The vet didn’t refuse. She just said it wasn’t necessary. She said if I wanted to do this the “fast way” we could inject, reduce any inflammation and make it easier to build what we would need to build anyway which is muscle. I’ve said that in several post.
If I hadn’t injected the horse the trainer would still claim she was lame, even though again the vet said she was not lame.
I worry that a relationship that begins with the student posting criticism and frustration and expressing intent to fire a trainer on a public forum might never become a healthy one … I do hope you’ll have a sit-down with the trainer and talk about some of what you’ve been concerned about here so you can truly get a fresh start.
You may feel that lateral movements are the holes in your background, but if you really did come from a hunter background where all you were taught was to point at jumps and go over them and if the last 3 trainers you’ve worked with are as bad as you say, the thing you (and your horse) probably need most from your trainer is a solid foundation. Horses and riders don’t move up the levels by schooling new movements, they advance by constantly improving the basics (well developed aids/timing and equine athleticism have a way of making the movements come easily). In 95% of the lessons I take, for example, my trainer uses “dressage movements” primarily as tools for improving fundamentals (straightness/bend, collection/impulsion, my aids/timing, balance, etc.), not as ends in and of themselves. And pretty much all of the movements have come by putting a few basic concepts together once the horse understood the aids. It sounds like you really do need more training than your preferred/GP trainer can provide, but it might not be for the reasons you think.
You should disclose things like this because it is the right thing to do out of fairness to the trainer, not because you don’t trust the trainer. If you feel the need to cover your own a$$ in case of a bucking incident, you must realize that there’s some chance, however small, of it happening again. Trainers put their lives and livelihoods at risk when they get on horses; it’s not unreasonable for a trainer to work on the ground with a horse (instead of taking a new client’s word for it w.r.t. safety) before taking that risk with a new horse who has injured riders in the past. If you’re concerned or don’t like what your trainer is asking your horse to do, talk to her! There are a hundred reasons other than fear that your trainer might have chosen not to get on the horse before this point; the more you write about the trainer’s motives the less convinced I am that you understand them.
Horses typically want to have easy interactions with humans when they’re healthy and treated fairly. “Difficult” horses are usually just “easy” horses with pain and/or poor training. There’s nothing wrong with buying a horse who has those kinds of problems, but you should take pride in how easy she becomes if you solve them, not how difficult she’s been historically. There are no bonus points for “difficulty”, or for having an underdog backstory.
Did you take a look at the article @alibi_18 linked in post #33? It sheds some light on how many dressage riders think about lameness – that catching physical issues at the “diminished performance” stage can in some cases allow interventions that will prevent inflammatory processes from creating worse forms of lameness. Perhaps you wasted some money on an unnecessary injection, but it’s also possible that what you did will ultimately help to resolve the stifle issue before there are knock-on effects in your horses back or lower limbs. The fact that strengthening is also prescribed doesn’t mean that the injection won’t have any beneficial effects.
If your trainer has sensed that you don’t trust her, she might also be concerned that she cannot trust you. Were your horse to start in training and subsequently become lame, would you blame the trainer for the lameness? Some clients would. Part of her rationale for encouraging proactive treatment might come straight out of your playbook: averting blame for possible future catastrophes.
Here’s a little gem from that article that illustrates something I’ve learned the hard way as a human with orthopedic issues, and that might explain why your vet was on board with your trainer’s proactive perspective on treatment:
If we have an inflammatory process going on in that joint, even a very low-grade synovitis, stopping the inflammatory cycle can be beneficial to avoid a catabolic, or degenerate, cycle of events. Inflammation left unchecked can send them down the degenerative path to arthritis. By appropriately medicating the joint and eliminating concurrent predisposing factors, we’re aiming to break the cycle.
When you said you wanted the trainer to school the movements you don’t know how to do…that’s a bit of a red flag for me. It sounds as if you might think these movements are just tricks you haven’t mastered yet. In proper dressage they aren’t.
The more advanced stuff is just more refined versions of those same old boring basics (LOL) that we all work on. Whether you have 3 Olympic gold medals hanging around your neck or not. It’s all refining the basics. It is emphatically not — practising “the fancy stuff” as an isolated sort of deal. It’s all part of the same package.
It boils down the the rider sitting quietly and well and able to be a comfortable, stable package for the horse to carry, the rider understanding mentally and physically (as under your butt) the individual footfalls that make up the gaits. The right aid given at the wrong moment is still the wrong aid. It takes ages to get this stuff into your feel/brain. It’s hard.
