The rider absolutely has to learn to ride. Learning timing as a rider is an evolution and some people never truly develop it, especially for the upper levels. Also, riding a horse that is very well trained and that responds reliably is entirely different than bringing a horse through the levels and using your skills as a rider to develop the horse. The rider needs to know how to effectively manipulate the horse through the execution of movements and how to correct them when they are not successful or accurate. A beginner rider is not going to know how to best apply aids to develop the horse, nor are they going to be sufficient is relaxing and using their body to improve the horse’s movement with their body. Approaching horses as a push button machine is quite a limited perspective because so many horses are not push button, are complicated and take a great deal of tact, knowledge and problem solving.
After all, if this were the case, riders at the SRS wouldn’t spend a year on the lunge without stirrups or reins learning how to ride.
The horse can’t “create” the contact if the rider is unskilled. The rider can get in the way with their seat, legs, hands, spine etc. Without the correct timing of the aids you don’t get the benefit of a response that sits the horse back. I find that some horses will tolerate mediocre riding and others will say if you don’t stop twisting your body, gripping your legs, hanging on my face etc. I can’t do what you ask.
Read de Kunffy,“the Athletic Development of the Horse”.
When the horse engages the contact is there, the rider simply contineus to "hold his hand quietly. Assuming that the rider has alread y learned to gently maintain contact, and to ride from their body.
I didn’t ask the judge further because she wasn’t amused with me by that point. (hard to imagine, I know😂 lol) And I was scribing for her. This was a schooling show, but I cannot remember if the judge was ‘L’ or more.
The topic of “real” versus “klassical” sounds interesting…
I agree. I like the analogy of the horse offers the handshake. As opposed to, I walk up to someone, reach out for their UNOFFERED hand (lying at their side) pull it towards me, and try to ‘shake’ it.
The hand shake was not offered. I invaded the other person’s space and grabbed their hand.
Agree. The free market makes this a tough sell, however. Hence (I think) many professionals just don’t bother/give up/have learned the hard way they cannot ‘sell’ this as a business model.
Very often….the trainer uses the rider as a puppet, and rides the horse through the less skilled student. In such a scenario, the student never emerges from ‘puppet’ phase. Not the kindest way to phrase it….
Yes. Horses vary in their ability to be ‘programmed’ to perform, in spite/regardless/ etc of the rider. These are the “ammy friendly packers” that are so highly prized, and priced. But these horses are what a lot of customers want. They want more of a roller coaster. Strap in and let the machinery/training take you for a ride.
So if this is what you are actually seeing, then you need to find a new trainer
I see some gosh awful riding and coaching in the name of adult dressage, but it usually never gets beyond First Level due to rider skills constraints.
It’s true many coaches micromanage puppet students but typically they only lesson once a week. Either the student manages to internalize the things they are taught, or they just hack around on the buckle 6 days a week and bragcomplain how sore they are after a lesson and how their horse hates the coach for making him work. Those students don’t progress.
There is a lot wrong with much lower level dressage competition riding and training. However I’d say dressage is the one discipline that the horse will not perform above the level of the rider. How many ammies get a ride on a school master and are humbled?
I would say wanting the self driving Tesla horse is more likely to be in hunters, Western Pleasure or maybe saddle seat. These are all disciplines where the coach can prep the horse, can do most of the riding and training, and the owner can show up on the weekend to compete. This just isn’t possible in dressage.
OP, if you are hanging around idiots that expect a self driving Tesla horse in dressage, or who have coaches that can’t or won’t teach riding skills, just walk away and don’t watch anymore. It can be oddly satisfying for a moment to watch the things that make our eyes hurt, and argue in our heads with them. It can actually be a useful way to clarify our own arguments and ideas.
But if you give them too much space in your head they will assume undue importance and will start to look like the norm instead of the bottom percentile. I totally believe that some ammie or backyard coach somewhere said the things you report. But they are idiots. There is no need to rewrite the dressage training pyramid etc to show them the light because they are idiots and also lazy idiots. Nothing you say or rephrase will change that.
So while it’s good to clarify your own ideas, don’t do it in reference to lazy idiots. Stop watching their horrific lessons (seesawing on the mouth to get a “headset,” spurring every step, Pinnochio arms, pony trot on forehand, or whatever it is at your barn) and avoid the shortcut coaches who have given up trying to teach skills because they don’t know how. Stop having a war in your mind with them. Look to better models that can improve your own riding and let the others continue on their own journey.
Edited to add: getting stuck on trying to debate the bottom feeders risks creating a “straw man” fallacy. That’s where you create a version of your opponent’s argument or position that is very easy to defeat because you have taken the simplest, stupidest, or most reductive version of their position. Every issue or activity has a range of participants and you can find stupid examples in everything. It’s related to the fallacy of hasty generalization.
