Some years back I rode an Oldenburg mare - lovely temperment, less than stellar work ethic, took a ton of effort to get her in front of the leg. My trainer used to say: “You are both laid back and one of you needs NOT to be”. Various health problems forced her into retirement and I’m now a much happier camper on my Lusitano…he is not w/out his own challenges but so much better match for me.
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You could start another thread, equally appropriate, are some RIDERS not suited for dressage mentally.
And my answer would be the same. All riders can do dressage to a certain level given the right horse and right training, but not all riders can or should try to do advanced competitive dressage. :-).
FWIW I’ve seen and worked with several absolutely brilliant high achieving people…stars in their own professions, and in some cases ridden horses since their childhood. They can’t subdue the noise in their brains and their neutrons firing…sufficiently to process quietly advanced work. Or their overactive imaginations as well… Bits of the exercises yes, but to string them together consistently and ride each one and prep for the next…not so much. Not pretty anyway. And the more they attack it intellectually, the worse it gets. Just the way it is. What makes them a killer physician or surgeon or lawyer kills them when it comes to feel and single minded focus - at certain levels.
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Yes, I totally get this.
As someone who works in a highly intellectual profession, the wonderful thing about riding for me is that it makes me shut down the over rationalizing part of my brain and let myself work by intuition and physicality. That last is not my strongest suit but I know I just need to practice more than a really talented person . But I also do a lot of groundwork which is not that demanding physically but requires a lot of focus on the horse. And trail riding.
If I couldn’t shut the brain off or if I was just doing goal oriented lessons and bringing ambition to the riding I would probably be a jittery mess.
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Basically, stop trying to avoid riding your horse. Now that doesnt mean you avoid rides, but ride in a way as to not upset the homeostasis of the ride. This is the worst thing you can do on a hot horse. This is how I used to ride my mare. I thought my leg was on but oh no, it was soooo not on lol. If you can not put leg on, and push the horse into the bridle, without tension, then you have to start back at square one.
Of course this includes the regular things like checking teeth, ulcers, saddle fit etc. When all that is good, review your own riding. Can you keep your hands out in front and use your legs to push into contact? If not, then start at the beginning. Which is why I had to take time off jumping and focus on my self and my riding. My biggest issue causing her to be tense and hot? My hands. Riding with my hands, and not using enough leg. My hands were awful, like terrible. I could get any horse “round” but not actually connected. So for years I learned to use my hands without realizing what I was doing. My coach made me ride with a neck strap eliminating my hands from doing anything but following. Then I did about 1500 walk trot transitions. Not even joking. To teach myself how to ride without pulling and also to actually train my horse to listen to my aids.
Of course there is a bit of a magic trick that my coach has taught me that has been life changing, and it is the supplying rein. When halted, take one rein and supple the horse (basically pull the horses head around to the side) and let the other rein droop. If they walk while doing this it is fine let them. Don’t release the rein until the horse reaches down to stretch itself, or lets out a sigh. Repeat many times both directions. Once the horse understands the concept, you do this at walk, then trot. The horse will then learn that your supple/flexing aid is a relaxing aid.
Eventually, not long actually, your horse will connect the contact in the supply/flezx with the relaxation, and this eventually becomes your half halt and flexion aid and your horse will relax into the contact every time you ask. This is my first building block for all my horses now and it has been beyond life changing.
Before, everyone tells you how to handle a hot horse, now because of my amazing amazing trainer, I have learned how to train the horse to relax, rather than just hope it happens.
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It boils down to something also as simple.
You never do the same thing twice. So in the walk when you ask for bend around the leg, do something different, not canter.
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HUGE transformation in my mare the past month!! In a dressage program she is blossoming! So sooo happy doing the harder work and is solid 3rd level in in a short amount of time.
Turns out she just needed to be put to work
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Yay what a great update.
I love that update!
I never answered the original question. To me, yes, but more often there is a horse / rider mismatch. There are horses who are more mentally suited for lower levels, and horses who are more mentally suited for upper levels. I’m hoping my younger, purpose bred, mare ends up suited for both. She’s low enough level now that it’s hard to say!
There are very many horses who due to their start are no longer mentally suited. I tend to prefer the horses who are sensitive enough that the wrong handling early can ruin them. But I tend to have a Prozac effect on horses, so I want heat where my calmness is a good thing.
My older mare is HOT. High, burning energy. Not spooky or fearful in general, but the energy can come out as fear for an outlet, and if she is actually fearful or insecure there can be issues. My trainer didn’t think she was a good horse for me early on, because that hot meant showing low levels was not simple. As mentioned in this thread, getting her in front of the leg was a big struggle for us. Her “misbehavior” is to halt, so is her biggest spook. Nicely safe, but not useful in the show ring when she is more prone to reactivity. The turning point for us in showing was when she was balky and I managed to get her powered up in front of my legs to show. She lost suppleness and I didn’t want to lose the in front of my leg, so our first level test we somehow beat some nice horses in was spent in medium trot with extended “lengthenings” and our bend wasn’t what it should have been. Someone who hadn’t seen me ride her in a year or so was our ring steward, and on our way out told me she was impressed I had so much power without whip or spurs. Our next show, she had far more rideability, though less power because we were in a ring with more tiring footing. That show we had a judge who made sure I knew he disliked everything about my mare, but still gave us scores in the 60s because she was good and even though he thought she had 5 quality gaits he still had to score us that high.
At an in-between stage, my trainer put tape on my reins and told me I couldn’t go shorter than the tape. They felt VERY long in her balled up show tension, but I was showing training level and first then, and it forced me to push her out to the contact. It gave me the tools to take it to the next level of building her power and presence in front of my legs.
