If you are able to do a good transition from walk to halt - keeping your horse straight, connected, and up into the bridle, you will have a good basis for all downward transitions.
"I mean no disrespect to L judges, and I hope I can be one someday, but being an L judge doesn't tell me much about your riding, training, or teaching ability; it only tells me about your qualifications as a judge.
Similarly, I see a lot of people with their USDF Bronze medal advertising as instructors or trainers, and that absolutely terrifies me because I have a Bronze and earning it revealed to me how much more I need to learn and just confirms to me how unqualified I would be if I were to teach." ~ Valeska Davis
"The first thing I do is move them off my leg. After the lateral work, nine times out of 10, horses put their head down because their back is coming up. No draw reins, no gimmicks, just the inside leg to the outside rein." ~ Anne Kursinski
"The back is the bridge in the horse, and it can only be there if the hind leg is really working. The rider has to influence the hind legs to build that bridge, otherwise it is a horse in three pieces, back, front and you somewhere in the middle." ~ Francis Verbeek
Your leg aid alone does not produce a leg yield. You need to close the door a bit on the outside shoulder by connecting with your outside rein to get any real hind leg crossing behind.
"I've learned that a saddle that truly fits can give you a totally different horse to ride. I now have more stretch, larger movement, foamier mouth, and more go." ~ Jodi Waldrip
"I like to think of 'sitting on the outside hind' when I ask for the canter... That mental picture makes my body do the right thing." ~ Jessie MacWhistle
When a horse is ridden with a hollow back, his back muscles cannot properly support the rider's weight. This increases the risk for sore back muscles or even kissing spines. It is SO important that we teach them how to use their backs correctly!
Hans Mueller explained the difference between an aid and a cue this way: "Suppose every time your horse picked up a right lead you spit on his right ear. Pretty soon every time you wanted a flying change from left to right you spit on the right ear. Then you do the same for the left lead. Now you start tempe changes, and it works beautifully until you get to one time changes and you run out of spit!"
"Leave the horse totally alone [through a gymnastic line of jumps.] I make sure that I come with the right approach to the first fence, for the rest, I say to the horse, this is totally your job. What I want is fifty – fifty, the same in cross country, my dressage means my transition comes through, and then I say to the horse, now it is your turn, you read the fence, you land properly in the water, you look for the next fence, not me. I guide you, I follow you, I made sure that I close all the doors at the narrow ones and explain to you exactly which way to go, the rest is up to the horse. It must be his responsibility, I don’t want to take it all because it is fifty, fifty." ~ Ingrid Klimke
From Facebook fan Mei Bo-Pa: "My german jumping instructor always said 'the money is in the forward'. Meaning translated ride your horse with a powerful canter to the jump and leave its mouth alone."
Many amateur riders have a tendency to worry about the fact that their aids may not always be 100% correct when they ask their horse to do something. And therefore they are less likely to insist if their horse does not respond correctly. But just remember that horses can be taught to do just about anything from just about any aid.
You can teach your horse to canter on the left lead when you pull on his left ear…. if that's what you want to do.
So while it IS important to make sure your aids are as correct as possible, make sure you DO insist that your horse listen to your aids. Even if you don't ask for canter or leg yield the exact same way his last rider did, your horse CAN figure out what you are asking for, if you motivate him to do so.
Riders who skip the stretching stage of warm up, because they do not believe in stretching horses, are trying to train for collection with horses that most often have tight, tense muscles under the rider that do not swing easily with the horse’s movement. This is a recipe for failure. And any so called "collection" that they achieve will be fake.
"We need the neck to stretch down for the warming up, right in front of the saddle so the back can come up and the hind legs can come under and this way we are able to connect the hind legs." ~ Martina Hannöver
To lengthen your horse's frame, imagine that you are pushing the horse's head and neck away from you with your hands, while riding forward into that connection.
