Searching for flatwork help! Dressage/Equitation

Your clarifying comment makes all this make total sense now :slight_smile: I agree that riding a schoolmaster to learn to feel what’s correct, is a great step in the process of then being able to teach it (with guidance) to another horse. Sometimes we don’t have the schoolmaster, which means it usually takes longer, but it can still be done with the right trainer

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It certainly helps to learn it on a horse with the “buttons” so you can learn to ask correctly and learn to feel what correct feels like.

I don’t know if they would have an eq type horse you could use, but in that area of the country, I would 1000% suggest Timmy Kees for this. He coached me at my first Maclay finals that I qualified for kind of by accident at 13, on a random lease horse I got set up with (who had a large quirk, but it was I guess what there was in our budget). The first day getting to know the horse at the farm, he told me I didn’t have the right connection with the horse to navigate the small rings at indoors (I rarely showed indoors at all in the south, and then in fairly large areas). He spent so long that lesson getting me to understand throughness and connection to the outside rein, I was afraid we would run out of time and I’d never get to jump the horse before the class. I didn’t have a great show, but I learned things that changed my life as a rider.

After that I went home and practiced on my giraffe OTTB (much to his dismay) until I really learned it. And I have carried that skill with me for a few decades. I ran into Timmy about 10 years ago and thanked him again for those lessons.

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What you’re seeking isn’t quick. Even if you learn the proper feel ofthe movements on a schoomaster, without knowing how to develop a horse to that level, you’re going to be frustrated if you only have a year on the horse, which presumably has its own way of going (and doing the job it’s asked to do).

Which isn’t to say that learning new techniques isn’t a good thing (it is!), but there’s a huge difference between learning to ask a horse that’s already properly trained (which includes having the right core muscles and balance) to do the movements and having the same result on a horse you’re leasing.

If the horse you have isn’t already working through its back and carrying itself (and many aren’t), getting it to that point is likely to take a lot of time and focused work.

Doesn’t strike me that the OP thinks it will be a quick fix type thing. But it will be a whole lot longer trying to learn on a horse who hasn’t been developed that way and is very set in his ways. To your point, the investment in lessons with that horse might be worth it if it was a long term partnership, but maybe not for a year lease, especially if the horse’s connections have advised the OP against it. I think it’s great the OP is seeking out other opportunities to learn.

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Nobody is critiquing @equitation2018 for their desire to learn. However, learning is best accomplished with a proper mindset and expectation. One can learn to jump a horse in 1 lesson and that person can say for the rest of their life they jumped a horse, and that is fine. However, if somebody wants to learn to train a horse to jump, they have to realize that the path is long and not straight.

All we are doing is setting up expectation and mindset.

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And, frankly, if I send my packer off on a lease, I would not be pleased if it came back confused about how to do its job which it had always done with minimal input from the rider because the person I leased it to was trying to teach it new things.