Do Your Homework

“Do your homework!” – This is something we are told repeatedly from elementary school on up. It is also something crucially important in dressage.

I recently had the opportunity to spend two months as a working student for Allison Spivey Dressage and there I learned a huge amount about the importance of homework. I have always been good at taking the work we do in lessons and practicing it at home, but what I didn’t realize was how much fixing some root problems would make my life so much easier!

My OTTB, Echo, is not the most supple creature. Haunches in/travers has always been a huge struggle due to the lack of suppleness. Allison and I worked very hard on improving Echo’s suppleness, gaits and responsiveness to my aids in the first three weeks we were there and the difference in the “tricks” was HUGE!

We accomplished this by doing lots of forward and back in lateral work and on circles, and by constantly switching the bend and asking him to move his body around. We did it all in a very non-confrontational way so there was never any fighting- it was just a very playful attitude towards training and Echo responded to it beautifully. As he got stronger and more flexible, everything just fell into place. Suddenly the shoulder in with more angle and bend was available and I could not only do travers but I could also change the bend and angle within the movement without a massive blow up. But it was the three weeks of doing our homework that got us to that point. Without taking the time to address some basic, lingering issues, we would not have been as successful as we were.

Echo in his racing days

While it may seem like really boring, it is plugging away faithfully at that boring stuff every day that makes the fun stuff easier. Not that anything is easy in dressage- just ask Echo!

Now that we are home, I continue to focus on Echo’s suppleness and reactivity to my aids. We do a lot of head to the wall leg yields, leg yields in general, shoulder in and changing of bend. This has continued to pay off as my lesson with Amy last night included canter half pass! This is something that I could not have imagined us doing 6 months ago. Going forward I will do my homework, day in and day out working on the small things, as we continue on this journey of dressage.

Echo today, working in the double bridle