Dressage Lesson – 3 weeks to go!

Tracy came out to give me and Gamble a dressage lesson today. It went very well and I learned a couple of things to boot!

1) When making a tight turn, you need to keep the bend to the inside but keep pressure on the neck with the outside rein. The problem is that you don’t want to be hauling him with the inside rein, but more guiding him. And when you guide him, your hands can become significantly displaced from one another, which looks disorganized. So I learned that I can use a combination of my wrist and my elbow to take up the slack when I’m making a tight turn.

2) When practising for the final 10 m. turn at a collected canter, work on making 90 degree turns on a larger square. You need him sloooooowwww to do these but he has to keep the bounce.

3) When slowing down from the medium canter, just “squeeze” him down to the downward transition so that it isn’t too abrupt.

At the end of the lesson, I went through the CIC ** Test A twice and it went well. I have the test fully memorized now, and many of the movements are going very well, particularly at a canter.


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