This post talks a lot about dressage, but it is highly relevant to just about any horse discipline. I apologise that is so long, but I think it is also one of my most important essays.
When I was a kid I worked at a riding school on the northern side of Sydney. A Dutch couple that taught me the fundamentals of dressage and showjumping ran it. I learned to love dressage and jumping and became a serious student of both. In those times, the importance of the elements of the German training scale was drilled into me constantly.
That seems a long time ago and when I look at modern dressage it seems even longer. Nowadays, the movement seems to be what is important in dressage. Good training has been replaced by good breeding. Genetics is what makes the competition dressage horses a winner, not training.
I believe that because training has become less vital to producing an elite horse the basics of the German training scale have been corrupted.
The German Training Scale forms the basis of almost all the competitive dressage training in the world. It is even well-entrenched among many non-competition riders. The German Training Scale is to dressage what the 10 Commandments are to Christianity. Therefore, to question the scale and its basis is almost blasphemous in some circles and can label a person a heretic or madman.
It’s a six-step program that is meant to set the foundation of understanding that every good dressage horse needs to know. The phases consist of rhythm, relaxation, contact, impulsion, straightness, and collection. The scale is designed to be progressive in that a horse should exhibit a steady rhythm before he offers relaxation and it is not until a horse is relaxed that you can expect a submissive contact of the reins. Impulsion and straightness will follow from a good contact, which in turn will prepare a horse to offer collection.
But in my view, there are problems with the GTS – including the order with which they are set out. But the biggest issues with the GTS are twofold. First, it gives people the idea that by following its rules you are guaranteed success and dressage nirvana. It is assumed that by following the system, in the end, your horse will be the best dressage horse it can be. But, of course, this is not necessarily true and the reason it is not true is the other biggest problem I see with the GTS. That is, nowhere in the teachings of the GTS is there thought or discussion for what it takes to achieve good rhythm, good relaxation, great submissive contact, excellent impulsive energy, brilliant level of straightness and the highest degree of collection. The variables that go into making each element of the scale the road for producing excellence are absent from any discussion of the GTS.
In my mind, the elements that are missing from any discussion of the training scale are the most important aspects of any training scale – Focus, Clarity, and Softness. The defenders of the GTS would say that these elements are implicit in the scale and don’t need to be added because everyone knows the importance of having a soft horse.
I would argue that there is an expanding worldwide dissatisfaction with the direction of modern dressage. In the last several years there has been a growing trend away from well-trained and correct horses towards less correct horses with extravagant movement. The elite level of competition has taken its eye off the ball of the principles of dressage and the sport has become a business. As such the concepts of focus, clarity, and softness are not being incorporated into the elements of the GTS and have been replaced by obedience, submission, and big movement. The elements of the GTS have become a list of verbs – doing words – when they should be adjectives that emphasize the quality of movement.
Let’s look at the elements of the alternative training scale.
FOCUS
seems fairly self-evident to most people. It’s the level of attention a horse offers to a rider. Clearly, it is hard to teach something if the student is not in the room. So having a good level of attention from a horse is paramount to starting any lesson.
But no horse will give 100% attention – he can’t. He must have some focus on the world around him to be sure that the lion behind the tree doesn’t kill him or even that he sees the tree before he crashes into it. I want my horse to be aware of his surroundings and what is going on around him.
I also want my horse to have a calm and relaxed focus on me rather than a concentration that comes from not daring to check out anything else in case the world caves in on him. I don’t want him to be afraid of me or afraid to look elsewhere. I want his attentiveness to be an interest in me rather than wariness. When I present an idea to him I want it to be important to him. It should matter to him that I have changed something. I shouldn’t be interrupting him in any big way when I speak to my horse.
But just as important as my horse being attentive to me is that I can direct his focus elsewhere. I would like to be able to get him to think about going forward and send his thought forward first for his feet to catch up. By being able to send his thought forward it means that when he goes forward he is not fleeing from what’s behind him. When you kick a horse that won’t go and he suddenly starts moving forward, he is running away from your pressure. But when you send his thought forward first he is running to something. There is far more freedom in his forwardness when this happens than when he is escaping from something.
