Colonel Alois Podhajsky
(1898 - 1974)
“As a result of the appropriate gymnastics and training of the horse, the appearance and the movements of the horse will be more beautiful.”
The Complete Training of Horse and Rider (1965)
"Xenophon was the first one to claim that horses can become only more beautiful with correct training, never uglier. I would like to add to this that ifthe horse becomes uglier in the course of his work, it is the unmistakable proof for a wrong dressage training."
(1965; translation: T. Ritter)
"I have time"
should be the guiding word especially of dressage riders during the entire course of training and remind him of the fact that the goal of the classical art of riding is to be attained only by the gradual increase of demands."
(1965; translation: T. Ritter)
"Horse and rider should always be an aesthetic sight."
(1965; translation: T. Ritter)
"The best guideline for the appropriate intensity of the work is provided by the old rule that the horse should return to his stall as fresh as he left it."
(1965; translation: T. Ritter)
"Just as experience dictates to the ballet teacher the length of time necessary to train his students, so the horse, too, needs time to mature into a great fourlegged dancer. This fact cannot be obliterated by seeming successes that supposedly prove the opposite.
For, even if someone should succeed in training a horse to high school level by the age of eight, this individual occurrence cannot shake the foundations of the classical art of riding, if this dressage horse is completely unsound and unusable by the age of ten."
(1965; translation: T. Ritter)
"A ruthlessly condensed training only leads to a general superficiality, to travesties of the movements, and to a premature unsoundness of the horse.
Nature cannot be violated."
(1965; translation: T. Ritter)
"Just as the sculptor at first chisels the future outlines of his work of art with powerful blows out of the crude block of stone, and then lets it develop in increasingly finer detail in all its beauty, the aids of the rider must also become more and more delivate in the course of the horse's education. Every rider should always keep this strictly in mind and especially avoid destroying with crude aids, out of impatience or other reasons, what he has built in his previous work."
(1965, translation: T. Ritter)
"The third type of longeing, the training of the young horse, must be described in detail, as it is the most important one. Especially in this area, many mistakes are made that come back to haunt the later education. It is particularly the chasing of the horse on a small or tiny circle that cannot be condemned enough. This not only does not help the education in any way, but the horse runs the risk of suffering all types of bodily harm."
(1965, translation: T. Ritter)
"Riding forward is the essence of correct training."
