STC Dressage

Riding the Half-pass

One of the movements I’ve seen people have the most trouble with over the years is the half pass. It’s almost always one of two reasons why. Either they don’t have enough bend, or they aren’t going enough sideways. Fortunately, both problems have a similar fix.

I always go back to the travers down the long side first. Focus on keeping the head pointed straight down the track, and the hands pointed straight down the track as well on either side of the neck. A common fault here is to try to pull on the inside rein to create the bend. But the bend does not come from pulling on the reins, it comes from controlling the shoulder as you push the haunches in. (Controlling the shoulders, by the way, comes from all that wonderful work in shoulder in and renvers during Second Level!)

Be sure you can create that position, but then take the leg OFF! The horse must be able to continue to do it without you nagging at them every stride to maintain the position! This goes back to all the posts I’ve written about riding with clarity, and a lack of good basics will be obvious here. When they can maintain the position without you pushing them every stride, then you can ride forward towards both reins down the long side, and that’s where you’ll start to develop more reach and expression.

Now you’re ready to go back to the half pass. And here’s where the fix comes in. Ride it just like you were the travers. If you can ride a travers in good balance all the way down the long side, you can ride a half pass all the way across the arena in the exact. same. way.

Don’t worry about pushing them sideways off the rail right away. That’s what gets you into trouble and causes you to lose both bend and forward energy right from the start. Focus first on pointing the head on the line across the diagonal, and make sure your hands stay pointed straight on that line as well on either side of the neck. Control the shoulder, then ask for travers. Once they are in position, take the leg OFF just like in the travers down the long side, and then ride forward towards both reins along that line.

Now at first, yes, the haunches will be a bit behind the first few strides off the rail. Don’t worry about that. As you polish it up and the horse gets better in the balance and responses, you’ll be able to bring them right along from the start in no time. But the idea remains the same, point the head on the line, then ride forward in travers towards it. As the horse gets stronger and better balanced, you can start aiming your line closer to you down that opposite long side to make the half pass steeper.

Sean Cunningham – STC Dressage Inc. – Ocala, FL
www.stcdressage.com 815-861-3005

Riding With Clarity

If you're wondering what Van Gogh's The Starry Night has to do with riding, I'm about to make it clear to you.

Riding with clarity is one of the most important concepts in any of the disciplines. It doesn't matter if you're into dressage, hunter/jumpers, reining, barrel racing, or even just pleasure riding. I would dare say it's probably about the most important concept to grasp if you truly want to progress in your riding.

Imagine you are an art teacher with a class full of students. You want them to recreate Van Gogh’s The Starry Night.

Only, you don’t tell them that.

All you tell them to do is paint a picture. What do you think your chances are of any of those students painting Starry Night?

Once in a great while, you may get lucky and one will do it, but when you assign them the next task in the same manner, they’re still sure to fail. If you want the class to paint The Starry Night, you have to tell them to paint The Starry Night.

It’s the same with your horse. They’re not a mind reader any more than the art students. If you give them no direction, they have no idea what you want, and thus can’t, and won’t, do anything you want. Sure, they might get lucky occasionally and do the right thing, but good luck getting them to repeat it.

If you want them to listen to the leg, you have to use it in such a way that you teach them it means something, every single time. Squeeze, reaction, release. That’s how you maintain a quiet leg aid.

If you want them to respond to the rein aids, you have to make sure you use them in the same way each time. And when you do use them, you get the intended response, and then immediately give back.

These things happen by getting involved in the ride. By thinking about what you're doing, and making sure when you ask a question, you get an answer. That's what riding with clarity means. It's important to note, that I don't mean to ride like a dictator. I don't mean to ride with force. You should play with your horse and have fun with them!

So next time you climb on, I challenge you to think about how you are riding. Are you just bumping and thumping along, and then complaining that your horse doesn't listen to you? Or are you making sure to ask your horse questions he can answer, and then immediately rewarding the response?

Sean Cunningham – STC Dressage Inc. – Ocala, FL
www.stcdressage.com 815-861-3005

Okra... Can you believe he's just 3 and only under saddle about 9 weeks ? Such a good boy!

He's looking for his new partner, DM me for info about him!

Decided to pull one out of the archives here because I still really believe in this!

Learning To Relate.

I have a regular student who is an art professor. It would be fair to say that the concept of combining colors to produce other colors is one she understands quite thoroughly. How does this relate to dressage?

We've been making great progress recently in her learning the different tools she needs to ride her horse well. However, putting them together at the beginning of a ride is something that has still been a bit of a struggle.