Once you’ve got this level of feel, then you can work on actively influencing and improving your horse’s way of going. That means knowing what the legs of the horse are doing, how and when to start asking the horse to load the hind legs, engage his tummy muscles and flex his pelvis, etc, etc. It’s a long haul.
And frankly for the onlooker you aren’t going to see radical things in the early schooling process. It is baby steps that build on each other. It’s not exciting to watch (but rewarding to train). If you are expecting a trainer to get on and start riding half passes, walk pirouettes, etc, etc, then you may think the trainer is BS-ing you when she explains it’s a long road of preparation before you get there. If your horse can’t walk in a straight line, seek the bit, accept the hand, shorten his stride and lengthen his stride, do a correct circle in alignment (bloody difficult btw), then these things need to be put in place and it takes time and patience. If I saw a ton of bucking, spooking and freaking out at these baby stages, then something is wrong with either the training or the horse.
You may know all this and I apologize if I come across as lecturing, not my intent. But good dressage shouldn’t be spectacular stuff in the beginning. It should be steady, calm and quite and the horse should look and feel calm and happy in his work as it’s explained carefully to him.
I am glad that it looks like you have found the right trainer match for your horse and are feeling positive about moving forward. The same scenario is on going at our barn with one of my fellow boarders and their gelding. Perhaps the difference is how the trainer/BO dealt with the situation.
Our trainer was very honest that she felt a disconnect with the gelding and that her methodologies/riding style were not the best match and she would not ride the horse. She felt he could be unsafe for her to train. Our trainer was very considerate of the owners feelings. The gelding is very much loved and the owner is very proud of him and thinks he can do it all with just the right training and lessons. They too eliminated any issues related to pain
Our trainer recommended another trainer she had worked with to come in and do a second evaluation. The gelding is very picky about the riders he goes well for. When he is good he is great and when he isn’t well he really isn’t. Both trainers worked together on behalf of the owner. The second trainer began working with the gelding and even though it was far from a perfect result at first, the second trainer got bucked off and dumped a few times but did get a feel for best riding style for this horse.
Fast forward 3 months and the second trainer became a regular at the barn working with this horse and taking over teaching the lessons for the owner for the short term. Owner and horse progressed, second trainer rode regularly to keep horse tuned up and the owner with the trainer even did a few small shows.
Fast forward 6 months… Second trainer has their own barn and numerous other clients and couldn’t commit to coming out regularly through the show season. Both trainers worked together again with the owner and proposed that one of the working students, who they both felt is a good match, to ride the horse regularly. Our trainer took over the lessons again with the owner and life is merrily moving on.
I wouldn’t take the opinion of your first trainer too much to heart. She didn’t ride your horse well and because she couldn’t perhaps accept that was honestly looking for other reasons to explain what wasn’t obviously working between them. Sometimes it isn’t just about skill, some horses you get along with and some you just don’t. It isn’t personal.
You ride your horse well and understand her and that is what matters. Finding someone that accepts you and your horse and can work with you both on the good days and the bad to bring out the best in both of you is what matters. Let the rest go. It sounds like you are in a really nice facility with lots of good things going on. I hope you can get beyond what sounds like has been tough couple of months and get back to enjoying your horse.
If someone brought my trainer a horse with a history of bucking people off and a history of SI pain, she would not get on it until she felt assured all the problems were fixed by medical intervention or ground work.
She is a dressage trainer. She has a very sticky seat and can stay on almost anything. She will take risks on her own project horses, greenies, young stock. But honestly if someone like OP turned up with the back story of explosive bucking, pride in difficulty, neither horse nor owner having any foundation in a discipline: there’s no way my trainer would be riding that horse. The risk isn’t worth it. There is no reward at all.
She has more than enough horses to work, and many that are potentially more rewarding, either as her own sales projects or sound quality horses owned by long term clients who are focused on a specific goal.
I can’t say whether or not the things OPs trainer did are all reasonable, in part because the narrative here seems partial. But I think that backing off riding a horse from a new client that is described by the owner as an explosive bucker due to SI pain is a very reasonable choice for a busy dressage trainer.
I am astonished by all the posters who apparently didn’t have to learn how to do lateral movements, etc. And more astonished by all the green horses they’ve ridden who apparently already knew how to do lateral work, etc well enough for their riders to use them to improve the horse.
