@Scribbler, to be clear, I am trying to describe/summarize patterns I have observed over the years, not repeating singular comments from individual trainers.
But thanks, I appreciate the points you are bringing up.
I’m a big picture person by nature :).
When you get criticism of anything from multiple people, a pattern will emerge. Not everyone will have the same criticism, and not everyone will have the same solution or indeed any solution. But overall, taken en masse, the criticism will direct you to an area of concern and it’s up to you to decide what the real problem is. Understanding that has been really important to my professional and academic work and writing.
In your case, the comments circle around you not being able to open up your horse’s gaits enough to go above the basic level. The larger term for this is impulsion.
Now in any given case, is it a failure of your horse, a failure of your technique, a failure of your courage, or a mismatch with a horse that’s too quiet or too much horse or too troubled for you to feel safe? And/ or a failure of that coach, to either name the problem or to be blunt with you?
Who can say? And who really cares at this point?
Big picture is that you’ve historically had problems with the issue of impulsion across multiple trainers and horses. So that’s what you need to fix.
It may require fixing your courage to ride forward or your seat or a tendency to micromanage. It may require a more suitable horse. It may require finding trainers who take you seriously.
It definitely requires keeping the big picture in mind at all times and not going down a rabbit hole of fixing one small detail that doesn’t contribute to your larger problem.
Keep the big picture in mind going forward.
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Those are many different goals in a short paragraphe.
If you want to learn how to develop a horse from scratch in a specific discipline, find someone that does exactly that.
If you need to learn how to ride up the levels and go through the medals process, buy a horse that does it already (or is in the process of) and find a trainer that will teach you how to develop both the horse and yourself in the process.
If I were you, I’d buy a more confirmed horse that already do some lower jumping but is trained in dressage.
A 6-7 yrs old doing 1rst (what you are able to do) and jumps a bit.
Have you ever competed higher than at First?
It’s not me being judgemental - it’s a real question and it’s important.
The riding commitment isn’t the same the higher you go up the levels.
While this is true and fair and I get what you’re saying*,
I have gotten feedback from multiple pros over the years that my horses (current and past) are capped at first level and/or will only been viewed as not capped at first level if I can develop their gaits sufficiently myself to make them look like they have potential for more.
But then there’s a Catch-22. If I’m considered not good enough to improve my horse’s gaits enough to the point where my trainer believes they have some potential, but they aren’t able/willing to help me develop the gaits if they don’t think there’s potential, what do I do?
You should have done exactly what you are doing now.
Maybe your skills/knowledges were way too far off or your goals unrealistic at that time.
Maybe your horses were not in a condition to perform 1st levels in any way.
If the quality of my riding/training is the problem, why is the answer from the pros “I don’t know if this horse can get past 1st” rather than “He should be able to, but you need to change XYZ to make that happen.”
Maybe you were not listening?
Maybe you didn’t want to hear it and put the blame on the trainers who couldn’t teach you?
Maybe there was too many things at that time to change XYZ?
The latter is the kind of feedback I did get from instructors in Germany the few years I lived there and it was hugely beneficial. I was the same student there as here, so I’m struggling to understand how to communicate better with US instructors to get the same kind of feedback I got in Germany. I get that the onus is on me to understand them and fit their programs, but clearly I have failed to do that in the past and my experience in Germany showed me that there’s something better I can aim for. I don’t understand why the clarity in Germany was so much better than here, other than probably the instruction I’ve generally had frequent access to in the US has just not been very good, which is probably true, but I feel like I’m going to get chastised for saying that too.
And maybe you were « star struck » by the German accent…
Or maybe you were lucky.
There are crappy trainers all over the world.
I think there’s a cultural aspect to though. For example, I’ve had multiple trainers in the past tell me that they’re afraid to tell their other students “hard truths” for fear of losing them to other trainers (context was that they were also telling me that they appreciate that I’m a good student and work hard and can take criticism), but in Germany, forthrightness is a way of life. I think also we in the US can sometimes be more demanding about details and lose the forest for the trees - which is relevant to the title of this post…
Yet, those same trainers are the ones you are complaining about not being able to tell you « the truth ».
