Olivia Frost Dressage

08/17/2022

The movement of your horse’s hind legs can be broken down into the following three phases; thrust, reach, and carry.

Each phase is important and each one impacts the next, e.g. the more weight the horse takes during the carry phase, the more power he can produce in the thrust phase.

This knowledge is useful because it helps you in timing your aids and influencing the horse.

👉 EXAMPLE 1

During a leg-yield, the horse’s inside legs are required to step in front of and across his outside legs.

Therefore, if you apply your inside leg aid at the same precise moment as your horse lifts his inside hind leg (into the reach phase), then you can encourage the horse to step further under and across with that leg.

This will give you a greater degree of crossing during the leg-yield and a more sweeping stride.

👉 EXAMPLE 2

If you want to encourage your horse to take more weight behind, then apply your half-halt just as the horse’s inside hind leg is coming down to the ground (the carry phase).

At this moment, you can encourage your horse’s inside hind leg to take more weight.

👉 EXAMPLE 3

The horse’s canter stride starts with the horse’s outside hind leg. Therefore, to make a smooth transition from trot or walk into canter, apply your canter aids as your horse’s outside hind leg is in the reach phase.

This means that as that hind leg touches the ground (the carry phase), instead of it being another step of trot or walk, it will be the first step of canter.

This also encourages the horse to reach further under with that hind leg, producing a more uphill transition.

Give it a go!

07/10/2022

Everything comes with a price

A sensitive horse is going to be sensitive to both light aids AND your accidental aids and mistakes

A quiet school horse is going to give you room to fumble with your hands and legs, and they are also likely to ignore them when you mean to use them.

It isn’t fair to want the reward without the price. It isn’t fair to take from a horse without giving- and it all comes down to working on ourselves: our expectations, riding abilities, mindset, and awareness. You can’t have a perfectly performing horse without putting in your own work. A horse is not a computer or a robot- they rise to, or fall to, the level of the horseman.

Photo by Melinda Yelvington

05/16/2022

To ride a large horse and bring him onto the aids, you need to make him more reactive to lighter aids and slightly increase the tempo of his rhythm.

11/20/2021

What a great way to discuss positive vs negative tension

Position is something that really isn’t worked on enough. Often we see riders go on for years and years spending enormous amounts of money on lessons and no improvement is made because no one addresses the real problem… the rider is tense, or out of balance, sits to one side, draws their legs up, has no body awareness, or all of the above. This is not to say that unless a rider has a perfect position they will not be a good rider. I am a firm believer that there is actually no perfect position, simply because we are all so different. If you try to sit a rider in a certain way, and this causes them discomfort, they will not relax or find their balance. Each rider must search for their own perfect position, which by definition for me means the position in which they do not hinder the balance of the horse, but allow him to move freely. A position which enables the rider to give subtle and effective aids without stiffening or losing their own balance.

The key to most top level sports is training the body to relax in a position of strength, or endurance, or speed. Dressage therefore can be defined as just that: finding relaxation in a position that requires strength, both in terms of horse, and rider.
Think about it: The horse must be strong enough to perform the exercise, but be able to relax within it. A rider must be strong enough to hold their posture, their seat, their legs in place, strong enough to position the horse, to provide the necessary pressure for the aids, but to be able to relax within that position of strength.
It seems so easy, find your position, then relax. But in terms of both horse and rider this concept is extremely difficult to achieve. Why? Because both horse and rider often fall too far on either side of the relaxation/strength spectrum. A rider will either use too much force (strength) without the necessary relaxation, and produce a horse that is tense, and being moved around the arena by the use of harsh aids, and strong hands. Or the rider will be too relaxed in the saddle, will seem to flop about with the horse, without being able to let the horse balance, because their own weight is being distributed unevenly and without any correct posture or balance themselves.
In terms of the horse, a horse is often either too strong, leaning on the hand, and has not learned the value of strength and relaxation in correct posture to establish self-carriage and balance. Alternatively a horse may be too relaxed, and thus not have the strength to carry himself, and will therefore rely on the physical effort of his rider to sort of drive him around the arena.
So how do we find the right balance between strength and relaxation? How do we find that “relaxation from a strength pPosition” that is so hard to find, yet is at the heart of all dressage training, from young horse to Grand Prix?
First in terms of the rider; this comes down to body awareness. Often as riders we have muscles that overactivate. This means that when we want to do a simple movement, our muscles go all in and use more than the necessary strength required. This also means that when we think we have relaxed a muscle, we actually have only relaxed it partially.
If you don’t believe me sit down with your feet together and your knees out to the side. Relax your adductors. Then, think about whether they are really relaxed and try to really let them go. Typically you will have one of those, oh, moments, where you realised that your idea of relaxed, and actually fully relaxed, are two different things. Once we can learn how to fully relax, often yoga or pilates helps a lot, we can learn how to hold and balance our own bodies evenly, and then relax maintaining that position of strength. Doing it on the horse is more difficult, and it takes patience and work, and thought, and help!
For the horse, Nuno Oliveira used to say that “the horse is not a machine, but a living being. Therefore, we must know what dose of relaxation and degree of vigor that we must employ with each horse.” What he meant of course is that the dose of strength versus relaxation required on one horse, will be vastly different to that required on another.
We must learn to set the horse up for the movement, and then let him do the work, allowing him to relax into it, move alone, and build the strength to carry out said exercise with ease. He will then learn to not only relax physically in the exercise but also mentally, because his rider is not banging and crashing about with every stride.
Finding relaxation from a position of strength, poise and balance, is about patience, and feel, and adjustment. All the elements of dressage that we must incorporate into every training, until things become effortless.
“The criterium of a good rider is a rider that we cease to notice, and we only watch the horse," said Nuno Oliveira.
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03/13/2021

