3/23/2023 1 Comment Week 5: Dressage Lessons This weekend Marty and I go to do a dressage lesson with a retired professional dressage rider, named Nancy. Nancy is an older lady who almost got into the Olympics but unfortunately didn’t make it. She also broke her neck around two months ago but has been recovering. She is an extremely tough person, and she has very different teaching methods. This was my second dressage lesson with her and it went amazingly well. Lots of trainers have very different teaching methods and approaches to how you should ride a horse or teach them. It doesn’t mean either training style is wrong, different people just teach and learn differently. Unlike my trainers Nancy barely wanted me to use any leg pressure at all to get Marty to move forward and wanted me to try other methods to get him to move forward. Telling me that I shouldn’t be having to put all my effort into getting him to trot faster and he should do what I tell him to do until I tell him differently. Or in other words, Marty should go till I tell him not to and I shouldn’t have to ask him to keep going when we are doing something as simple as trotting.
During our lesson, Nancy gave me a dressage crop which is a very long floppy. Instead of asking him to move forward by applying leg pressure and would tap his hip with the crop until he understood what I was asking for. I honestly felt pretty bad for having to tap him so many times but I also understand why Nancy was having me do this. If I am having to put so much effort into getting Marty to keep trotting or cantering what am I going to do when I can’t get him fast enough to get over a jump? I won’t have any other way to get him to move faster. To help Marty out we also tried something Nancy called the “buddy system”. The buddy system is when you have another horse trot or canter about two feet away from you and then you match pace with the other horse. The idea is to either help your horse slow down or to help speed up. Because horses are herd animals they want to run together so it encourages them to match their pace with the other horse. Not only does it make it easier for me to get Marty going, but it also helps me work on adjusting his pace which is a super useful skill when jumping. I would not suggest trying the buddy system because like people, most horses like their personal space and might feel threatened if another horse that they don’t know is that close to them. We also worked on doing leg yields and jumped over a few jumps at the end of our lesson.
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