Good morning this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride with my good buddy Contigo. About a week and a half ago we showed you how to work a horse in piaffe, so now we are going to continue that.

When starting a horse in piaffe, I tend to do this every other day or so once I have started a horse in it. I want to remind you of the prerequisites to working a horse in piaffe and they are: the horse is correctly working over his back and that you as a rider have developed the ability to ride on the weight of the rein (that is you are able to release to the weight of the rein). Once the horse has developed enough topline to begin this, he must work in the weight of the rein, otherwise if you start working piaffe, the horse is going to fold out of the reins if your horse is used to being held against the rein. This only works if you ride in the classical system, which is riding with the weight of the reins and light, not pulling at the mouth of the horse.

I still have a line on him just in case he is having difficulty, so I have more line than just the rein. I hold the rein and the whip in my outside hand. As I get started here, I give him just a little tap. Notice how I am letting him move a little forward. I do a couple segments of this and then reward him and then go back and ask for a little more. If you go back to the first video I did with him on piaffe, you can see that he was barely moving his legs, but today he is getting a littler deeper under himself. Notice how he is lowering his hindquarters. Remember that piaffe is the foundation of collection. Collection means that once the horse is engaged and under himself, it is the degree at which he is lowering and maintaining the lowering of his hindquarters.

When we try again, we ask him to be a little more animated this time and it looks quite nice for only being his second week of this! He is moving the diagonal pairs very nicely and he is starting to lower down but it doesn’t have that much thrust. In the correct piaffe we want the horse to jump up, not to snap his legs up.

Thank you very much for joining us here at Art2Ride and we will do another update on Contigo in another week! See you then!

classical foundation dressage Piaffe San Diego horse training topline Will Faerber