The holy grail of Dressage

Inside leg to outside rein: the holy grail of dressage..

Am I right?

Or is it?

While inside leg to outside rein is an important skill to develop it is just one piece of the bigger puzzle of connecting the action of the horses legs to rein contact so as to influence the lift, freedom and range of movement rather than ground and disengage.

If you’ve been following us for a while now you will know the purpose of the rein contact is not ask your horse to arch and round its neck but to work deeper into its haunches.

Inside leg to outside rein is one of our easy exercises to establish this. Wait? Did I just say easy!?! You better believe I did because once we understand what we are trying to achieve and how to time the aid this is an easy way to start connecting our horses hindquarter action to contact.

But before we do that our horse needs to know how to seek and work into contact and work over its back. And to work in to contact it needs to follow the contact without dropping the shoulder and falling out. And this is why it can be so hard. Firstly to working over the back in to contact the horse needs to have been introduced to away from leg into contact. Secondly, riders are so focused on more bend that they allow the horse to drop and fall through the shoulder in their effort to get a deeper angle rather than riding them around the leg. As soon as our horse drops and falls the shoulder, as soon as the shoulder stops following the nose we have no outside rein to work them in to.

So the easy part. Using a circle naturally creates more lift of the inside hind. Think about 2 cars going around a corner at the same speed, the inside car gets further ahead. Well the inside hind doesn’t get further ahead but it does lift higher. We can cue this extra lift in to squeeze soften inside leg outside rein.

Also in our yield we tend to mess this up by trying to ride flexion before our horse is ready. We need to start with just the direction and straight. If we time our direction aid (away from the inside leg following the outside rein, again inside rein and leg) to cue it into the hind leg as its coming through we are asking the hind to come through deeper and more under the horse.

So a combination of the circle to ask for lift and the leg yield to ask for through and under starts to get our horses working inside leg to outside rein and starts to cue the rein aid to more hock flexion.

Now the reason why I say this isn’t the holy grail and its just the easy introductory exercise is because we are only influencing the action of 1 leg. We need to influence and connect the action of all 4 of our horses legs so that rein pressure accentuates hock action and foreleg action instead of inhibiting and grounding and this is where things can start getting a bit tricky but if you don’t understand this it can also be why you are stuck in your training with your horse.

We have developed a course to hold your hand through this entire developmental process so if you think this blog is complicated and overwhelming, why not join us, start at the basics and work your way back up to this, filling in all the gaps in you and your horses training along the way.