So in a recent lesson, I asked her, in the most basic kindergarten concepts, how do you make the color purple? Simple, you combine red and blue. So then I asked her, if you add yellow and brown together, wil you get purple? No. How about green and black? Nope, still not gonna happen.

So I said, you're out here riding around looking for purple, but instead of mixing red and blue together, you're throwing a little yellow in here, a little brown in there, and then wondering why purple isn't happening. I continued to explain, you know how to make purple. We've done it together before. So instead of just randomly throwing things together, go through your mental checklist of what needs to happen to get purple.

That did it. She went back out, went through the proper steps, and within a couple minutes the horse was going beautifully. She put red and blue together and got purple, and almost entirely on her own without me saying much more.

All it took was me showing her how to apply what she already knew to what she was trying to do by relating it to a concept that she knows upside down, backwards, inside and out.

There is no better way to learn a new concept than by relating it to one you already know, and we are all professionals and experts in one field or another. This is how I try to teach at home, and why I try to get a brief summary of the riders beforehand when I teach a clinic, so that I can learn how to explain things in a way that relates to what they already know.

Sean Cunningham - STC Dressage Inc. - Ocala, FL
815-861-3005

Fixing a lateral walk

While it does at least partly depend on why your horse’s walk is lateral, it many cases the process to fix it isn’t that difficult. But it does take one thing that may not be common to hear; you have to work on it. A lot.

There are plenty of horses out there that just have a natural lateral tendency in the walk. They tend to be a bit more challenging to fix. Far more that I’ve seen are a result of training. They’re braced, hurrying, held too tight/short in the neck, etc. All of them can benefit from this work though, and regain a more regular rhythm.

I start in the halt. The horse should be able to stand quietly, on the bit, without pulling or fussing around. I don’t worry if they move around a little bit. Some will even try to back up, and I just let them. The problems come in when you try to kick them back up to the contact to stand still. That’s when they’re likely to feel trapped and may start to rear. But if you just stay quietly connected, they’ll eventually just relax and stand quietly.

From there, I want them to take just a single step forward. However, the first response must not be to grab the bit. They should take that step forward in a relaxed manner. Once I can get the single step, we take more steps. But they must be very short, slow steps, feeling each individual foot step. The goal is to prevent the big, lurching steps that cause the horse to grab the bit away from you.

As you get those steps, you can allow the walk to come more forward, but still control the tempo of it. Keep it a bit on the slow side and feel each individual footstep touch the ground. While you’ll see a big change usually in only about a week, you should continue to think about it during every warm up and walk break. Always come back to the halt first if you have to, and build up from there.

The reason this works is it removes the tension and hurriedness from the walk, and creates more acceptance of and relaxation to the aids. As the horse is more relaxed, the rhythm becomes pure again.

Sean Cunningham – STC Dressage Inc. – Ocala, FL
815-861-3005

It all starts on the ground

Good basics are something I spend a lot of time preaching about. I tell people all the time, even with my FEI horses, I’m working the basics 80% of the time. That doesn’t just go for under saddle work though. It applies to ground work too.

That’s right, ground work. I’m a huge believer in it, and spend a lot of time with my horses on it. It’s the reason I could always easily lead horses two at a time to and from turnout, It’s the reason why all of my horses can self-load on a trailer with the rope over their neck. It’s the reason why they all end up pretty well behaved when they go places.

Good ground work doesn’t only apply to stuff on the ground either. It absolutely transfers to the under-saddle work as well, and it goes both ways. If they’re respectful of boundaries on the ground, they likely will also accept them under saddle. If instead they’re acting a fool on the ground, they probably will under saddle too.

I have a series of questions that I ask them including being able to walk and trot forward next to me, stop, turn, back up, and more. And just because they do it for me today, doesn’t mean they’ll do it tomorrow for someone else, especially if they don’t stay in practice for it.

It’s never a bad thing to spend time regularly re-establishing the basics of ground work just like you would the basics under saddle. Any horse will either progress or regress to the level of the person working with them, and rather quickly at that. So if you don’t have much experience working with them on the ground, be sure to enlist the help of a reputable trainer who can help you learn!

Sean Cunningham STC Dressage Inc. Ocala, FL
www.stcdressage.com 815-861-3005

Perfection is the enemy of progress

In our quest for the ever-elusive “perfect” 100% score in dressage, it is no surprise that we are always looking at the quality of the movements we’re doing. For me, this comes with a bit of a caveat though. A common fault I see is trying to achieve that high quality way too soon. As I’ve said before, this doesn’t mean you don’t ever challenge your horse. They’ll never get stronger and better if you don’t. It’s how you challenge them that makes the difference.

