07/11/2024
Love this post! How we teach a horse (OR RIDER) on day 1 is not the same as day 100.
How we ask for a basic turn will evolve as we ride. We have to conquer steps 1,2,3,4, ... before we move to steps 5 & 6. We have to understand that through those steps there may be platoues, and struggles that need to be overcome.
We must be patient with ourselves and our horses during this natural progression.
Use the lightest aids THAT WORK.
Use the most classically correct aids THAT WORK.
Your horse did not read any classical Dressage manuals, so your horse does not understand the correct responses to any aids, if you haven’t taught that set of aids to your horse. There are times that I have been teaching a student a more advanced set of aids than they typically use, and they try to explain to me that this set of aids does not work with their horse. 🤦♀️ Yeah, I know!! The Horse does not already understand inside leg to outside rein connection. You can’t slap tack on a wild Mustang and think they are going to respond favorably to a well-timed half halt.
No matter how tactfully ridden, you must be ready to back up your classically correct, well planned, well-timed aids with whatever works at the moment to get the desired answer.
You can only teach your dog to sit off a verbal cue, or a hand gesture if afterwards, you can actually get the dog to somehow sit down!!!! Maybe that’s as crude as pushing his butt to the floor and maybe it’s as tactful as keeping eye contact, while moving over top of the dog in a way that causes them to sit down, but the only way to teach the dog to sit off of a single small cue, is if you can follow that up with getting the dog to do the thing.
Same with Horses, but it’s not so easy to just push them into a desired position as a last resort. In order to teach a horse, anything is quite a long process and starts with elementary aids. Maybe we start on the ground, tapping the horse on the hip with a stick while tipping his nose toward us to get him to move his hind quarters away (and this is assuming your horse is already halter broke!) After enough repetitions so the horse understands it for sure, you can climb on and tip the horse’s nose to the left while tapping his left hip with the stick to get his b***y to step to the right. Then you reinforce it with praise. Then you use left rein and left leg and only come in with the stick if needed. Then you start using both hands in order to keep the horse’s neck a little straighter. You consistently step more into your inside stirrup to get the horse to rotate through the rib cage. Then you start to connect more with your outside rein to keep the shoulders, more balanced, and limit how much the hind end steps across. Your aids can get more complex as the horse understands them until eventually, you shape a simple stepping over of the hind end into a balanced circle with inside leg to outside rein connection, on the aids, with a Horse lifting through the thoracic sling. You can then shape this into shoulder-in and haunches-in and half pass, and flying lead changes.
What you can’t do is hop on a young horse, and use the perfect set of aids, and think that the horse should then go perfectly. People seem to understand you’re not just gonna hop on any horse and do a perfect lead change simply because you know how to ask. But if riders ask for something that’s only one step beyond what they’ve been doing, they seem to forget that just because they asked correctly doesn’t mean the horse understands it yet!!!!
In the real world, there will be moments where your aids are less classical/less advanced! If you are trying to do a right shoulder-in, but your horse is spooking at something on the left, and wants to look left and fall on his right shoulder, then you may darn well have to close your right rein against his neck for a few strides. An open rein is way more “correct” during a shoulder-in, but in that moment, you’re probably not going to inside-leg-to-outside-rein your horse onto the rail. In that moment, the classic tactful aids probably aren’t going to work and you have to “push the dog’s butt down” so to speak.