So focus means having a horse calm and quiet attention and being able to direct his attention too.
Like most everything else, a horse's focus is never an all or nothing. You get degrees of focus. The level of focus you might need from a horse for something simple like brushing his tail, may not be enough when you want to control his speed around a cross country course or ask for one time flying changes. The greater the demands you place on a horse, the harder his brain should be working, the more focus you require. Sometimes you start with only 10% of a horse’s attention, say at his first competition. But you are always working to build that up to 20%, then 50%, and 70% and maybe one day you’ll get 90%.
CLARITY
refers to the accuracy with which the brain of the horse interprets our signals. The closer our intent is to the way the horse sees it, the clearer we are being. But when our intent is unclear confusion reigns and the horse’s response can be significantly different from what we wanted.
A lack of clarity is a stress to a horse. Imagine learning to drive and the instructor says, “Ya got this wheel thing that turns the car. The pedal thing makes it go and the other pedal thing makes it stop. Oh yeah and this pedal thing and stick thing together allow you to change gears. See driving is easy. Now off you go and drive to the shops and back.” That would be a pretty stressful experience.
Several variables go into making a person’s signals clear.
Firstly, you have to have a horse’s soft focus. He must be listening and calm. If a horse is upset and his insides are vibrating with tension, it’s hard for him to hear your signals no matter how clear you think you are making them. I call this state of calm alertness a “quiet mind” and it is an integral part of creating clarity.
Secondly, your signals must be very consistent. You can’t be pulling on your left rein to go left today, but tomorrow you pull on the right rein to go left. You have to be using the same signals in the same way; otherwise, your horse will get confused. But the caveat to that is that you have to be prepared to change how you present your idea if the way you are presenting it is not working. Don’t be stuck with doing something the same way just for the sake of consistency. You should be consistent, but only with the things that work for the horse – not the things that don’t.
Thirdly, part of creating clarity is to break things into bite-size pieces that a horse can handle. For example, if you want to teach a horse to back up 100 steps, you start with rewarding him when he shifts his weight back. When that is clear to him, then go to rewarding when he takes a step back. As that gets clear in his mind, then try backing 2 steps before rewarding. Then repeat it with 5 steps and 10 steps. Keep building until you have him backing 100 steps. Don’t ask him to back 100 steps the first time because for sure he will get to maybe 5 or 6 steps before wondering what the hell he has to do to get you to stop pulling on the reins.
When there is a break down in clarity it is never a bad idea to go back a stage or two to something the horse already understands well. Break it down into the earlier steps and start building on those again in smaller increments. Don’t go to the next stage until the present stage is well understood by your horse. For example, don’t try to teach flying changes to your horse until you can consistently get your horse to choose the canter lead of your choice.
It’s important to keep in mind that clarity and a lack of clarity affect the horse only through his mind. The muscles and skin of the horse have no concept of clarity and therefore when we speak of clarity we speak of the horse’s brain. Training is for the most part about the horse’s mind – not his body. What the body is doing is secondary to what the brain is thinking.
If we have a horse’s focus, it allows us to converse with him. Without focus there is no conversation, there is no clarity. Focus gives us the chance to offer clarity. But together with focus and clarity, we get softness.
SOFTNESS
is the love child of good quality focus and good quality clarity. If you don’t have a high enough quality of focus AND clarity, softness is not possible. Both are needed and both must be good. They don’t have to be perfect. Perfection is something you’ll get tomorrow, but today we are working on better. The more you ask of your horse the better the quality of focus and clarity you’ll need to achieve softness.
Many people confuse softness in a horse with lightness. They are two different things. But you can’t have softness without lightness. Yet you can have lightness without having softness. Many people have light horses that aren’t soft.
Softness is a response that is both mental and physical. A soft horse is very responsive to a rider. But in addition to being responsive, he has a quiet mind. A quiet mind is clear, ready but unstressed. A quiet mind is an essential element of a soft horse. If a horse has a busy mind, an anxious mind, a distracted mind, he can’t be soft. Therefore, a soft horse is one that is relaxed, yet alert and responsive.