For example, I’d rather have a horse sort of fall over the shoulder a little bit when they first start learning how to go sideways. This way, they learn they can go sideways quite easily, and it’s a fairly simple thing to then improve the balance of it as they willingly accept the aid to go sideways. Conversely, if we try to make the balance perfect right away, we often end up holding more tightly and aiding more strongly than we’d like to to support that balance. This leads to tension and resistance in the horse, which is much more difficult to overcome.

Of course, all this must be taken into perspective. A horse that’s naturally very well balanced will need much less of this than one who struggles to trot more than 3 steps without tripping over itself. Also the more advanced a horse is, the less new things will throw it out of balance as they learn.

The most important thing, as you will hear me say over and over again, is to get the horse to willingly buy in to what you’re trying to teach them. The more often you can get a willing response to a smaller amount of progress, the faster that progress will actually become towards that high-quality work we’re seeking.

Sean Cunningham – STC Dressage Inc. – Ocala, FL
www.stcdressage.com 815-861-3005

Dressage is a fact finding mission

The finished product of good dressage is always a pleasure to watch. Smooth, balanced lateral work. Active, correct piaffe. Dead straight tempis. Even at the lower levels, I always take note of good riding at the shows, and will stop to watch. I almost enjoy watching the warm-up more than the show ring too. It’s fun to watch the finished product, don’t get me wrong, but I love watching how other riders prepare for the test. It’s where you really separate out the good riders from the lucky riders.

Are they just drilling the same movement over and over, hoping it gets magically better before they go in? Or are they methodically working through the issues that arise, finding ways to get the horse more connected to them? Are they hyper-focused on the people that might be watching, appearing to try to show off? Or are they just minding their own business, calmly riding around in whatever shape and balance the horse needs in that moment?

This goes for the work at home too, and even more so there. It’s not enough to just ride through the movements looking for repetition to make it better. You have to go deeper, and uncover the reason WHY the movement isn’t working. Maybe they need to be higher in the frame, maybe lower. Maybe they need a walk break, maybe they need to be pushed through a little. Maybe they need their hocks injected, maybe they’re just having a bad day.

The point is, we must never get so caught up in what’s not working that we ignore why it isn’t. And we must never be afraid to try different things in our quest to uncover it, even if it may seem a bit unconventional or doesn’t exactly follow the way the book says it should be. Good dressage is a fact finding mission, not a grandstanding opportunity. The goal is to spend our time uncovering why things aren’t working, and then finding ways to fix them.

Sean Cunningham – STC Dressage Inc. – Ocala, FL
www.stcdressage.com 815-861-3005

I hope you make mistakes when you ride

Yes, you read that right. I want you to mess up. A lot. There’s just one requirement. You have to mess up differently each time. That’s all I ask.

My number one goal for any of my students is that they learn to think on their own more. I’m not always going to be in their ear every ride. I can’t be in their ear in the show ring. If they can’t get in there and problem-solve, things are going to fall apart pretty quickly the minute I’m not there. If a student asks me if they should wait to ride a movement at home when they’ve been struggling with it, my answer is almost always no! Go ride it! Try to feel what we’ve been working on and see if you can correct it!

Is it possible you’ll go try to ride a line of tempi changes and blow them all? Yes, absolutely. Don’t let that stop you from trying! You don’t need your coach there to try! Here’s what your coach should do; when you go for your next lesson and you talk about what happened, they should work through the problem with you, help you figure out where it went wrong, and then send you off to try again until your next lesson. THAT’S a valuable coach. The one who tells you not to try anything unless you’re in a lesson or you’ll mess it all up? Get rid of them. I don’t care who they are. They’re not teaching you anything. (The exception of course being in matters of safety. For example, if you and your horse have never jumped higher than the .8s, you probably shouldn’t go home and try to jump 1.45…)

You’ll never learn how to ride that line of tempis properly on your own if you never go ride them on your own and make mistakes! Sometimes you’re going to over-correct. Sometimes you’ll under-correct. Sometimes you won’t even know what the heck is going on and it’s just a beautiful disaster. But the more you get out there and try, the faster you’ll get past all that and will have a feel for when it’s good, and how to get back there when it starts going wrong.

Sean Cunningham – STC Dressage Inc. – Ocala, FL
www.stcdressage.com 815-861-3005

How to sit better on your horse. (Hint, it’s not by working on your position!)