She injured herself in a stall, because of course she did with her energy levels and inability to handle being constrained. 🙄 She is just coming back to under saddle work now, and I am excited to be out of self isolation and get to ride her again. She reached a point where she was absolutely predictable and easy to ride because I had great guidance as I was learning to be the rider she needed. And the more physically challenging, the happier she is in her work. She wants that outlet for her energy. She has a super busy mind, and challenges give her focus so the worry isn’t there. That was all my trainer giving me the tools to ensure she learned she was safe under saddle, and took a lot of time to achieve.
My younger mare is way more mellow, but interestingly isn’t as focused naturally, so our work with her is constant little reminders to pay attention which would absolutely drive my older mare bonkers. She is more interested in doing the work to make me happy than she is in doing the work because it’s fun to work hard. So we’re trying to teach her the joy of working- and she’s super willing, doesn’t complain when anything gets more challenging, etc. She is going to shine in extended gaits most likely because those are the ones she seems to find most fun, but sitting is pretty easy for her.
I have seen horses not suited for moving up the levels. I saw a big name trainer struggle with tears while explaining that to q rider, too. The horse was a draft breed, but the problem wasn’t on physical ability. It was a pretty agreeable horse in general, but the mind clearly only moved at a slow and calm speed. The trainer told the owner/rider this was a horse who would be a joy to have in the barn, kind and sweet, but that trying to train in speedy responses to aids for such a mellow and naturally unresponsive horse would require treatment the trainer preferred not to give.
I have seen horses in many other breeds who were very similar. Not uneducated or lazy, but truly slower minds which were never going to be sharp enough to respond quickly. I know one warmblood who is on the hairy edge of that, and takes working up every single ride to get her brain moving enough to do the FEI work.
On the flip side, my mom’s mare was purchased to be her last riding horse and is a Friesian cross. Her preferred gait is halt, and that was why we bought her as the last horse. But she is naturally responsive enough, once I taught her to be in front of the leg she just stayed there. She was super easy to work with, and had her job been a dressage horse rather than a safe trail horse I also schooled in the ring, she probably could have been trained almost exclusively by an amateur learning as she went through silver without a lot of trouble. Maybe higher, too, as I taught her half steps in hand when I was playing around and they translated into piaffe steps under saddle with ease. Just a nice mix of easy.
This has been a great discussion.
My mare is older and has never been ridden correctly by myself or her previous owner as far as I can tell.
She’s VERY forward, 10 steps ahead of me all the time, which scared me. I never rode well with my leg aids but have recently learned that forward horses need more leg and lazy horses need less leg. Its all about acceptance of the leg aids now that we are working on and we have made huge progress from barely riding to now working on canter half pass in a matter of months.
Wish I had this wonderful trainer since day one with my girl, I feel like we wasted many many years. I’m grateful that we can get our s**t together before she’s too old 
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Very interesting discussions. I’m struggling with similar issue, except, we’re not even at canter yet, lol. Trotting was all it takes for us to lose all the “relaxation at walk” I so carefully built up during warm up. Instead, she gets into this power walk, then bigger power walk, turning into bigger, greater, faster power walk, then inevitably, jig. I started to wonder, “maybe this mare is not built for dressage.”
The thing is, even though this is a hot mare, she is very sensible, mentally cool and collected. I wasn’t asking any difficult, and she wasn’t rebelling against me. It so confounded me that I couldn’t get her jigging under control. All I could think was, once a clinician told me, “when a horse loses his balance, he gets faster.” After mulling over this idea for three miserable, unproductive rides, it finally clicked. The culprit: the right front. It was trying to move faster, and the rest of the three legs tried to follow. So three legs trying to catch up that fast right front, which then tries to move out of the way of the three legs, then bam, power walk to retain balance, then followed by jig to retain balance. It’s easier to retain balance in movement. If I did nothing, she would inevitably get into some really fast, trash canter then gallop on small circle. So the solution was simple: ask that right front to wait just a split second longer. I close my right wrist in sync with her right front so it stays in the ground longer. The three legs now don’t feel the need to play “catch up,” and we get our nice walk back. Honestly, I feel so foolish.
Exactly, if it’s too much for the individual horse, the trainers job is to make it less so. If the trainer can’t or doesn’t recognize it is, or remediate… That’s not on the horse.
It also hinges on timeframe. Can you as an ammie do it? Sure. But you won’t get there in the time you would with another horse, or a BNT might with this horse.
People* paint themselves into corners wanting to do it with this horse, with me up there, but I want to get to second by next year.
Again, too often the horse gets blamed for what the trainer has failed at.
The rider/trainer is supposed to be the brains of the operation, not the horse.
*People. We are the ones who do all this, but then we suggest it’s the horse who’s less than because the horse can’t do it.
They can. But maybe not with you. Or in this timeframe. But they can.
This was my horse Yo.
We started out in Hunters, and did he get bored fast.
I finally, duh, came to realize that we needed to do the Medal classes as warm up… Get over all the fences, but not in order or necessarily at a canter with simple lines to fences that were exactly the course our classes would be.
it needed to be random, unpredictable, changed up frequently,…
For flat classes to have a good walk, canter at home could never follow walk. If it did, it would get jiggy.
I finally had him listening such that I could trot down to a fence in warm up and halt… Three strides out more or less, always random… And then when he was listening to stop before the fence, the converse command “now jump” was clearer. Less muddied by the fallacy that always trotting or cantering towards a fence meant wed jump it.
Then again a better rider could get a better simple, straightforward Hunter round out of him right out of the box. But he was stuck with me, and luckily he forgave me for all the hideous mistakes I made along our way. And he made me a better rider by not being easy or laid-back or trusting me completely at first, but rather making me earn my leadership role.
A decent well known hunter trainer of stallions said he was a stallion ride.