The way you approach your riding is how your riding approaches you.

For this week’s tip I’d like to introduce a concept from Darren Harday called “the Compound Effect” that I have applied in many areas of my life for many years now, and in particular to the sport of Dressage and how I approach my horses’ training. I have scratched the surface of this concept in several of my previous posts, but I’d like to dive deeper into it today.

The Compound Effect is an approach based on the idea that small, seemingly insignificant daily, consistent actions and choices, will build momentum towards greater pay offs on the long term, rather than implementing much larger but short term changes. If I can give you an example related to life choices in general, it would be to make small changes in your diet daily to lose or maintain a certain weight on the long term, instead of going through a 30-day drastic diet for which the benefits might not last. Or to stick to a routine of working out or going for a walk for 20min every day, and creating a habit, rather than perhaps signing up a very difficult gym bootcamp and quitting after two weeks.

When it comes to dressage, and in fact training horses in general, we will only be rewarded publicly (with good show results for example) by small and consistent actions we take every day privately. Each small action taken separately might not seem important if we do not follow through. For example, deciding not to ride today because it is too cold, or because you are tired. Yet, it is because you offer a routine to your horse, with regular rides, that you end up winning the championships at the end of the season. Not because you hurry up riding your horse frequently two weeks before a show. We are only human, some days I am tired, or I have a tight schedule, but I always make the effort to at the very least get my horse tacked up and give it a short ride.



We live in a world where instant result and instant gratification are accessible everywhere. And this is not at all an issue that we can only attribute to millennials! In the horse world, we can witness every day this category of riders who will indulge in expecting very quick results through short term actions such as changing trainer each time they face an obstacle, or going into a frantic mission (driven by worry and fear) of changing the saddle, diet, turnout schedule, barn, tack whenever a problem is being faced in the training. I vividly remember a particular rider I got acquainted with who kept importing horses from Europe with a dream of each horse being their next big thing. Until the horse would start to be too naughty, too spooky or would start to develop an issue in the training. It would then be sold and another horse would be imported. The pattern kept continuing with at least 6 horses. Because what was sought after is an instant result with the expectation of not having to overcome problems and having a straight path to the olympics. This is pure delusion.
Pay offs will only happen if you stick to providing consistency in the training program, hard work, self-discipline, patience, and accept to fail over and over. This is not to say that you shouldn’t make small adjustments to your trajectory to solve a problem A or B, but if you make an adjustment you need to give yourself and the horse time before seeing positive results out of it.

Sometimes we have this false belief that successful riders at the top of our sport are some kind of heroes, who were born with different abilities, and that they could make any horse instantly look amazing. I do not believe this is true, however I can assure you that each of them apply this concept, even if they never heard about it. They most likely have very strict discipline, and provide a very consistent training to their horses. On the long term, they can make any horse look amazing if you give them enough time, because of the compound effect.

Now let’s be realistic, showing up to ride your horse on a cold or a hot day while other riders don’t is not the only reason why you will get a bigger pay off than they do down the road. What has to happen also, is to apply consistent actions to yourself and to the horse under saddle that will lead you to make your partnership progress. This is where having a good coach or trainer, being emotionally balanced while riding, being physically balanced while riding, being tactful with the horse when needed, and correct the horse when needed comes into play.