So if I look at the “mainstream” dressage lessons in my barn and see people being taught to seesaw on the reins and spur at every step, and I then extrapolate to say “this is how amateur dressage is being taught today and we need a change,” there are going to be a dozen COTH posters replying convincingly that they don’t ride like that at all, and that they also incorporate many techniques that I associate solely with French dressage. And that I am seeing some bottom of the barrel back yard coaching in a region without a deep pool of dressage talent.
I have seen it in plenty of trainers, none of them mine. The issue being that most folks will not be aware that this is what they are receiving OR they are aware, but find it suits their purposes.
“Klassical” = the people who think all modern and : or competitive dressage is abusive and horrible and awful, who have never actually trained or ridden an upper level horse (or can’t ride at all) but have very strong opinions about how it should be done. Different than people who are knowledgeable about classical principles of training.
Great that makes you happy. Bit elite lifestyles do not make a difference for most. I’ll be impressed when the fast food industry is driven to desperation by the market competition of your farmers market.
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Great that makes you happy. Bit elite lifestyles do not make a difference for most. I’ll be impressed when the fast food industry is driven to desperation by the market competition of your farmers market.
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Huh. I didn’t know home cooking was elitist.
Anyhow the reliance on fast food in the USA is a combination of poverty, urban planning failure, racism in inner cities that created poverty pockets and food deserts, etc. And in the suburbs a combination of low wages and people working multiple jobs that don’t allow time for cooking or shopping. Anyhow if you wanted to change that you’d need to make some big structural changes that helped even out income disparity.
You aren’t going to change anything by saying “it’s all because people misunderstand the national food guide” (if that still exists). Which is the equivalent to you saying the Dressage pyramid is somehow misleading people into bad riding.
It’s not, in either case. They are just ignoring it.
Plus your average dressage practitioner, even ones subsisting on a fast food training diet, is a far step removed from someone living in poverty in a food desert.
Let’s not conflate dressage riding, which is an archaic and small-scale problem, with systematic societal inequalities, which aren’t.
So, rather than “pyramid” or “circle”, I think “spiral”. We do the forward, the strengthing, the legthening, the collection, and the we most likely come back to the forward - but this forward is different because now there’s more strength and more understanding.
Lather, rinse, repeat, but the spiral means you are never at the same place when you come back around.
Interesting to read the conversation on the skill of a rider and buying a fully trained horse. I agree that you can’t put a totally unskilled rider on an upper level mount and have them do well with proper contact, but I have unfortunately been seeing a trend in my area where money talks. The perception of what a “good” dressage ride looks like seems to have a disconnection. We have all but 3 dressage trainers here that compete in higher levels. One is local, the rest are a 2-4 hour drive in/out. I personally know of 2 jumping instructors that bought their way into dressage “specialty” (Yes, they now refer to themselves as dressage specialists). They both bought one and done school masters and made it out like they trained the horse One of them got into an argument with an FEI judge at one show about how to properly ask for contact. This was based on the judge marking down for front-back riding and the instructor did not like that and argued against it. Now they came into some money and bought a fully trained 4th level horse… spurring every stride, BTB and hollowed at times. Yet, they receive a ton of praise for how good of a dressage “trainer” they are. I think this is very area-specific, but it is a trend in North America for riders to buy a horse that is “push button” and show the horse, while the trainer trains and teaches. Some are very honest about it, but I’ve come across a number who make it out to seem otherwise.
I suspect they will have limited success, as a well trained Fourth Level horse will fairly quickly become an unhappy Second Level horse with an unskilled rider. In cases like this their first show season is usually the best, and year after year the scores go down and / or they drop back to a lower level.
I know a coach like this who bought a PSG horse and called themselves a dressage trainer after that. They showed one season at Fourth and then Third with scores in the mid 49s to low 50s. Lots of excuses - windy day, judge doesn’t know what they are doing, blah, blah, blah…. They did eventually get help from a real dressage trainer with that nice horse, but never showed it again.
I also see a number of young pros who competed FEI Jr and YR on very nice, very well trained horses, hang out their shingles advertising themselves as “FEI trainers.” It’s a buyer beware scenario to know that someone who has been taught to ride well at the FEI level doesn’t necessarily have the skills or experience to train a horse to that level.
One of them got into an argument with an FEI judge at one show about how to properly ask for contact. This was based on the judge marking down for front-back riding and the instructor did not like that and argued against it. Now they came into some money and bought a fully trained 4th level horse… spurring every stride, BTB and hollowed at times. Yet, they receive a ton of praise for how good of a dressage “trainer” they are. I think this is very area-specific, but it is a trend in North America for riders to buy a horse that is “push button” and show the horse, while the trainer trains and teaches. Some are very honest about it, but I’ve come across a number who make it out to seem otherwise.