Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

Ginger said:

> You might just as well have called me a moron and been done with it!
> Since you have posted your response publicly, I will do the same.
> Disagreeing with me is one thing but telling me that I am the only
> one in this world that thinks the way I do is obviously incorrect
> and egotistical.
I did not tell her that she was the only one who thought that way, just
that she would be the virtually alone among those who do dressage and
pointed out that the concept (that one introduces the collected trot and
canter before the collected walk) is so widely accepted in the dressage
world that it is coded in dressage tests in such a way that if one takes
the general rule of thumb of one year per level, that the collected trot
and canter are introduced two years before the collected walk.

And since I posted it publically (rather than to her personally), I
wasn't addressing my remarks to her at all, but rather advising anybody
who doesn't know very much about dressage that they would do well to
hold off on introducing the collected walk until after the horse is
pretty well established in the other collected gaits.

Because introducing the collected walk too soon risks ruining the
horse's walk (a very important gait for an endurance horse--which is why
Heidi says she doesn't introduce the collected walk at all--see, I did
read the other posts).

All of this assumes that we are all defining collection in the same way.

However, I suspect that we are not, not only because Ginger thinks that
collection is about setting a horse's head (not how _I_ define
collection), and because Chris is teaching it to her green horse (and
since the collection that I am talking about is at the pinnacle of the
dressage training scale pyramid
http://www.artofriding.com/articles/trainingscale.html it is hardly an
exercise for a green horse)...so we are probably talking about something
different but because "collection" is probably one of the most
over(ab)used terms in the horse world.

Which is why _I_ introduced the topic of defining collection.  There is
absolutely no point in talking about how and to what extent we want to
achieve collection unless we all agree on the definition of the word.

However, I will stand by my original statement.  IF we are defining
collection the way that I defined collection in my original post, i.e.
in the dressage sense of "true" collection, then neither the rider nor
the horse are likely to be well served by introducing it at the walk
first. If other people are defining it in some other way (I KNOW the
Western Pleasure people do), then we need to know that before we can
talk about it (and start disagreeing about it :)).

Does this mean that I use some cast in stone "training scale" for every
horse that I ride?  No, a perfect example of this was an ex-driving
horse that I wanted to retrain to self carriage under saddle.  After a
brief stint of trying to go back to the basics of "classsical" dressage
training, and discovering that the horse just didn't get it.  I found
that the only way I could get the horse to round his back was to shorten
his stride and start with a double bridle, collection, and the
half-pass, the horse couldn't do a nicely rounded working walk to save
his life (at least not until we had spent a lot of time building his
back and underline muscles for carrying a rider by doing lots of
collection first...go figure).  And we did pretty much all of this work
at the walk and the trot (since the horse was an Orlov Trotter, any
meaningful canter work was a long time in coming:)). However, this
doesn't mean that I suggest people start their horses under saddle in a
double bridle and go straight to asking for a collected walk (despite
the fact that this is what I did with this particular horse).

kat
Orange County, Calif.

With respect to my stating that I suspect that Ginger is alone in
thinking that it is best to start with the most difficult lesson first
(she said: "That is the most difficult place to start but it's also the
best place to start."), I am perfectly willing to be corrected on that.
If there is somebody else out there who thinks that the best way to
train horses is to start with the hardest lessons and work your way up
to the easy ones, I will happily concede that I was mistaken.



=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Ridecamp is a service of Endurance Net, http://www.endurance.net.
Information, Policy, Disclaimer: http://www.endurance.net/Ridecamp
Subscribe/Unsubscribe http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/logon.asp

Ride Long and Ride Safe!!

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=