Q: This was a long question from a rider who had watched a clinic where riders were put through the perfunctory test movements many seemingly above the capability of the riders skill with a high tolerance rough and careless riding and the horses going around with a glazed look in the eye. The question being: has dressage training and instruction slid down this much in recent years, or was this an exception? (This rider did not want to be judgmental but was questioning what they were perceiving). A: Unfortunately I hear these kind of comments about shows and clinicians, all too often, from riders, trainers, novices and seasoned horse people. I cannot speak for others training or lessons. Sadly, teachers are sometimes swayed by what the students think they want to learn, or the clinicians are focused on producing an effect, or a collection of movements. I find that this is not a temptation for me because I simply look and see the top two most urgent needs for the rider and for the horse. Then prioritize and decide which is most urgent, address that need first, often it is some skill or aid or positional change on the part of the rider. Once corrected, this makes the rider then much more capable of addressing and helping the horse with his/her most urgent top two needs. The needs become dynamic; as the rider achieves success in mastering the horses struggles, for example a faulty rhythm, then the secondary need such as the balance (in this hypothetical example) can move to become the first priority while the controlling of the impulsion may now move up to second place, and so on. Often, there are more profound results when the rider can successfully master 2 or more variables at the same time. I think that you have to trust your own judgment, your gut, if you will. It is not about being judgmental, it is really about being discerning. There is a distinct difference. Judgment serves to grade a teacher and other riders or ourselves to no apparent end. Reserve judgment, it is for another entity to do. Discernment is necessary for you to make progress as a horseperson. You must design your own equestrian education in this world devoid of riding academies. The academy must exist in your own mind. We have to be self-taught, using the horse and his/her responses as the true judgment as to whether we are on the right track. If you listen to the horse, you will never be steered wrong. Horses are always telling us what we need to know. Many riders fail to learn to listen to what is being said to them by the horse. This should be the role of the riding teacher: to teach the rider how to learn and interpret what the horse is communicating and how to respond. The horse is the best teacher of all. The riders mind is potentially the second best teacher. The instructor is the third best teacher. Unfortunately, most of us need the instructor for a long time before we can learn to hear what the horse is teaching us, and so that we can learn to use our own minds to teach ourselves how to ride. The riders mind must be cultivated through education so that the rider can become an independent thinker and not be too dependent on others who may be all-too-often withholding thereby keeping the student needy and dependent on their meager words. Riding is not about the movements it is about the joining of the rider and the horse into a cooperating union of one, which, once joined as a team can work gymnastically to supple and strengthen the basic gaits of locomotion native to the horse. The rider should provide the roadmap to strengthen the horses body to be more flexible, expressive, ambidextrous and athletic. Just learning to ride movements so that you can show them as movement #13 in Second Level test 2 is just silly and pointless. Movements must be done at the right time and in the right way as gymnastic exercises designed to address horses weaknesses and eventually build them up into strong athletes. Movements must be developed in a progression. For example, shoulder-in does not exist solely on the wall as it is in the tests. It can be introduced for a couple of steps in a corner, in the loops of a serpentine, on a small circle, on the diagonal sophisticating what might have started as leg-yield, as the preparation for half pass, as the necessary preparation for canter strike-off. It can be done as 1/8, 1/4, 1/2 shoulder-in and the full 33 or 44 degree 2 and 3 track versions and yes, also on the center line, on the quarter line, on the inside track off the wall, and if you absolutely must, on the wall. This is what seems to be misunderstood about movements. Each one of these shoulder-in applications addresses specific needs of the horse and rider and helps solve functional problems. The danger of riding the movements only as they appear in the tests is that the movements become an end goal in themselves and the tragedy is that the usefulness of the patterns and movement may never be experienced or fully understood by the horse and the rider (respectively).
Posted on: Mon, 18 Nov 2013 04:11:16 +0000
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