You have bias against US trainers to begin with - it’s fine, you are looking for something specific.
Find someone who has trained in Germany so it will fill that expectation you have.
*I’ve ridden many dozens of horses of all kinds of types and quality. I don’t speak confidently about just about anything regarding my abilities and capacity with riding, but it’s 100% the case that I have a really diverse breadth of experience with green and low level horses. I’ve also been on quite a few schoolmasters and have a sense from that of what the end product of good basic training feels like. I acknowledge this does not mean I do anything well, but I feel like I can say with some confidence that it feels fundamentally different to get on a horse that needs years to develop decent 1st level gaits and a horse that is born with clear potential, even if the basic work is the same. I also don’t say this to blame the horses for my failings - I just think it’s important to triage what the individual horse needs relative to its own strengths and weaknesses and understand what the timeline looks like for making major changes when there are substantial problems. And for some horses, those problems will require much longer timelines. Like one horse I worked with was an abuse case and it took at least a year before he could do decent Intro/Training work because it just took that long for him to consistently trust his rider and go relaxed and rhythmically in his work, at all gaits, through transitions, etc.
If you say so.
But if this horse had been put in training with a Pro, it wouldn’t have taken that long.
You’re not a pro and that’s why it takes so much time.
It takes even longer because you’re riding horses that need more skills and knowledge than you can provide.
Sorry for so much wordiness - I’ve been told in other contexts that “this” (wordiness) is my real communication problem 
- could be the answer for Germany as well, since my fluency was limited…(kidding)
I appreciate your feedback.
You are most probably talking too much and not riding enough - hence missing a lot of the horse’s signal while thinking and talking.
Like I told my friend (and student) : Shut up and ride.
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When I scribed for the L program I got to listen to the comments given and responses from the instructors for the program. Those were riders who had all at least ridden through second, but most in the session I scribed for had trained horses to FEI themselves, and some had also trained students to FEI.
Almost every single trainee was told at some point that their comments were not focused on the biggest issues. “Circle not round” should be an obvious mark down and comment if things are going well otherwise, but if the horse takes off bucking in the middle of the circle, the resulting indentation in the egg shape being ridden isn’t where the comments should be made. So that prioritization changes every day.
Purity of gaits was always key from the instructors’ viewpoints. Relaxation and steadiness next. Then came the next rungs of the trai ing scale.
The problem in focusing on the feel of the reins, for example, is that you aren’t asking why the feel is wrong. It could be tension, lack of balance, a horse ridden over tempo, disobedience due to confusion about the aids, etc. We only work on the basics every ride. With my oldest we decided I wouldn’t show because of how violently wound up he’d get and thinking it was unfair to others paying full entry fees to encounter his acrobatics, we worked on relaxation and swing nearly every ride. By doing that we ended up schooling the I-1 work plus GP steepness half passes, full pirouettes, and some other challenging work. We left out changes because 1) they didn’t help in the tension issues and 2) we didn’t want to do something likely to actually make him more acrobatic.
point being, he tended to shorten the long muscles along his back. At the start there were physical issues we had to resolve, and the problems were residual mental trauma essentially. The lateral work we used to lengthen those back muscles in motion loosened his whole body, built both pushing and carrying strength, and fixed his contact. He also naturally wanted to collect and sometimes he had to be pushed for a boatload of impulsion to break through his mental blocks. This eventually gave him the best extended trot on the property.
Overall, all the work added up to improving his gaits and agility, power and collection. Just by focusing on the basics.
With my youngest, we just made a tack change which eliminated position issues I was having. My horse immediately had impulsion without me having to struggle to get it from her, and suddenly all the basics we’d worked grew into schooling second level plus half passes as things suddenly became easier. She has huge gaits but tends to push instead of lift, so we’re constantly adding lift to her gaits.
