(“If you ain’t got that, you got squat.”)

At a recent clinic weekend I met a contingent of riders trying to solve the mysteries of training for the FEI levels. They had varying backgrounds and weren’t all products of the same influences, but they seemed to have one problem in common. Their horses would fall into one cul de sac or other in the pirouettes or the tempis or the piaffe/passage work, and they would repeatedly head butt their way through the same exercise time after time, hoping against hope to finally “get it right.”

On advice, one rider was trying to solve his flying change issues with the Evermore Forward solution—despite the fact that it made him increasingly flat, stiffer, and more against the hand. Another wondered how to deal with her horse who dropped his back in the piaffe and got stuck, unwilling to move forward. A third’s horse wheeled through the canter pirouettes and routinely fell on his inside shoulder. Shades of that famous Einstein/Franklin/Twain/Somebody line about the definition of insanity.

In each case, the real solution was to step back and examine whether the horses (and riders) possessed an understanding of the basic relationships these exotic movements are built upon. And invariably it seemed they were following the kind of “band aid” solutions you’re given as a last resort two days before a show when things just aren’t working. Survival skills.

But this was January up North–months before the ground would thaw and the ensuing Mud Season would give way to show season. A time, if there ever was one, to solve problems, not cover them up.

How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat? How can you slow and balance your horse’s canter if he’s not in front of your leg? How can you expect to shift his weight back if his top line is rigid and unyielding laterally? How can you make fluid passage/piaffe/passage transitions if he doesn’t recognize it’s all just trotting, and he isn’t as on the aids and as adjustable as anywhere else on the trot continuum?

As Robert Dover once so succinctly (and nasally) put it, “In dressage, People, adjustability is everything!” As he might have added, “If you ain’t got that, you got squat.”

This speaks to the difference between simply attempting to practice the finished product as opposed to building into the horse the likelihood that the aids you ultimately use will produce the right result. In other words, making the horse come through.

Some of the best advice I ever heard on this topic came from Kyra Kyrklund: (I paraphrase) When you run into an impenetrable resistance, you have three ways to find the key. While working to soften him, you can make his outline higher or lower, longer or shorter, or you can ride him faster or slower. Somewhere among those combinations, you can persuade him to “give” and then extrapolate that feeling to the tempo and shape you ultimately desire.

This way might not satisfy a conquest-oriented ego (Smash mouth football addicts, please apply your tastes to another equine discipline), but it’s a satisfying and almost always successful way to unravel these sorts of problems.