Lovely lesson, beautiful fall weather.
shoulder fore?, leg yields using the dressage ring and letters, 1/2 pass baby steps--sideways and then forward. Discussed no stirrups--relaxing thighs down. Image of French riders/ballet dancers.
Article Kathy shared:
Classical Training: Don't Overthink It
Tue, 09/10/2013 - 11:23
Training Your Horse
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
