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Ride Like a Composer: The 4 Things You Need To Do Improve Your Movements

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Ride Like a Composer: The 4 Things You Need To Do Improve Your Movements

In lessons I often see that riders start a movement or a transition without any noticeable preparation for the horse (or themselves). As a result, the movement or transition doesn’t turn out as well as it could. Since this seems to be rather widespread, I thought I would turn this subject into a newsletter article. It’s an important topic that doesn’t seem to be addressed in a systematic way very often. There are some simple strategies, however, that will help you to improve your and your horse’s performance quite significantly.

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Mental Flexibility (it's a suppleness thing!)

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Mental Flexibility (it's a suppleness thing!)

In riding we often spend a large amount of focus on establishing and polishing the suppleness of the horse's body. We even often refer to the necessity for suppleness of the rider's body.

What is often, however, not mentioned or considered is that we also need to develop suppleness in the horse’s MIND, in his way of thinking. How flexible and resilient he is. How he adjusts to new circumstances or new exercises or new ways of doing the work.

And this also applies to the rider. As riders, we need to develop our own suppleness of thinking so that we also can become more flexible in our thinking, creative in our work, adjustable to circumstances, and resilient to circumstances.

So what does this look like?

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Be Like Water. Pivot.

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Be Like Water. Pivot.

Traditional riding instruction was often very rigid and inflexible. Disharmony or disagreements with the horse were usually framed as discipline and respect issues. That’s why you were told to prevail and insist that the horse carry out your orders at all costs - which can very quickly lead to fighting with the horse. The possibility that the horse was unable to comply due to a misunderstanding, a lack of balance, a lack of body awareness, a lack of suppleness, a lack of strength, or due to pain was rarely considered.

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Develop your own training plan

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Develop your own training plan

The thing is, every training problem can look slightly different, so I can’t really outline every possible problem and the process I go through to fix each of those problems. Not right here, anyway. But what I can do is share with you my own personal process for dealing with any problem and bringing it to a successful resolution. For the purposes of this article I must be quite general, of course, but I do give a couple of brief examples of how the process can look in certain scenarios.

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We Don’t Have To Name It Yet: Defining Priorities In Training

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We Don’t Have To Name It Yet: Defining Priorities In Training

We all know from experience that we can’t get everything at once, especially when we are teaching the horse a new movement, or when we ourselves are learning a new movement. It’s very difficult to have all ducks in a row. Often we’re lucky if they’re even all on the same lake. This means that we have to make a decision as to what elements of a movement we want to establish first. Which aspects are the most important ones? Which aspects are fundamental? Which ones are peripheral and can be fixed later? In other words, we need to set priorities. We need to start with the most central, most important ingredient, and then work from the center to the periphery.

 

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Thoughts On The Function Of Lateral Movements

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Thoughts On The Function Of Lateral Movements

Lateral movements are pretty to watch, when they are ridden well. They are fun to ride, and they are contained in certain competition tests. In addition, they are indispensable gymnastic tools in horse training. In this newsletter I want to share a few thoughts and observations concerning the gymnastic function of lateral movements. It is not a comprehensive, ultimate treatise on the subject. That would go beyond the scope of this post.

Due to their sidestepping aspect, lateral movements are very well suited to mobilizing and strengthening the horse’s hind legs and oblique abdominal muscles.

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Studying "The Box"... and Transcending "The Box"

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Studying "The Box"... and Transcending "The Box"

Once you see that the rules you had learned don't always seem to apply, and that there are often alternative routes that lead to much better results you start questioning everything you ever learned and you start testing the rules by experimenting with alternatives.

Then you realise that the old absolute rules you learned are in reality only rules of thumb that work in a certain percentage of cases, but not always. I tell my students in lessons that the horses don't read our books. So they don't know that they are supposed to react a certain way, according to our theories.

Stuck in a Rut? 7 Tips to BOOST your creativity in your riding

Stuck in a Rut? 7 Tips to BOOST your creativity in your riding

One of the most challenging tasks for a rider and a teacher is to stay inspired and creative in your work. It’s very easy to get stuck in a rut of riding the same patterns and the same movements in the same sequence, in the same location of the arena every day, with every horse you ride. That gets stale and boring very fast, for the horse as well as the rider. Especially intelligent horses enjoy an intellectual challenge. So, if you keep the work varied and interesting, they have more fun with it, and you will, too.

Ask The Right Questions to Get Better Answers

Ask The Right Questions to Get Better Answers

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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The 3 Main Paths to Piaffe

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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.

 

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Help! My Horse Won't Go Forward!!!

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Help! My Horse Won't Go Forward!!!

This is a question that one of our readers sent in, and it’s a problem that so many riders struggle with. Why is it a problem if a horse won’t go forward? It’s very similar to a car that won’t accelerate when you step on the gas pedal. It defeats the whole purpose of riding or driving. If you can’t go forward, you can’t steer, and you will never get where you want to go. A horse that does not want to go forward will never be able to advance in his training and reach the upper levels. In addition, many dangerous disobediences such as rearing, bucking, turning around, or bolting originate with sucking back and refusing to go forward.

 

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