Transitions, Transitions: Simple, but not easy

Transitions, Transitions: Simple, but not easy

The way the horse performs transitions to the halt and from the halt tells us a lot about his training. Many horses and riders struggle with these transitions. Half halts often don’t go through in down transitions, so the horse inverts or curls up. The halt isn’t square, the horse is crooked, to name just some of the most common problems.

Dissolving Resistances

Dissolving Resistances

In my own practical experience, I have often observed that resistances in the poll and resistances in the hindquarters tend to go hand in hand, so in order to overcome the problem we need to address the poll as well as the hip.

The 8 Different Types Of Exercises

The 8 Different Types Of Exercises

You can make the training easier and better understandable for the horse if you try to look at it from the horse’s point of view. Ask yourself what it is you are asking the horse to do in physical, biomechanical terms. Find out which elementary skills your horse needs to possess and which elementary types of movements he has to be able to do in order to perform a certain movement. Then try to build him a ladder of small learning steps that teach him those elementary skills that he is still lacking. Try to utilize the principle of the economy of motion whenever possible, i.e. lead the horse down a path where the movement or transition you want to ride appears to be the most energy conserving thing the horse could do under the circumstances.

 

Polishing the Pebble

Polishing the Pebble

Not everything in riding is glamorous. Not everything is special, magical, and brilliant.

Much of the most important work we do, as riders, is work that is simple - even mundane - in its simplicity. But it is where the real treasures lie.

It is one thing to teach a horse a new concept, movement, or skill set. This is important work, too, but at first, it will come with many rough edges. When you introduce it to the horse, you get it in its crude, unpolished form. It is far from “finished” and the real work unfolds from there.

Some Thoughts About Energy

Some Thoughts About Energy

Energy is not an official part of the training pyramid. It’s not really a formal category of training, although teachers will sometimes ask students to ride a more energetic walk, trot, or canter. I suspect that when teachers tell the students to “ride more forward” they often mean “create more energy”, but the word “forward” tends to lead to more speed, rather than more energy or more power.

The closest thing in the official terminology is Schwung/Impulsion, but it’s not quite the same as energy.

The Relaxed Walk at the Longe Line

The Relaxed Walk at the Longe Line

You can communicate so much in a subtle way to the horse at the walk. You can influence better the bend, carriage, size of the circle, and rhythm/tempo if you begin by establishing it at the walk. But not every horse is so keen to walk at the beginning of the work session, I know! They have to learn through gentleness, calm groundedness, and guidance. Once they learn how then it becomes a habit.

3 Tips For Improving Your Canter Departs

3 Tips For Improving Your Canter Departs

Recently, we have received a lot of questions about how you can improve the canter or the canter depart. This is obviously a major issue for many riders. This topic is very suitable for explaining the biomechanical principles behind it.

Halt Like Bach: 3 Tips For A Reliable Square Halt

Halt Like Bach:  3 Tips For A Reliable Square Halt

Many riders struggle with a square halt for years. For those who are not familiar with the term, here is a brief definition: In a square halt, you should only see two legs when looking directly from the front, from behind, or from the side. The weight should be distributed evenly on all four legs at the lower levels. At the upper levels, there should be more weight on the haunches than on the front legs.

Roundness and Softness in the Canter

Roundness and Softness in the Canter

During the last year I have been working on the roundness and softness of the canter with Gulipipas. When his canter doesn’t feel good, it is because the inside hind leg is not flexing enough. This results in a rough feeling under the seat and resistance against the inside rein. To the extent that the inside hind leg softens and flexes more, the canter stride becomes rounder and softer.

This made me think of Gustav Steinbrecht’s statement that the impulsion and roundness of the canter strides comes from the outside hind leg…

Turning The Pelvis With Ease

Turning The Pelvis With Ease

This week's newsletter article is a guest post by one of our guest teachers in our courses, Catherine McCrum. Catherine is a Feldenkrais practitioner and Gestalt psychotherapist living and working in London. The Feldenkrais Method is a way of improving how you move and function in daily life with a particular focus on how your unconscious movement patterns and posture holds you back from doing what you want to do with ease and grace. She works with a wide variety of clients and students from athletes and performers to people with neurological difficulties. Her original training was as a ski coach and trainer which she finds very applicable to her relatively new love of riding and her horse.

Reasons Why Your Horse Is Not On The Bit - Part 2

Reasons Why Your Horse Is Not On The Bit - Part 2

Everything is connected in riding. Rhythm, balance, self carriage, straightness, suppleness/stiffness,  back movement, rein contact, impulsion, collection (i.e. flexion of the haunches) are all interrelated and influence each other. Rider balance and horse balance, rider crookedness and horse crookedness, rider stiffness and horse stiffness affect each other in very direct ways. Any improvement in one area leads to improvements in all the other areas. Unfortunately, it works the other way around, too: a problem in one area will also have negative repercussions throughout the entire system.

 

What? Why? How?

What? Why? How?

What? How? and Why? are the three big questions that every rider asks herself constantly and thatoften seem to be very difficult to answer. What should I do? How should I do it? And why should I do it? The reason why this information seems so elusive is on the one hand that many good riders make these decisions on a purely intuitive level without being able to render the decision making   process transparent or to explain it. - That was not really part of the traditional teaching paradigm, because it relied very much on the schoolmaster horses. In the old riding schools the trained schoolmaster horses were the true teachers. On the other hand, these decisions are often not that easy to make. Since we usually don’t have well trained Grand Prix horses as lesson horses nowadays, we have to find other solutions.
 

How to improve your horse's body awareness

How to improve your horse's body awareness

One important aspect of horse training is that in teaching a new movement or a better posture the rider first has to improve the horse’s body awareness, coordination, and balancing ability. This includes teaching the horse to place his feet differently, to distribute his weight differently, and to use different muscle configurations than he has been up to now.


This only works, if the horse knows where his feet are, of course. This means creating neurological connections between the brain and these muscle groups, so that the horse learns how to find them and activate them.

The 3 Main Paths to Piaffe

The 3 Main Paths to Piaffe

The piaffe is one of the most beautiful movements to watch. It is one of the gymnastically most useful movements, and it is in some ways the gateway to Haute École, similarly to the way in whichthe shoulder-in is the gateway to Campaign School dressage. Training the piaffe is a rite of passage for the aspiring Grand Prix trainer in a similar way that flying changes are a rite of passage from Elementary School to Campaign School. At the same time, you don’t see good piaffes very often because training it is not that trivial. I often think the piaffe is like a delicate flower that can easily be crushed by too much intensity, too much rider activity, or too much force.

 

Here, I would like to give you a systematic overview over the principal methods that I have found useful in teaching the piaffe.