Back To Basics

I know it's been awhile since I've posted anything but today had a conversation with a student that got me inspired to do some writing.  First of all, a quick update on our spring/summer season for our friends out there, this season has been relatively quiet but we did attend the Kelowna Spring Show and the Edmonton Amberlea Spring Show, Landino, Sietske and Diamond Gem each earned scores into the 70s and championships respectively at their level, we had planned on attending the Calgary show in June but due to the flooding on the roads had to cancel our trip so will be attending the Alberta Provincials there shortly instead:)  Anyhow, getting on with the training portion of this post, today I had a conversation with one of my students about basics versus tricks which made me want to do some writing.  I think that there is such a gap with a lot of dressage riders in the actual understanding of how the basics affect everything, I think there are a lot of people in the sport who say the "right" things verbatim because they've heard those things repeated over and over again but rarely do I actually see someone who truly applies those things correctly to their training sessions which tells me that the concept is actually not fully understood so much as it is repeated verbally.  As a trainer, I know without any doubt that any issues with my horses are always related to a hole in the basics, I am always confident in that belief, and fixing those holes is always my number one focus in training, that being said I'm not saying it's easy, just because one is a trainer doesn't mean we don't struggle with the basics as well, every rider and every horse has their difficulties, but it does mean I have a large toolbox to help fix those holes and it also means I have understanding and complete confidence in what it is I need to fix.  As a coach, I can tell quite a bit about a student by how they come into a lesson, when a student comes in and you ask them to tell you about their horse there are usually three types of responses, the ones who openly say they don't know much and will leave it up to you to tell them what to do, the ones who may not be completely confident in their assessment of themselves but know they need to correct their basics (i.e the ones who come in saying they struggle with contact or bend) and the third type who come in saying they want to work on a specific movement, half pass, flying changes etc.  The third type is always the one that scares me the most as a coach, mainly because they are often looking for a quick fix for one of the tricks and I am not someone who can give a quick fix and ignore a hole in the basics when I see one and sometimes it is hard to get these students to wrap their head around the idea that they need to fix a very basic thing (something they thought they already had down) in order to improve their work beyond that, I can honestly say that I personally have never walked into a lesson or clinic and asked the coach/trainer to work on a specific movement.  I always hear the word "exercise" in dressage, people want exercises to improve things, they want drills to go through and repeat over and over again, something that they can practice through routine but the thing is there are no magic exercises in this sport and in reality the exercises actually don't matter much at all, it's how you ride the exercise that matters.  There are thousands of exercises and drills that we can put our horses through but none of those matter if we aren't working the horse correctly through the body while doing those exercises, if we don't have a horse using itself correctly while doing an exercise we are simply putting miles on the body, this is no different for humans, any coach, trainer etc in any sport will tell you that it doesn't matter what exercise you do, if you do it in a way that isn't productive for your body then it's not only a waste of time but often times actually counterproductive.  For example, often people will come to me and ask me for an exercise to improve the bend in their half passes and they seem to be looking for a magic fix for the "half pass problem" but what they are failing to realize is that if there is a problem in the half pass, there is a bend problem in general going on, so drilling the half pass again and again, no matter how you mix it up, is likely useless, I can certainly come up with ways to practice a half pass but in all honesty I can be of much more help "fixing the half pass" by working on basic suppleness on a circle or in riding proper bend through a corner than in actually fixing the half pass.  When that basic suppleness is corrected, all of a sudden the half pass more or less fixes itself (and this applies to any movements, flying changes, pirouettes etc. the problem is never in the movement it is in an element of the basic training, of course we have to ride movements at some point because that's how we check in with our training but we can't fix movements by riding movements, if I school a movement and notice the movement doesn't work as I'd like it to then I have an answer as to whether or not there is a hole in the basics, the next step is to isolate where the problem area is, for example if my horse falls through my inside leg in a half pass then I have the answer that I don't have the horse around my inside leg well enough, the answer is not to keep working at that half pass but to go back and work on keeping the horse better around the inside leg and that is something that can be achieved best by going right back to the basic training scale element of suppleness, so the long and the short of it is don't fix movements, fix basics!