What I would like to start off with is a little thing I call, what are we trying to do? Which is something I ask people all the time who are riding horses. What are you trying to do? and what are you trying to accomplish? I am amazed at how many people can’t answer that question. Another one I get in dressage is, what is collection? I am amazed at how many people can’t answer that question as well, especially when they are supposed to be a dressage rider.

What we are going to start out with today is trying to learn what working gaits are. Working gaits mean the point at which you are working through the back and the horse is working it’s topline. The point at which you are working the topline is where you are in working gaits. You can be racing very fast around the arena and not have the topline engaged, and that is what I see all the time, people racing around on the front end. Going forward is not just racing around the ring, forward means to engage forward under the body. That is what the word forward means, it doesn’t mean racing around the arena as so many people think. So what we are going to learn today is how to get your horse into a working gait so it can develop a topline.

Collection: Once a horse is in a working gait simply denotes how far the horse bends the free joints of the hind leg, that’s what collection is. In other words, if I were trotting it would be the difference in trotting along like this in a working gait and trotting along along like this (shown in video) where I am lowering and staying lower behind, which requires a great deal of strength and development through the back. This is what we see in dressage today, we are seeing a lot of horses that are really not in collection. They are at Grand Prix, but they are snapping their legs up instead of lowering their hind legs. People in dressage need to recognize a horse that is engaged and pushing off the ground as opposed to a horse that is snapping it’s legs up and not really engaging.

Getting your horse into working gaits is what we are all about here today. Now why do we want to do that? Because getting the horse to work through the back is what puts the shock absorber system on a horse. In other words, when a horse is not engaged in it’s back, all the concussion of it’s movement is being taken out in the joints and the hard tissue.  Where we want it to be is to be taken up in the soft tissue, which allows the joints to work freely and prevents all the damage that we see happening in horses today.

We only need to look at a horse to tell how it has been muscled. I don’t need to get on one and ride it to tell how it’s been going all it’s life. As you look at the horse in the video, which muscles look more developed? The topline or bottomline? The underside muscles are more developed. This tells me right away that this horse has been pulling itself along by it’s shoulders for quite some time now to develop the muscles that we see underneath here (shown in video). A horse’s neck should be thick up here and thin and relaxed down here so it can develop correctly. We see a big dip behind the saddle and this bump here (shown in video) that is caused from the horse’s back collapsing. This tells me that the mechanics have not been happening correctly. Once again, a horse going like this, all the shock will be going into the joints and it’s going to shorten his useful lifespan by 2/3.

Today we are seeing horses that have been ridden badly in dressage, people are literally burning horses out by the time they are six and eight years old! It’s insane! The point of dressage is to make a horse last as long as possible. Just like a person becoming physically fit themselves, it will make you live longer and healthier, and that’s what we are trying to do for the horse.

So that is our goal for today. Until you can get the topline engaged, their is really nothing else of any value that you can do with the horse because everything you do that tries to go beyond those basic things is going to put more pressure into those joints and create more and more problems for them. So that is why we are here today, to teach you how to engage the horse’s topline so that you can develop a horse that will collect. True collection depends on the ability to engage through the topline.

classical foundation collection dressage Grand Prix Muscle San Diego horse training topline Will Faerber working gaits