Dressage Anyone?

Dressage Anyone?

Ever wonder how well your foundation training is doing?

In my book, if you can accurately control the five basic body parts of a horse, your horse has good foundation.

How can you determine if you have a good foundation … Dressage anyone?

Winning in Dressage = Good Foundation Training

A good trainer friend of mine named Claudia is a lady from Germany who is a lifetime horsemanship professional. She’s been teaching for some time now. While watching me give one of my own horses a workout one day, she approached and asked if I would be interested in competing in Western Dressage? At the time, I knew very little about the Dressage competition world. Assuming I would probably suck at it, I politely dismissed the idea.

Claudia was persistent however, and finally convinced me to enter an upcoming competition event.

So…once we began practicing, I quickly realized that Dressage was really nothing more than basic horsemanship. That is, being able to control the horses main body parts such as the, pole, neck, shoulders, barrel and hind quarters.

Controlling these body parts is one of my primary objectives in my basic horsemanship foundation training program. This, is what Claudia saw in my workout!

Let’s do it!

At Claudia’s direction, I entered one of my horses (Montana) in a Level 2 Western Dressage class. Again, not fully understanding some technical terms or what a judge would be looking for, I just did what Claudia told me to do..

Well … we came away with a very good score from the judge (67.7) and a Blue Ribbon!

The moral of this story is…. If you have a well broke horse, and you are able to independently control your horse’s main body parts, you will be amazed at the things you can accomplish!

Now if I can just get the salute to the judge right!!