(“Where you actually start may not be at ‘the beginning,'”)

Got a new horse? Ready for some dressage? Well maybe you are but you better figure out if he is!

If you use the all-encompassing definition of dressage—training him from whatever starting point he needs to bring him to a comfortable, practical, efficient way of moving and carrying his rider, then you won’t have a problem. But to many people, doing dressage means sitting to the trot, making a lot of circles, and putting your horse in a frame. Somewhere along the way these are all appropriate tasks, but everything must be build upon a foundation of trust, understanding, and physical development. Where you actually start may not be at “the beginning,” but in many cases what seems like well before the beginning. Sometimes what you have to do may not look very much like dressage at all.

A few examples:

Years ago when working at a Trakehner farm in Virginia, I “inherited” a young stallion from his former rider who had gone back to Germany. Before this guy moved back home, he had made a total mess out of him. He had ground that four-year-old around, pulling on his face, and making him a bundle of curled up, defensive nerves. Not only was he behind the leg but the slightest contact with the bit put the horse’s chin literally on his chest. Trying to make him round only fed into the horse’s evasions.

For a whole month I intentionally rode that horse above the bit and off contact simply to make him believe that the leg could send him forward. Next: an interval where I still did not try to shape him but simply asked him to meet a passive hand without retreating from it. Eventually he would trust the contact enough that I could assume a more active role, developing a mobilized jaw and some flexion at the poll. While all this made sense and taught the horse to be more rideable, to an outside observer it certainly didn’t look much like the typical image of dressage training.

Along similar lines I was discussing a problem horse with a younger trainer whom I advise. This horse’s concept of dressage had been thoroughly muddled by a stint with an old-fashioned western pleasure trainer and another one with an overzealous jumper rider. In response to her bemoaning the task of undoing this poor horse’s confusions before she could actually begin really training him, I suggested that she needed to think of this part of her work differently. “Imagine that someone offers to give you enough fine Scottish wool to make a beautiful sweater. When the wool arrives, instead of a box of neatly arrayed skeins, you find only a huge bag of tangled, knotted yarn. Obviously no knitting will take place until the yarn is untangled. It may be a tedious process, but it’s necessary and worth the trouble.

One final example: a student with a horse who was less than “ept”–specifically another hot, wired thoroughbred inclined to internalize tension, back off from the contact, and move in a way that would have made your Home Ec teacher proud. Seeking more frequent help that I could provide, the owner enlisted the aid of another instructor—a competent but less experienced one. With the best of intentions and wanting to provide a good, educational experience, this instructor set about providing lessons with lots of relatively difficult exercises–elaborate patterns with leg yieldings, counter canters, and many transitions. They were all legitimate projects and honest to goodness “dressage.” They would have helped a horse with a different sort of temperament, but all they did was fry this particular horse’s already fragile psyche.

My wife refers to this scenario as “death by dressage.” Sometimes undressage or predressage or a teeny, tiny smidgen of dressage is the most appropriate kind. You can always add more later.