I have never been amazing at walk pirouettes, especially with my Iberian youngster who has one of those big walks that can get lateral when he’s tense.
Recently I’ve started trying them right after playing with our half-steps/ early stage piaffe - suddenly the collected walk with four beats and non-sticky, yet not huge, walk pirouettes are 100% easier!! The piaffe seems to make him “remember” his hind legs in the walk and keep it active without tightening the back.
I stumbled upon this breakthrough and have repeated it all week - it’s totally working to keep our walk true through the pirouettes. When he gets to the brink of sticky I “think” piaffe for a step and the walk comes back fine!
Im curious if anyone else has random training eureka moments they’ve discovered?
Also with a tense Iberian type: we finally figured out how to keep the connection in the outside rein through the half pass doing figure 8’s with no change of bend. The diagonals were in leg yield and half pass depending on which way we were going. It was like I felt him go, “So, it’s just…? Oh!!”
It’s too bad this isn’t expressed more often. I discussed it with a judge when I was scribing - that walk pirouettes should be helping toward piaffe and canter pirouette, and are useful for training in that context. I have nerve damage on my left side, and learned to ride a walk pirouette by entering it from canter pirouette. The canter put me in the right place for it, when no amount of thinking about it could figure out how to use muscles to get my legs where they want.
Related, from my problems: change of direction and bend in lateral work helps straightness. I can only feel part of my left seat bone, but the more I work on changing bend in lateral work, the more naturally straight I get. I have to have eyes on the ground helping frequently, but they don’t need to tell me as much as even 6 months ago before my girl was ready for a lot of lateral work.
In general: use the things which are easy to help the things which are hard. Examples:
*Warming up, I feel my mare is tight in the right jaw at a walk. Shoulder in feels impossible, but haunches in and out work just fine. Work them first. Look at pirouettes, leg yields, even just voltes, to find release in tight muscles. Revisit shoulder in or right flexion - and only move on from the walk when that suppleness is there. But let the lateral work which is working well help get us there.
*Canter wants to get long and running. However, canter walks seem to be working well. Do a bunch of those transitions to get hind end working as needed to make the canter work improve.
*Trot is tight in the back, but stretchy trot is on point. Transition in and out of stretchy trot and keep posting all the time until working and collected trot start swinging more. (Lateral work can also help trot quality. For my more trainer horse, piaffe is her favorite thing so it also helps.)
if you just watch and don’t listen (that announcer guy is very annoying) there is an interesting little segment of passage to piaffe steps/adjustments about halfway through this vid:
That’s very helpful - that horse has the same piaffe instincts as my guy (to get stuck on the spot and behind the leg). The way she explains the forward steps in training is super useful.
Warning to anyone who cares: it is a dressage hub video.
Chronicle of the Horse probably still has the original video wacky witch stole publicly available.
i do not know dressage hub from dressage hat. and don’t know who ‘that woman’ is. But the video itself is quite good. Maybe it can be found on some other platform…it’s worth looking for.
I teach walk pirouettes from haunches in on the rail. Sounds like it wasn’t clicking with your horse. It’s so cool that you found this worked for him! And now, for some more “random training tricks.”
I’ve found a random training trick while teaching half-pass. It works for both the horse and the rider. I find that the classical method, haunches in on the diagonal, doesn’t compute for a lot of riders (myself included). What I found is that once the horse is very good at leg yield, you have the rider leg yield from the rail to the quarter line, exaggerating the bend somewhat. Then have them half pass back by maintaining the bend and “leg yielding” the horse back to the rail, shoulders slightly leading.
Another random trick I learned - this may be more in the area of ring craft - is for horses that are reluctant to stretch down in the free walk and don’t get there until nearly at X across the diagonal. You go deep into the corner and then a little before you start to turn off the rail onto the diagonal, you begin releasing the reins. The horse feels this and starts to stretch into the longer rein so that once you are on the diagonal, he’s already in a good free walk. Takes good timing but it does work.
Edited to remove first sentence which sounded snarky to me and was not intended to be so.
A confident, no nonsense, Queen of Everything dressage horse can be used as a mobile jump standard to help her young friend learn to go over a little X instead of around it. Note, this is likely not to work if the dominant horse is the one having the jumping lesson
Ok, so it’s not a dressage training “trick” but we probably all need a little smile today given world news.
Here’s one actual “trick” that isn’t really a trick but is useful. For a horse that speeds up the tempo too much in medium and extended trots, don’t just collect a little more in the corner before, but go into full piaffe to really set the weight back and reaffirm the tempo.
oh good! You found that video i put up on post#4 but on another, less objectionable, platform I think this is some pretty educational riding. I got a lot more out of it with the sound off myself. ymmv of course.
The best “tricks” i have ever found are the ones that check/correct rider imbalance. I have found more often than not over the years that when the horse isn’t responding how i want, the problem is that i am blocking them somehow because i am accommodating for my intrinsic asymmetry.
Unfortunately, how i may be blocking any given day is a moving target…
My trick for this is to ride the thing (figure, exercise, movement) on rapidly alternating reins. The first 2-3 times I just feel what I am doing, comparing inside/outside aids on each rein. Then I try to match the balance of inside/outside aids on the bad rein to those on the good rein.
Thinking in terms of inside/outside removes the need to flip left/right mentally.
I learned this for the stretchy circle as well. Works nicely.
My random trick for teaching horses to take the bridle - I little piece of apricot fruit leather on the bit. It seems obvious, but people ask how I get my horses to open wide when they see the bit, and when I tell them, they act like I’ve invented fire.
Can you describe how this works for you on a stretchy circle? In the training level tests there’s no corner to use. (edit, whoops there is in training 2 but not in training 3)
Young mare’s is getting better, but I’d like it deeper/faster. She loooooves to stretch and keeps a nice even cadence, but it can take her a quarter of a circle or more to get down there.
Right? “GIMME THE CANDY FLAVOURED CHEW TOY!!!” is not hard to teach. I feed a mint with the bridle and it has worked a charm for me for years with many horses. The only trouble is the withering looks I get when I’m a bit clumsy and take .25s longer than it is deemed necessary to get the reins, etc. out of the way and make the horse wait a moment. Terrible. I should be shot.
