Honey, you do dressage.

If you have ever ridden in a lesson with me or discussed riding with me and made the claim "I don't do dressage" or "Dressage is boring" then you know what a huge mistake you made at the time. It irks me to the core to hear people complain about doing dressage in their lesson or to talk about how boring dressage is to do. Well wake up call everyone...if you ride then you do dressage!!!

Dressage is the foundation of all riding, in fact the name itself means "the training of the horse." If you don't have dressage then you have none of the basics. 

Let's look at the dressage training scale:

These are not just factors in a dressage training program or test but they are, in fact, factors of every training program in every discipline.

Need some examples?

Say you ride hunter/jumpers and you are on course, first of all there are 8 jumps in your course but the only way to get to those jumps is through flat work....aka dressage. Here is your next dressage factor during your hunter course, you come out of the corner for your diagonal line but realize you have overshot the line to the left. What now? Do you turn around and try again? Do you veer of course in an attempt to straighten out your line? No! Instead you put your right leg on and leg yield over a step or two to straighten out your approach. Plus if you ever plan on riding with George Morris be prepared to do a lot of dressage work during your flat day!

Now let's head over to the jumper ring. You look over the posted course and good gracious there are some tight roll back turns. You get on course and head into your first rollback, you balance your horse on the outside ride and support with the inside leg to execute the turn successfully. Sound familiar? Yep there's that dressage basic of inside leg to outside hand. Now you head up to your last line and realize that you need a bit more stride in between so you put on your leg and stretch the stride out a little longer. Hmmm sounds like a canter lengthening doesn't it? Just like we see starting in First Level Test 1.

Now the english disciplines are not the only ones that utilize the foundation of dressage. The western disciplines are also formed on the basics of dressage. Reining may be the most simple to explain.
In reining you have a pattern, in dressage you have a test. Essentially they are the same thing as they give you movements to go through that you are then scored on for your final score and placing. Some of the reining movements include circles, spins, changes within gaits and flying lead changes. In order to achieve any of these movements one must use the dressage basics of rhythm, balance, connection and impulsion. Ta da reining and dressage.

photo credit: Barbara O'Brien
Moving onto another western sport, let's look at western pleasure. As some of you may be rolling your eyes western pleasure is actually all about collection. In order to get that kind of slow movement and have a horse hold up for more than one show season, you must use collection to build up the hind end. Collection comes from having a rhythm along with connection.
And finally we'll look to the other end of the western spectrum, barrel racing. Goodness gracious even barrel racers use dressage. The amount of balance and connection that those horses need to get around the pattern is amazing and goodness knows if you aren't balanced you won't be making it.

So if you don't think you do dressage think again because honey, you do dressage. Sometimes we need to remember to go back to the basics and tweek things which often times means we need to go back and look at the training pyramid. Now if you want a sport where your type A, perfectionist personality fits right in then please join us in the dressage world! And for those of you who think that all dressage people are boring and nit picky, please enjoy this video.
Proof that dressage can be fun!