Good morning this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and I am here with Kristen Balch and her horse Contigo. We are here today to talk about how to begin the piaffe.

We have done a couple months of piaffe on the ground and we have got him doing it pretty nicely, so now we will introduce the weight of the rider. You do not want to do this until the horse is clearly moving the diagonal pairs, then you can begin to add the weight of the rider. In the piaffe, the rider is going to stretch herself up, lightening the saddle, and restrain her back. In other words, she will not have the freedom that you normally have in the back to help the horse move forward. So she is going to restrain in the back a little bit and both legs are going to come back and tap left and right with the diagonal pairs.

Notice how light the horse’s reins are. This only works if you have developed your horse correctly and is developed to the point where the topline is clearly defined and you are able to ride the horse in the weight of the rein. If you hold against the rein with a heavy hand, as soon as you try to piaffe, the horse will bolt right out from underneath you. So your horse must be developed and trained correctly for this all to work. Once you have all these things working correctly, you can start the piaffe.

Kristen stretches up, both legs come back and I help for the first time. For a horse just beginning in the piaffe, Contigo is doing very well! I am going to reward him for that with a little piece of sugar. So for a horse just beginning, if they just activate underneath themselves as shown in the video, that’s enough to start with.

Once again, this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride and we will give you another update on him later on. Thank you for watching!!!

classical foundation dressage Piaffe rider San Diego horse training topline Will Faerber