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Ask The Right Questions

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Ask The Right Questions

This week I want to touch on something that is very important in training and riding, but unfortunately, it is hardly ever addressed in lessons or in books and magazine articles. It has to do with training strategies. How do you decide how to proceed next with your horse? How do you know how to improve a movement, a transition, a turn, the rein contact, the horse’s suppleness, or any other problem you may encounter? Many good, experienced riders make these decisions purely intuitively, based on their gut feeling and their experience with many different horses, and these riders are very often correct in their decisions. But this kind of skill is unfortunately difficult to communicate and to pass on to others.

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How To Improve The Horse’s Straightness In The Shoulder-in

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How To Improve The Horse’s Straightness In The Shoulder-in

This is a great discussion of how a thinking rider can correct the horse’s attempts to evade the demands of the shoulder-in by using the other lateral movements to bring both hind legs underneath the body. This somewhat indirect approach is much more effective than trying to create the correct bend by pulling on the inside rein, or trying to create a contact on the outside rein by using “more inside leg and more outside rein”, which are so often the standard recommendations of trainers. These direct approaches actually only make the problem worse, whereas the indirect approach teaches the horse better body awareness and it makes the hind legs stronger and more supple, so that he is able to perform a correct shoulder-in easily and without feeling the need to evade.

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The 8 Different Types Of Exercises

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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.

 

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Inside Leg to Outside Rein

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Inside Leg to Outside Rein

What does it mean to ride from the inside leg to the outside rein? And how do I do that?
Inside leg to outside rein is an abbreviation for a relatively complex set of movement patterns that result in a very supple, balanced, straight, and agile horse. The job of the inside leg is to initiate the circle of aids by bringing the inside hind leg closer to the outside one as well as closer to the front legs. This results in a weight shift from the inside shoulder onto the outside pair of legs, which results in an expansion and stretch of the muscles on the outside of the horse’s bend, this in turn creates a contact with the outside rein, which is then able to connect back to the outside hind leg.

 

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8 Habits Of Highly Successful Riders

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8 Habits Of Highly Successful Riders

8 habits that will make you a successful rider. If you prioritize the items on this list, you and your horse will progress, slowly but surely. Whenever you feel lost or frustrated, return to this list, check if you have been implementing it or if you have become sloppy with some of these items. If you put one foot in front of the other, you will succeed step by step, even if progress sometimes seems to be painfully slow for all of us.


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Polishing the Pebble

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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.

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What is Collection?

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What is Collection?

Reading the descriptions of the old masters suggests that the features that most people associate with collection, i.e. shorter strides, higher elevation, or a slower tempo, are by-products rather than the essence of collection. They are visible surface-level phenomena, whereas the true nature of collection is functional and can perhaps be felt rather than seen.

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3 Tips For Improving Your Canter Departs

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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.

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Good Rides and Bad Rides

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Good Rides and Bad Rides

We have probably all had days when we felt like we had completely forgotten how to ride, when it seemed as if we couldn’t do anything right. I suspect that as long as we ride, we may never be completely safe from experiences like this. Fortunately, the incidents seem to become fewer and farther in between, the more we learn. - Or maybe we just don't take bad rides as personally anymore, because we know that we will have another good ride again soon. Just like we know after a good ride that there will be more difficult ones waiting for us in the future.

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Who Are We To Judge??!

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Who Are We To Judge??!

When Alois Podhajsky was the director of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, he sometimes noticed that someone watched him during the morning workouts with a disapproving eye. So he sent his groom up to the gallery to relay the message: “The Colonel couldn’t help but notice that you disapprove of his training. He is inviting you to come down and ride his horse for him because he would love to learn a better way.” Not surprisingly, nobody was brave (or incautious) enough to take the bait and say: “By God, I’m going to get up on this horse and show him how it’s done!” That’s a very clever and very effective way to silence the peanut gallery who thinks they are so much better than the riders in the arena who are actually trying their best to do a good job with their horse.

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Building a Better Relationship Through Trust and Communication

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Building a Better Relationship Through Trust and Communication

In order for the horse and the rider to become the best versions of themselves and the best possible team they need to have a good relationship. The basis of this friendship between horse and rider is mutual trust, mutual respect, and effective communication. In all three areas, the burden is on the rider to prove herself to the horse, that she can be trusted, that she deserves respect, and she needs to learn to become a good communicator.

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Understanding Resistance

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Understanding Resistance

When I returned to riding as a middle-aged person, my first horse had a very loud ‘no.’ He was cheerful enough about doing the things he wanted to do, but my goal - to learn dressage - prompted a storm of tantrums and hissy fits of truly epic proportions. This, of course, felt horrible. He was treated well, I thought, and the requests I was making were not very difficult. So why did he spend his time looking for ways to make my life hard? Why did he keep saying ‘no’?

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We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know

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We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know

When you are working on your own, you can investigate certain questions together with the horse and let the horse show you how he wants to be ridden. Each horse is different, each situation is different, and the preferences of individual horses change over time, as they develop and move up the levels. That’s why you should investigate these questions again from time to time with your horse in order to be able to adapt your seat and aids to the horse’s changing and evolving needs.

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The Old Masters’ Views On Straightness

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The Old Masters’ Views On Straightness

The old masters considered the horse’s natural crookedness to be a major obstacle in developing balance, suppleness, collection, impulsion, and “obedience” (i.e. positive responsiveness to the aids). Put positively, functional straightness is the foundation of balance, suppleness, collection, impulsion, and “obedience”. Without straightness, the horse won’t get very far in his training. Unfortunately, overcoming crookedness is not a trivial matter. It requires constant attention, and if the rider doesn’t work on straightening her horse every day, his innate crookedness will gradually increase again.

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Consequences of Crookedness

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Consequences of Crookedness

In one of our courses, a member asked a question about crookedness. She wanted to know which exercises to ride on the hollow side and the stiffer side to combat the symptoms of crookedness. There is unfortunately not a simple, straightforward answer to this because crookedness leads to imbalance on several different levels, such as…

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