This is different from a light horse in that lightness refers to a horse being responsive to the rider’s aids and nothing more. There is no requirement for the horse to be relaxed or have a quiet mind. A horse can be bouncing around like a balloon in a storm and still be light.
Since I propose that the German training scale of rhythm, relaxation, contact, impulsion, straightness, and collection be replaced by an alternative training scale of focus, clarity, and softness, let’s examine how this might work to both the trainer and horse’s benefit.
RHYTHM
Rhythm is when a horse is keeping an even tempo – there is no rushing or slowing up that is not initiated by the rider. As I have already said, softness is both a mental and physical relaxation. The nature of a quiet mind is that the horse’s mind is relatively unstressed but alert and listening to the rider. This comes from the focus the horse has on his rider, which in turn encourages the horse to be tuned into the energy and muscle tone of the rider. In a soft horse, the rider’s energy and muscle tone of his body offer a clear meaning as what the rider expects from the horse. This is a major factor in a horse being able to maintain a rhythm. The amount of energy a horse feels coming from a rider’s position and seat will transfer into the amount of energy a horse puts out in his movement. There is no need to be working on rhythm if softness is already well established.
RELAXATION
Since softness refers to mental softness or relaxation if you like, there is a concomitant physical relaxation that accompanies softness. A truly soft horse tends to work with correctness. They don’t favour working one part of their body harder than they should (except when there is a physical problem like an injury) or being stiffer on one side more than the other.
CONTACT
This one always gets me into trouble with dressage riders. Most people think of contact as the amount of rein pressure a rider offers a horse. But in my view, contact is the amount of rein pressure required to get a change in a horse’s thought. Good contact is the least amount of rein needed to cause the horse to make a change. In some horses, you need kilograms of rein pressure to get a change and other horses require a feel that is little more than the weight of the reins. Both are contact. If you don’t cause a horse to make a change, you don’t have contact.
But of course, the contact we should strive towards is when the least amount of input from the reins creates the required change in a horse’s thought. In my opinion, if you can get a horse to respond to an almost imperceptible change in the feel of the reins, you are better than the next bloke. But this is where you can see how people confuse softness with lightness. If you only get a change in a horse’s feet, you have lightness. But if you can get a change in thought, then you have softness.
IMPULSION
Impulsion is the effort a horse puts into movement. It is not related to forwardness or how quickly he moves. It relates to effort. Even a horse at a slow walk can have good impulsion if the slow walk is under the rider’s direction. Just like rhythm, impulsion comes from a horse having a quiet mind and being responsive to the aids. When a horse is soft in mind and body, impulsion from a horse is available.
STRAIGHTNESS
The natural result of softness is that horses carry themselves with straightness because there is very little mental resistance that normally causes the physical resistance associated with crookedness (again this assumes no physical impairment to a horse’s movement). Most crookedness in a horse comes from a mental resistance to the rider’s seat, legs, and reins. It’s based on how a horse feels about the work. A horse can only be soft when he feels okay inside because as I said, a large part of softness is mental relaxation. So get a horse soft and most straightness issues disappear.
COLLECTION
I won’t go into what collection is because this essay is already running too long. Let me just say that according to the German training scale, collection is the end product of rhythm, relaxation, straightness, impulsion, and contact. It’s what can be achieved when all those 5 other elements are in place. If any are missing or are not to a high enough quality, collection becomes elusive.
But as I have just shown if you have softness, your horse already has the 5 elements of the German training scale in place. The ability to achieve collection in a horse is already available in a horse that exhibits softness. I will say that true collection is not possible without softness. There are lots of horses and some even performing at a high level, that exhibit a false collection because softness is lacking.
CONCLUSION
I hope I have not made it sound like training or achieving focus, clarity and softness are easy. It’s hard. It takes hundreds and sometimes thousands of hours to accomplish a level of these things that are worth showing people. Nothing is black and white. Every element is somewhere on the scale between totally wrong to the best that could be. When softness is lacking, look back at your horse’s focus and/or your clarity. But most importantly don’t forget that even though a horse’s movement comes from his physical side, the quality of the movement comes from his mental and emotional side.
The German Training Pyramid