacked bend, so you do the half pass again. You take the corner in shoulder-fore and as you go to prepare the half pass at the end of the corner your horse's quarters swing out like a dolphin fin or the shoulders fall across the diagonal as he goes to perform the half pass solo. The solution is always to be adjusting the exercise, even slightly, to make sure it is always done on your terms. The second half pass, instead of aiming to start at M, perhaps begin the long side in shoulder-in and start the half pass at P, aiming to finish at D.
I realised the importance of this concept when I began working on the pirouettes. We’ve all seen riders who come in to prepare the pirouette and before we can blink the horse has gone full circle and a half while a dizzy rider is still trying to find their balance. My trainer told me to do canter squares to ensure that I kept control of the outside of the horse, but also to ensure that Batialo didn’t get stuck in pirouette mode, and would allow me to exit the pirouette smoothly after just a corner. I found that by doing this exercise, when I did ask for the full pirouette Batialo was expecting that I might want to exit at any moment, and wasn’t just thinking “Oh yippee a circle and we can get out of this thing!”
The halt at X is another prime example and riders are often baffled as to why when they take a centreline and go to prepare the halt at X, the horse has put the brakes on and gone “plop” into a legs out the back unsquare shamozzle before they got even close to the centre of the arena. This doesn’t mean don’t practice the halt at X, this means that sometimes take a centreline and halt at I, or at D, or G, or, take a centreline, and just finish the centreline and turn. That will really throw him off the ability to plan a halt on his terms.
Someone tried to convince me that my horse wasn’t smart. In dressage training the minute you think your horse is not smart, is the minute he will be leading the dance. You will be performing the travers first half pass, the 450 degree pirouette, and the shammozzle cross angle shock halt, asking yourself if you really need to be there, or if your horse could do it himself.
Repeat the exercises, but never replicate it exactly, so that your horse is always thinking, "I wonder what she will do next?”
by Sarah Warne - Photo © Rui Pedro Godinho Sarah Warne's Classical Training Articles