I remember learning how to give the aids for lateral work, then how to get the horse to do it correctly and only after that came learning how to use those movements/tools to improve my horse.
All the horses I’ve started had to learn how to do the movements, then how to do them correctly, and only then were those tools useful in improving that horse.
It is perfectly reasonable to have a trainer teach your horse how to do lateral work, etc so that as you learn you have a good chance of getting the desired response when you ask correctly.
I hope things work out for you, OP. 
I think the point trying to be made is that perhaps what the trainer is saying is that the horse does not have the basic foundation to be learning lateral movements as quickly as OP would like to happen.
There’s little worse than trying to undo something taught too soon or badly in a dressage horse. I have a friend who insisted on teaching changes herself when she’d never done it before on her young horse. Fast forward 4 years and she has an ingrained late behind change.
Also OP - while I think you and the trainer have a serious communication issue, there is another couple of things that come to mind. If trainer has 50 horses under their umbrella, trainer is going to be VERY reluctant to get onto a horse that they are not 100% sure of the horse’s reactions. Trainer cannot chance getting hurt with that many horses.
Also, do I understand correctly that we are talking about a OTTB here? Not for nothing, I know you’ve had several workups on her, but sooo many of them that I have known over the years actually do have a lingering behavior or pain issue from their years on the track, particularly in the SI. I would not be surprised for you to find out at some point, even years from now that there was a pain issue.
You’re going to have to decide if the rest of what you like about the barn outweighs your issue with the trainer. I agree with others that for now, you should maybe be doing your sessions as lessons rather than any training “rides”. As trainer sees over some time that Maresy is not overreactive, trainer will likely become less concerned about riding her and can do the installation of some of the more advanced work that you would like to have trainer do.
There’s a big difference between tuning up a horse that already knows how to do lateral work, and teaching a green difficult possibly lame horse lateral work.
You can’t go sideways before you can go forward and this horse has a long history of being difficult, bucking, balking, and shutting down. The OP takes pride in the horse being difficult and says you can’t ask this horse to do something more than twice before it explodes.
And you can’t start teaching lateral work unless the horse has some reasonable basics and understanding in place of straight, calm, forward and reach for the bit. These things are essential and not “interesting” or glamorous really for an anxious owner to see if your heart is set on riding your leg yields and half passes, etc.
It’s not just hop on, boot them with the spur and shove em over sideways. You CAN do that and Lord knows people do, but not if you want to build a horse that understands the conversation of the aids. And it sounds pompous when you write that down, but it’s the truth. You are building a language with the horse really and it takes time and the horse has to be in an accepting calm frame of mind.
Nobody has said anything about green horses with existing knowledge of lateral work… just that dressage training is a lot more than schooling individual movements. For me, improving as a rider and bringing horses along has been more like language learning through immersion than classroom or phrasebook style teaching of discrete units.
There are aids (not basic aids and aids for lateral work, just aids). These are my vocabulary for communicating with my horse, and as in natural language you start with a small number of lexical items and build from there. What you can communicate even with a reasonably sized vocabulary is fairly limited until you acquire a bit of grammatical complexity. And most movements, lateral or not, to me are like taking my vocabulary (aids) and using them with a certain grammar (combinations and timing). Ultimately you can build from very simple green horse basics to more complex movements without horse or rider ever learning the explicit lesson, “this combination of aids means shoulder-in” or whatever. Just like people can learn over time to form questions and use relative clauses in a new language without someone explicitly sitting them down and teaching “this is the interrogative” and such. Ultimately the “vocabulary” and “grammar” grow in a very naturalistic way, in the training I’ve experienced. Part of why I love dressage is that it’s about building a rich communication system, not teaching a few discrete commands (“sit”, “stay”, “leg yield”), and I don’t think that “phrasebook” style dressage would be as fulfilling, which is why I suggest that the trainer might have something more meaningful to offer OP than just schooling certain movements.
So yeah, I don’t remember personally learning any of the lower level lateral work, or teaching any of it to my current horse when she was greener. I do remember our first trot half-pass together precisely because it was as anticlimactic as applying things we already had established in a slightly different way and getting a few decent hp steps. And some of the more advanced things do tend to be taught in a more academic way (changes, and I assume p&p though I’ve not gotten there personally). But in the end the point I was making was that really doing dressage is more about constantly building very fundamental competencies than “installing” dressage movements, and that a good trainer might not necessarily even school the movements that are unfamiliar to OP but can still be doing valuable work.