So the question when you ask what to focus on is, do you understand the purpose of the exercises? Do you have a big picture goal to reach for how you want your horse going? As your horse develops that vision should constantly change, but you should be doing the work toward getting there. It truly is more a spectrum than discrete levels, and the movements a level or two above where you are are good clues for what exercises will help develop what you need for gaits where you are.
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@alibi_18, I’ve absolutely seriously thought over the same questions/assessments you’ve posed over the years. There’s a limit to how much detail I’m willing to post publicly, so I am not going to try to adjudicate anything in this thread. I can send you by PM anything specific you want to know about and carry out the discussion there if you are interested. I’ll just say that I did not go to Germany expecting to have any different an experience than what I’d had to that point in the US, and I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that it is more difficult to access good instruction there than here. I think my experience was consistent with that reality, nothing more.
Had a post that was destroyed by network issues on my end. Roughly, wanted to say that without changing anything about the way I go about processing the info from my instruction, any instruction, the advice to get a good trainer and do whatever they say puts me at risk of repeating my past mistakes. The advice so far in this thread about where I’ve gone wrong in the focus of my attention is noted and very very appreciated and gives me plenty to think about. This was the point of the OP in the first place. I’m frustrated by the rest, and afraid that if I can’t walk in the door with a horse that looks like it has clear potential to get to third in a few years I will not be taken seriously as a student. But it doesn’t matter really when the question here was supposed to be about educating myself.
Re: 2nd level, would like to know what you would describe as sufficient commitment to make that leap. I can write out all I was doing the time I came closest to it if you want. The reality is that I had gaps in my foundations and that was the problem so the rest of the commitment did not matter.
@netg , thank you for the really excellent post. The description of your personal experience helps a lot.
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If you have gaps in your foundation then try to find a lesson program with a horse going Second or Third level.
The big stumbling blocks for most ammies are sitting the lengthened or extended trot, feeling comfortable with true impulsion, and schooling a flying lead change. I would guess that these are the 3 things that most often stop the progress up the levels of most ammies on decent horses. Obviously as netg said, you can continue training and skip the flying lead change if you don’t care to show. You can also school an extended trot posting, but can’t show like that obviously.
Learning to sit an extended trot requires a big commitment to fitness. Your other thread is about finding the time to ride at all, so that’s another issue.
I wonder if everything in your intellectual and professional job including a numbers analysis job ( I think you said) directs you to look at isolated details rather than the big picture.
Riding is an interesting sport in that it requires both attention to detail and release into the full big picture. Riding is an art in the sense that once the pieces fall into place, the results can exceed the sum of the individual parts. Think of riding like a musical performance where you have excellent technique and can then improvise according to the mood of the horse (or band and audience). Think of all the teenage piano players and singers who are technically proficient but have not yet been able to put any nuance or emotion into their performance. Then think about how some musicians and singers can fly right past glitches in technique or voice and deliver riveting performances (true of rock music generally).
You have to have both attention to detail and opening up to ride with feel and instinct in dressage. If you tend to go down rabbit holes of detail, you need to figure out how to pull back and see the bigger picture.
Netg provides a useful model for how to think about the horse as an individual with individual needs, and how to make the horse the best he can be.
This is different from thinking of riding as an exercise in mastering your own technique, like rock climbing or dance.
Every comment you’ve made here has been trying to pinpoint your own problems in technique whether it’s naming the footfall, rein pressure, ability to “showcase” gaits or holes in your basics.
Ok you did mention you rode a problem horse, but you didn’t tell us what you learned about horses from him, just that he impeded your progress.
I think a big helpful step for you would be to start observing what the individual horse needs. Because even if you buy a good horse he will have individual needs.
It is not the case that if you just master good technique you will be able to ride any horse to his full potential. Of course you want good technique. But more than that you want a feel for the whole horse.
A rider with good feel but imperfect technique can often improve a horse a lot, and improve their own technique at the same time.
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