I can’t count the number of times that I’ve had a student try to say they “want to work on my seat” or “want to work on my legs” or whatever. My reply, well why is your leg creeping up in the first place? Why are you leaning to the side in the first place? Barring some type of physical issue like scoliosis or something that they have no control over, I can point, nearly without fail, to the reason being that the horse isn’t listening to the aid being applied.

Horse doesn’t go forward? Both legs squeeze harder trying to urge it on, drawing the legs up. As the legs draw up, they get tense. That translates to tense hips, tense back, your horse’s back getting tense and them bracing against the hand more. Then they slow down, and you squeeze even more with the leg.

Horse won’t go sideways? The leg squeezes and squeezes, trying to push the horse over every step. This draws the leg up, and the shoulder down, which translates to tight legs and hips again, sitting crooked in the saddle, the horse getting crooked underneath you. They can’t go sideways very well like that, so you squeeze even more.

Make sense yet? Your position isn’t the problem! When you apply leg, and the horse immediately moves forward from it, then you can relax the leg and it will quite naturally hang down underneath you in a more or less correct way. Then the hips stay loose, your back stays loose, your horse’s back stays loose…

It's the same with going sideways. When you can just give the horse one quick aid, which it responds to and starts moving sideways, and then you take the aid away and sit quietly, you’ll be amazed at how much better your horse keeps moving sideways, and you’ll sit more or less correctly.

Does that mean that we should never think about our position? Of course not. There will still be little tweaks here and there to make. Good equitation is always important and should be focused on. But it’s not nearly as big of a mountain to traverse as you think it is. It’s more like an ant hill that is easily knocked down with the help of a skilled coach.

Sean Cunningham – STC Dressage Inc. – Ocala, FL
www.stcdressage.com 815-861-3005

Practice your tests

There’s a camp of people out there who believe you shouldn’t practice your dressage test too often. The horse will learn it and start to anticipate it they say, and will do the movements before you ask. I couldn’t disagree more. First, if you actually have your horse in tune with you, they’ll wait. Second, things happen much differently in a test than they do in practice.

Let’s look at something as simple as a transition. In schooling, we can take our time, soften them if necessary, prepare, set them up, and then ask for the transition when it feels good. When we’re training, that’s how we should do it most of the time to set them up for success. But in the show ring, you don’t get that luxury. You must do the transition right at the letter.

If you don’t spend any time practicing doing a transition at the letter at home, when you go to do it at a show it’s rare that it will happen at the letter and/or in a balanced way. I see way more transitions happen late than early, but the fewest that happen right at the letter where they’re supposed to. And even fewer that are done in a good balance.

In every single test, the quality of the transition is a major part of the score for each movement, if not its own separate score entirely. There are at least 6 or 7 transitions in every test. That’s a lot of points to be throwing away, and it happens ALL THE TIME!! By practicing your test regularly, you get a feel for when you need to actually set up for every transition based on where your horse is in their training at any given time. Then, when it’s show time, you know exactly how to ride into each one of them to get it in balance, and right at the letter, which will only help those scores start climbing.

Sean Cunningham – STC Dressage Inc. – Ocala, FL
www.stcdressage.com 815-861-3005

Be careful with complacency

One of the things that comes up a lot in lessons, and again that I’ve had lengthy discussions about with my own coach David, is being careful not to get complacent when your horse is being good. Especially when you’ve just worked through a potentially difficult spot or have finally gotten them to respond to an aid, the instinct is to back off and just leave them alone and enjoy the ride. And while that may be true right in the moment where you finally get that response, you need to get back to asking questions again rather quickly.

The reason being, once they’ve accepted the aid and given a response, it’s fresh in their mind. So, while they’re already in that relaxed space where they’ve responded to the aid, if you then ask another question, you’ll be able to do it with a much softer aid. Because they’re already in that accepting space, they’re far more likely to answer that softer aid in the correct way, which you can then praise them for.

Conversely, what I see many people do is just go dead quiet in that accepting space and give the horse no direction at all. Before you know it, the horse has come away from them and they have to start all over with stronger aids. That, or the aids have simply gone ineffective again and get either no response or the completely wrong one.

We certainly don’t want to become overly busy or turn into a crutch for our horse to lean on. But also need to be sure we don’t get complacent in the good moments, or we end up only using our aids in the struggling moments. If the only time they feel any direction from you is with strong aids when they’re coming against you, that’s a recipe for a resistant horse who’s more likely to fight your aids than accept them.

Sean Cunningham – STC Dressage Inc. – Ocala, FL
www.stcdressage.com 815-861-3005