"One of the goals of dressage is to recreate the natural beauty of the horse’s gaits under the rider, so that the horse moves as beautifully under the weight of the rider as he does at liberty. In order to achieve this, the swinging of the horse’s back has to pass through the seat of the rider undiminished. The back has to be able to rise and fall with the same ease, regardless of the rider’s presence. If the rider merely sits passively, his weight alone can sometimes be enough to diminish the freedom of movement of the horse’s back. In these moments, the rider has to enhance the upswing of the horse’s back with an active contraction of his abdominal muscles, which helps the rider’s pelvis to swing more forward-upward, without tilting forward, however." ~ Thomas Ritter
"It's important that the rider doesn't disturb the horse – leaning this way or that – and that is the same with this pulling and pushing. You give a half halt, but half halt is not just pull back and then let go. First of all you have to push the horse into your contact, and while you do a half halt, the horse should not get tighter in the neck and not get slower in the hind legs. Actually we want to engage the hind legs. It's something you have to work on all the time, and get to feel it. When you tell the rider, now this, now that, you are already too late. You have to practice this, so that the riders get to feel it themselves." ~ Monica Theodorescu
Many horses think of walk time as "break" time. If you want to ensure that you get good scores on your walk work, you have to convince your horse otherwise in your daily work.
"You MUST stop looking at the size of the fence and answer the question. Two enormous tables on a bending line may be what you see, but the question could be going away from home and rather than be a bending line, it could be a slice with the terrain being on a slant to benefit the ride. When I stopped looking at how huge everything was and started looking at the essence of the question, it became easy and nothing was big." ~ Mellisa Davis Warden
When you realize that you are meeting a jump on a half stride, it can be challenging to keep a calm, clear head! Give yourself something constructive to think about. Tell yourself to just stay still and keep riding your horse's hind legs all the way until the point of takeoff.
If your horse finds lateral exercises more difficult in one direction vs the other (as many do), then they are not truly straight, or evenly laterally supple.
The horse's jaw unlocks when their back muscles relax and begin to swing with the movement. Attempting to "work" the horse's jaw when it feels tight is addressing the wrong end of the horse.
Circles, serpentines, and basic lateral work offer the best opportunities to work on increasing the horse's understanding and acceptance of the rider's leg aids.
"The legs bring the horse to the seat, and the seat brings the horse to the hands. When the teacher says 'shorten the reins' it needs to be translated into: 'engage the hind legs, sit on them, and then take the slack out of the reins', because if you shorten the reins from front to back, the horse will only resist." ~ Thomas Ritter
"I've always been a stickler on saddles. I see a lot of saddles that sit on the side of the horse's back, and if you think about it you are fighting against the movement in one direction or the other, if the saddle doesn’t fit in the middle. I think it's been proven by the Brits with a lot of research, that the saddle and the way it sits can make the difference between an 8, an 8.5 and a 9. I'm a stickler about that for sure. AND not riding with strength." ~ Debbie McDonald
The stirrup bar placement on your saddle can make or break your position when riding. Make sure you choose a saddle that will allow you to be in balance.
For a forward response, the rider should be using the lower leg as an aid - mainly the inner calf. For collecting, a half halt, or a downward transition, the rider should wrap the whole leg lightly around the horse, thigh through calf evenly - as if giving the horse a hug with their legs as they use their seat to perform the transition. This encourages the horse to correctly engage the hind legs and lift the back in the downward transition.
If you are too much "on guard" and ready for any possible shenanigans from your horse when riding, you might actually cause them. Your horse will feel your state of tension, and feed off of you.
"Ride all resistances forward and avoid halting instead ride a circle and encourage the neck to be looser and round until you have the horse's attention." ~ Hubertus Schmidt
"Until the horse comes free in the shoulder, in the shoulder in, he will not come free in the shoulder, in the half pass. Mostly, "more forward" develops the freedom in the shoulder, so often refresh the gait." ~ Hubertus Schmidt
