It is important your horse understands the difference between asking for flexion of the neck, and asking for direction to turn inside. To practice this, you can ride squares in walk, trot and finally canter in which you try to turn on every corner as quickly as possible to the new side of your square. Make sure you ask your horse to come inside by taking your hand a little bit to the inside and give a half hold in the direction you want to go, pretend like you pull a person softly on a sleeve to ask them to go a certain way. When you want to ask for flexion of the head to the inside but don't want to turn, make sure you use a different aid by opening your hand a little of the neck, but then ask flexion with a steady hand at that spot without moving it by doing a half hold squeezing the rein on that spot.

Asking for flexion of the poll.

If your horse is truely submissive, it is possible to ask for flexion of the poll only, while keeping the neck straigt. The head of the horse kan bend to one side without flexion of the complete neck, but he can only do this if he relaxes his jaw. When it is absolutely perfect, you not only see more of the inside eye and the nose and less of the jaw, but also you can see the ligament over the neck flipping from one side to the other over the vertebrae.

Leg yielding

A lot of times legyielding does not go well because the horse already wants to go the the side himself. So make it a habit to always first go straight down the centerline, and only when your horse stays absolutely straigt without your hand- or legaids, you start to yield. Immediately when the horse falls to the side over the outside shoulder, you go straight again, balance him again, and start to yield again. This way you teach the horse to think straight and keep in balance, while legyielding.

To solve a problem with riding you have to:

1. Analyse the problem, what happens exactly?

2. What do you need to solve it?

3. Train each of these things separately until you control each of them, before you put them together.

Training without force.

 When you would like your horse to use it's hindquarters better, you simply can attach an elastic bandage around the hindquarters, and attach it to a sursingle or a saddle, and lunge the horse with it. It will trigger the horse to use its hindlegs better without forcing it. Once the horse knows this on the lungeline you can as well ride with the bandage. Without using any force the horse will be taught to be more aware of his hindquarters and use his hindlegs better, little by little, day by day.

When do you put a blanket on a horse?

In our strange summer weather it is sometimes hard to decide whether to put on a blanket or not after training or rinsing. At our stable we have the rule "when you see steam, a blanket is needed". If the difference in temperature between the body temperature of the horse and the outside temperature is too large, you will see steam coming of the body. This means the horse is cooling down too fast and so you put on a (fleece) blanket to prevent stiffness of sickness.

When you do not see steam, this means the temperature is warm enough and you can put the horse back without a blanket. However, do take off the extra water by wiping the horse, because otherwise the horse might develop socalled "rainrot", which is a bad skin condition.

Variation in training is riding with your mind

To keep dressage interesting for a horse, it is necessary to have some variation in training. Everybody seems to know that and often people think they do a good job, because e.g. they lunge twice a week, go to the forest once a week, and ride dressage four times a week. Variation enough, or not??

Variation has to be more than that. You have to make sure you don't make the dressage training boring because you always follow the same patterns, e.g. you start with the walk, then trot, then do the canterwork. Try to change little things every time to keep the work interesting for the horse. For example, you could start with canter after walk warming up with a more experienced horse one day, or if you have the horse that already wants to start cantering as soon as you stop to rise in trot, do sitting trot and rising trot every few steps until your horse does not expect canter anymore and then start to canter.

In the side-gaits you don't just train what is asked for in tests, but think of new ways to ride these, different places, or don't stop where you would normally do so. In shoulder-in you could start on the track and then go on in shoulder in on the circle B - E, or in half pass you could go to the track but then go on in renvers (travers to the outside) through the corner, and you can think of many more ways to change the normal patterns, just be inventive!

Placing the shoulders of the horse

For the training of the horse and especially to make the horse straight, it is very important you get control where the shoulders of the horse are compared to the rest of its body.

Try in your training to ride a big circle with outside flexion. When you ask for more and more outside flexion, you will feel there comes a point at which the horse will shift the weight more to the inside and place his shoulders more to the inside of the circle (for the riders this feels like the horse is falling inward). Try this in walk, trot and canter. This way you can teach the horse to shift his weight and shoulders on a half halt. You start by asking more flexion to the outside (depending on how the horse reacts, you need to feel the response of shifting the weight inward) and then gradually you try to make these aids smaller and smaller, until your horse reacts on a half halt with two hands to the inside by shifting his shoulders and weight to the inside.