I'm sure you all know the situation where you watch a subway commercial and they say that you can lose 6 pounds in 6 months, but at the end, in teeny tiny letters it mentions “only if you exercise daily, eat a healthy diet, sleep well, etc." I was watching a training video with a rider that I truly admire and I found myself waiting for the very lengthy “dressage footnote” at the end. He was showing riders how to do the canter pirouette, and he was saying that once you have the correct hind engagement and control, you simply bring the shoulders around. He performed small circles showing the bend and how to go in and out of the pirouette.
It was beautiful, but I spent the whole time absolutely mesmerised by the canter. When the video ended, I was waiting for the teeny tiny writing saying: “This can only be performed if you have a horse that is light in front, engaged, in true collection, in balance, out in front, with a good rhythm and a strong back, and with a rider who has an almost perfect seat, with relaxed legs, and elastic hands. This pair has worked on the canter transitions and the balance of the canter, the collection of the canter and the ability for the horse to remain in collected canter without the rider's use of strong aids, or reins that hold him in any way.”
It didn’t come, and I wondered if riders watching that video would go home and head out onto their horse, with stiff hands or like me with tight hips, and then simply try to “turn the shoulders around” and wonder why the hell it just wasn’t happen! That is where the dressage footnote comes in.
Imagine that one time you are watching a training video or a dressage lesson with a beautiful rider showing you how to do an exercise, and when they finish, there are invisible footnotes. When a rider says, “more bend”, there should be a footnote saying “only if the rider has control of the outside shoulder in the first place”.
The biggest one I see is piaffe and passage. The training tapes tell you to come and just relax the back and let the horse do it alone, and then simply ease him back in the passage. We, mere mortal riders, come in and the horse almost stops, then becomes constipated. Our “easing” him into it becomes a workout where we are piaffing far more than the horse, and then we jolt off back into passage and almost fall off the back, and you find yourself thinking “wow nailed it!”, until you see it on a video later, and almost cry.
Piaffe and passage footnote: “only if you have spent 4 to 5 years working on collection, engagement, and have the horse completely straight, with impulsion that comes from correct training and not from the rider's strong use of aids”.
You can start in your everyday training, or when watching videos, to ask yourself what the footnote would be, before you just head out into the arena and try to imitate it. When the instructor on the video says the half pass is all about the correct bend, the footnote should be “only once the horse is straight, collected, and supple”, sure then it’s all about the correct bend. If you don’t have any of these things in place first, foot note should be “go back to the shoulder in”.
In fact, the footnote at the end of any dressage training tape should be, “do not attempt any more advanced exercise unless you have mastered the more basic exercise”. We all think we know this, but this applies every day! I see it time and time again, because I do it myself. Batialo will feel not fully, totally relaxed, and I’ll try a half pass, and half way across the school when I look like a tangled mess. He is confused, I think “well, great idea that was”, and I go back to the beginning, and try to finish with a solid shoulder in.
Dressage training videos can be a great way to see the end picture, but just like the man in the subway ads who miraculously got skinny, he had to work everyday on all the footnotes that came at the end of the ad, the footnotes that are actually far more difficult than just eating the subway sandwich.
Yes, when you have that magical canter, the canter that I sat there drooling over for 15 minutes, then of course you just “turn the shoulders around”, but most of the time, like myself, we have to be a bit realistic, and think to ourselves, if this video did have footnotes, how many of them can I tick off, or more to the point, how many more do I have to achieve!
by Sarah Warne