09/15/2026
Even if you do not ride dressage, the info applies to ALL horses.
This before and after shows perfectly what my problem with the modern horse education is.
Today I watched some sample lessons by a young, successful dressage coach. The pair he coached was a young woman and her four years old horse.
The horse had already won (!) dressage tests this year and was supposed to start in a higher class coming spring. I leave that without comment for the moment.
At the start of the lesson, the horse moved as a four year old horse should move under the rider: open poll, nose forward. You could tell that the horse wasn’t balanced yet, but it was extremely well behaved and really tried its best. I thought, what a gem of a horse.
The coach worked on forward with the pair. The task was to give a driving aid with both legs and thus drive the horse to the hand. The first few times, this looked successful. But as the lesson went on, and the coach asked for the same thing again, and again, the horse got more and more tired and behind the vertical. The rider was instructed to have more contact on the outside rein and drive the horse with the inside leg to the outside rein.
As the horse got more and more tight in the neck, I really wanted to tell the coach about the anatomy of the cervical spine, the intervertebral foramen, that building the sling takes time and more than just sending a horse into a fast trot, that a four year old needs plenty of breaks and that it starts to get heavy on the hand because it’s tired. Then you shouldn’t drive more, but let it rest, and maybe call it a day. There was no work in walk, by the way, only trot and canter. Walk was only used three times for less than a minute to let the horse rest.
As the horse’s neck got shorter and shorter during the lesson, it became stiffer in the shoulder, and the front legs pushed further under the body. I had the impression the rider had to use more and more leg aid, although the coach talked about “impulse riding”. That’s not what I saw. I saw a horse pushing itself more and more on the forehand instead of getting lighter.
I don’t agree with the idea that it’s normal that the young horse is behind the vertical. To me, this means that the horse is not strong enough to carry the rider, in which case we need to go back to groundwork and longing, or keep riding sessions short on a long rein. Yes, of course horses come behind the vertical. But it shouldn’t be for long and it shouldn’t be accepted as a feature of a young horse. And you probably need to make your reins a lot longer.
I noticed the horse’s crookedness and lack of balance. It tight roped behind and went wide in front. There was no correct power transmission from behind to front (twisting hocks and fetlocks), and this is the reason why, in my opinion, it doesn’t make sense to send a crooked young horse forward in the hope it will straighten itself out.
Why not do side movements with the young horse in walk and build coordination, strength and balance that way?
Or even better, do most of the work on the ground at that age still, and have only an occasional short ride?
We know so much nowadays about equine anatomy. Why not finally take that into account and change the modern education system?
I really don’t get it.
Nobody wants to start buying arthritis supplements when the horse is 8. So why do we train in a way that almost makes sure of that?
To me, the horse looked very narrow in the rib cage still, as if it hadn’t stopped growing (which it quite certainly hadn’t). Otherwise it was a fantastic horse with good gaits, and probably wasn’t cheap!
Why not wait a little and spend some time doing groundwork, longe work, work in hand, liberty, and focus on riding sessions like these a bit later? And then work on building self-carriage, instead of rushing the horse into your rein?
Because, with all due respect, if this is your before and after, something is not ok!
P.S.: These are AI drawings from screenshots I took. I didn’t look for the best and the worst moment, I just stopped the video randomly in the beginning and in the towards the end. I used AI because I wanted to anonymize the human and horse, but keep the exact posture. I can't draw that well.
P.P.S.: I just wanted to mention that the rider seemed like a very nice, talented young woman who probably only wants the best for her horse. I feel like I would love to send her some classical dressage books so she can make informed choices!