@x-halt-salute P&P is really the same. The more advance you get, the more you realize everything comes down to very good basics.
It comes out of the work.
The movements aren’t difficult, it’s everything surrounding them that is.
Keeping a good canter, having your transitions, mobilizing the shoulders and the haunches, connection through half halts, etc.
In a half pass, you ask for the shoulders to stay there, to the hind to come under, to stay supple, to bend, to carry more weight here and there… more impulsion, more throughness. You don’t ask for more half pass.
It is that easy and that hard at the same time.
And that’s what makes dressage interresting to me.
The biomechanic of it.
I agree, @alibi_18 . Thanks for confirmation that good basics are every bit as essential at the very top of the sport as they have been along the way so far. And for the half pass example that illustrates so well what I was trying to describe.
I hope OP’s training situation works out such that she can experience that wonderful feeling of something that once appeared difficult becoming easy through the basics.
When neither horse nor rider have the knowledge of the “language” of the aids it is beneficial for both that the horse learn from an experienced rider and the rider learn on a horse who already has that understanding. As the OP stated neither she nor the horse have any understanding of the basics of lateral work it would be to both their benefits for the trainer to teach the horse. Now that the trainer has expressed a willingness to actually ride the horse there is the chance to address the basics.
Certainly a trainer can walk the rider through the aids used to do say, leg yield (do this, now add that, half halt here) and the student can do it without ever getting the explanation of what combination of aids will get a leg yield. Even if a student does learn the combination of aids through a verbal explanation, at some point they stop thinking about the discreet aids and can just think leg yield. Altering the balance of the aids used to improve the quality of the horse’s work also becomes less about which aid(s) and more about the desired shape the aids are used to achieve.
Not everyone has the mindset that allows them to really see the detail of what they are doing, but the progression one step at a time is there when training a horse.
Try this exercise…Pretend you are talking to someone who is considering her as a trainer. Speaking out loud, tell your pretend person all of the good, the bad, and what the training experience has been like for you. Pretend that they can take you to court if you lie. I doubt your “pretend person” would accept this trainer’s business practices, so why should you?
It seems you are looking for a sense of community and a nice social environment and that’s ok. You are paying for something you are not getting and are bothered enough about it to post this on the forum and that’s not ok.
Since there are two sides to every story, I’m imagining the trainer’s side of this one:
"I have a client who came to me with an older OTTB mare with a history of bucking and some NQR issues in the hind end. Client is a frequent-communicator and expects return emails and texts on short notice, lacks important basics in her own riding. and is in a lesson program but seems to have an attitude toward her riding instructor, veterinarians, and myself.
In my work with this horse, I’ve noticed a tendency to shut down and some behavioral cues that the horse is either in pain or prepared to resist aggressively, or both. I’ve been doing groundwork to assess and build trust. Client is talking all around the barn about her discontent with me, and can’t seem to settle on a plan for the horse or personal riding goals.
Would you fire this client, or keep trying for a good outcome for the horse?"
This is an unpopular opinion because it’s unsafe and unproductive. When I am not effective in my riding, my horse gets slower, doesn’t move sideways, keeps trotting, whatever. Sometimes he swivels his ears backward at me. I expect him to behave and not explode when he doesn’t understand something. Why? Because I like my ass in one piece and in the saddle. I wouldn’t go near your horse under saddle if it was perfectly acceptable to you that ineffective riding led to dangerous behavior from the animal. I am with your trainer on this one. Maybe she’s trying to tell you something you don’t want to hear.
By the time Mr Horsey has reached the explosion point of buck, spook and freak out you’ve missed 8 zillion signals he’s been sending you before that point.
It takes too much energy to buck, spook, etc…it’s generally not their first go-to response unless it’s a sharp pain out of nowhere and you get launched.
Look for changes in the basic rhythm of the gait, tense body, tense neck, tight back, hump under the saddle, short choppy stride, ears back, pitter pattering front legs, head ramping up like a periscope, feel the tight hindquarters, feel the mouth has got tight and clamped, see the tail clamped down, etc, etc…and other individual to that horse signs. (My old TB if the tips of his little foxy ears looked they were about to touch it was HANG ON time…it was gonna get seriously Western in about a minute).
But point being is they are speaking to you way before they are yelling at you. Way before - you just need to listen harder. All of them do something subtle first and then get less subtle. The art of riding is hear the subtle and address it then.
The old quote - the superior rider uses his superior skills to avoid situations where he uses his superior seat!!! LOL
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