If we consider the example of three riders who have the same skills, the exact same horse, and let’s imagine the same potential access to training, we can definitely consider 3 different outcomes if we look at it from the lens of the Compound Effect:

Rider 1: make it a priority to ride her horse 5 days a week despite being busy with work, family obligations and being exhausted sometimes. She takes one lesson a week and makes sure to ask her trainer about her homework in between each lesson and actually works on it while riding on her own. Her philosophy is to let the horse makes a mistake and correct it tactfully each time it is required, without ever getting frustrated. On a cold day when her horse is naughty and she gets a bit scared, she still gives him a good workout on the lunge line or exceptionally ask her trainer to get on it. Each morning she stretches and does 10min of yoga pauses as she believes staying flexible will help her riding. Before going to bed, instead of watching TV she reads Charlotte Dujardin book The Dancing Horse, or watches Training videos on Youtube for 20 min. Her goal is to progress one level up each year with her horse, and she has a plan with her trainer on how to achieve her Bronze medal by next year.



Rider 2: will not ride the horse when temperatures rise above 80F or below 40F, having a month off here and there won’t kill the horse, will it?! She just changed trainer because honestly they kept doing the same things each week to fix that late change her horse has, and she really wants to do third level this year. Her trainer wanted to work on straightness and canter quality, whereas she thinks they need to practice the change itself over and over. Maybe she should actually bump him up to fourth level, because he might just need a more challenging test to be better. She doesn’t see the need to exercise herself, but the horse is on 4 different supplements because he is very stiff on the right rein. She is starting to be a bit scared of the horse lately because he keeps bolting after his changes; when he does that she puts him away. It’s not worth getting hurt, tomorrow will be a better ride. She wishes she could buy a horse more trained and with more talent so she could get her medals faster.



Rider 3: will ride pretty consistently 2 or 3 times a week, get a lesson with the local trainer at her barn once a week, they don’t really have a plan or objectives for her horse training but she thinks it is important to take lessons regularly. She has a great rapport with her horse, yet she has to admit they have been pretty much stagnating at the same level for years now. She always wanted to show but she thinks she is not talented enough compared to other riders, let’s be realistic.

Looking at these 3 scenarii, which rider do you think will get successful on the long run? I can pretty much assure that riders like Rider 1 will get that horse up the levels successfully and get her medals. Yes, they will have obstacles to overcome, and sometimes she will have a disastrous show. But eventually she will earn all her medals’ scores. Because she is doing a handful of actions consistently over time, which will create a huge reward down the road.

Rider 2 is doing the exact opposite; she is making small poor choices every day, as well as massive changes each time she overcomes a problem, which will lead her to failure on the long run. And of course, she will blame the horse, the previous owner of the horse, and the trainer(s) for her lack of success.

Rider 3 is creating a situation that Tony Robbins calls the “no man’s land”; she is neither compelling good nor bad choices daily, she is just staying in her comfort zone, refusing to overcome failure and obstacles and accepting the reality as it is, rather than pursuing her dreams. This my friend is when you wake up when your horse is 18 years old and you still struggle to do the same exercises than when the horse was 8, even though you have taken on and off lessons all your life, and wonder what the hell happened? It is never too late, regardless of your and the horse’s age, to start implementing small changes every day, raising your standards and getting out of your comfort zone one step at a time. Dressage is one of the few equestrian sports when both the rider and the horse can compete at a later age!



Dressage is a sport of hard work requiring to do small, seemingly insignificant, yet consistent things daily, believing that it will compound into a great reward. When someone criticizes one of my horses in the present moment, I never take it personally because I know for a fact that in X number of years, if I keep applying what I am doing today, this horse will be amazing in the eyes of the public. When people think that I’ve been lucky to find such a nice horse, that the horse is naturally talented and I probably spent a lot of money for it...I do not protest even though this is not the reality. It is my biggest reward in the contrary, because it means that what I’ve done consistently made the horse appear that way. Your strength is to believe that your horse IS already amazing, your job is to make it happen patiently in the background by applying consistent, small, yet powerful actions.

On the picture: Southern Belle SWF, photo credit: Susan Stickle

Vincent Flores
USDF Gold, Gold Bar, Silver & Bronze Medalist
Vincent Flores Dressage, LLC
http://vfdressage.webs.com/

03/05/2021

I remember reading this article pre-pandemic and resonating with its thoughts and warnings. After reading this again post pandemic, I wonder what has changed in the view points and actions for fellow professionals.

Guest columnist of this week is U.S. dressage trainer Angelia "Ange" Bean from Elverson, PA. She is a USDF L graduate with distinction, as well as a USDF bronze, silver and gold medalist. Following the apparent su***de of Teresa Butta (as well as a German and Danish dressage trainer around Christmas...

01/08/2021