Windfall Farm Dressage

🤔 I'm pretty sure most of our horses have tried cake.

Commentary: I Work Very Hard, And I Would Like To Try Cake https://theonion.com/i-work-very-hard-and-i-would-like-to-try-cake/

Yepper! Fight me.. go ahead 🤡

Once, I watched a coach bring a rider and horse in front of an audience at the end of an intense lesson. He wanted to show them something he had noticed. Something he thought was good.

He reached toward the neck and shoulder, pointed to a sweat patch, and said: you see this? This is good. This shows the horse has worked here.

The rider smiled. The audience nodded.

You are in the presence of someone who carries authority. The people around you confirm it. Someone with a name, a reputation, a lifetime of accolades is telling you it went well. Of course you smile.

But what was pointed to was friction.

The muscles overlying the mid and lower cervical region, C5-C6, are not designed to carry concentrated load. They are built for phasic, elastic work, brief, coordinated, shared across the whole structure. They participate in movement. They are not designed to manage imbalance.

When the thoracic sling can no longer support the ribcage and spinal oscillation begins to reduce, those muscles stop moving the limb and start managing the imbalance instead. Sustained work in tissue not designed for it produces heat. Heat produces sweat. An isolated patch at that region tells you exactly where the system has run out of options.

The horse is not working well there. It is coping.

A simple way to hold this:

When horses sweat, it appears first in the high-density regions: the neck, behind the elbows, between the hindlegs. That is normal physiology. What we are reading here is sweat concentrated at one precise point while the surrounding tissue remains dry. Not general neck sweat, not effort. A system that has stopped distributing.

Isolated sweat in a working horse is not a sign of good work. It is a sign of a system that has stopped distributing. The horse is not moving through that area. It is stuck in it.

After hot work, a correctly organised horse carries an even dampness across the neck, shoulders and quarters. No concentration anywhere. The absence of an isolated patch is the sign of effort distributed correctly.

The rider in that moment did nothing wrong. She trusted the person in front of her.

I stood in dissection rooms, carefully removing layers of damage left by people who never meant to cause it. I have wondered, in those rooms, whether we should ride horses at all. It is possible, but it requires care, accurate knowledge, and the willingness to be corrected. That is what calls me to write about this. To offer clarity where I am certain, and to remain genuinely open to being questioned on everything I teach.

This is the responsibility of those of us who teach. When we name something in front of an audience, in front of a horse that cannot correct us, we are not sharing an opinion. We are shaping what that person will carry forward, repeat, and pass on. The difference between interpretation and knowledge matters enormously when the body receiving that teaching cannot speak.

As coaches we cannot afford to let the pull of a moment, the crowd, the performance, the pleasure of apparent mastery, substitute for knowing what we are actually looking at. We have to test our own interpretations against evidence, hold them up to scrutiny, and be willing to be wrong. That is not a limitation on great coaching but a condition.

Reading the horse accurately is the foundation of our work.

There has been a trend going around lately about “10 Things I Hate About Dressage,” and honestly some of them have been hysterical… and painfully accurate. Thank you, Lauren Sprieser. I fully agree that walk pirouettes deserve their own category.

So here are mine.

1. “You have to be rich.”

I hate this one.

Mostly because it keeps people from chasing the dream before they even start. I understand where it comes from, and yes, horses are expensive. But I did not get into this industry because I wanted to make a million dollars. I got into it because I had a dream that would not leave me alone.

The opportunities came first.
The money followed the opportunities.

I never sat down and said “How can I make the most money?”
I asked “How can I make this work?”

Maybe that is terrible financial advice, but it worked for me. I worked relentlessly, kept saying yes to opportunities, and figured things out along the way.

But let me also say this very clearly:
None of it works without the work.

2. The idea that being “good” is supposed to feel easy.

Absolutely not.

This sport is hard.
It will stay hard.
And most of the time you will still feel like you are not good enough.

That feeling does not go away when you become successful. If anything, the standards get even higher.

Learn to love the process before you love the results.

3. The idea that top trainers are not supposed to get dirty.

Please.

Yes, I have a groom. She is also my other two hands. We work together. We are both filthy by the end of the day sometimes.

If you think you are above scrubbing buckets, wrapping legs, bathing horses, or sweeping aisles, then I question how connected you really are to the process.

4. Trying to control the environment at all times.

This one drives me insane.

The arenas do not need to be silent.
The kids can run around.
The tractor can drive by.
The staff can mow the lawn.

How are we supposed to create emotionally balanced horses if they only know how to function in a perfectly controlled environment?

Teach the horse to manage emotions first.
Then worry about the movements.

A horse that cannot emotionally regulate will never truly perform consistently anyway.

5. Bits are for comfort, not control.

Find the bit that gives your horse the most confidence and comfort.
Not the one that gives YOU the most leverage.

6. Stop hating worthy competitors.

Business is business, and competition is competition, but there is absolutely no reason we cannot respect and care about the people we compete against.

Save your frustration for abusive training methods, shortcuts, and actual mistreatment of horses.

Not the rider who beat you fairly with good horsemanship and classical training.

7. Maintain your horse before they are lame.

This is a huge one for me.

There is nothing wrong with responsibly maintaining horses. PRP injections can be incredible. I use them on myself too.

And no, your horse does not need to be limping to tell you something is wrong.

Sometimes the signs are:
“He feels sluggish in the changes.”
“He is not sitting in piaffe the same.”
“He is yanking me every once in a while.”

Pay attention to those details.

Inflammation changes movement long before obvious lameness appears. My entire program focuses on addressing inflammation first and then building proper muscle to support the joints correctly.

There is no reason horses should be expected to perform through pain.

8. Even FEI riders need help.

The feel and the reality are not always the same.

You need eyes on the ground.
You need ideas.
You need exercises.
You need someone who can say “I went through this too, and this helped.”

Drilling movements over and over rarely fixes the root problem.

9. Stop getting offended by judges comments.

The judges are literally telling you what they see.

At my last show, I had no idea I was starting to lean forward. The judge commented on it.

Good.
That is what I paid for.

Not every comment is an insult. Most judges genuinely want to help riders improve, and they went through an incredible amount of education to be sitting in that booth.

10. Stop waiting for perfect before you show.

You do not improve by hiding at home.

It is perfectly fine to show Training Level because the basics need strengthening.
It is perfectly fine to take the less confident horse down centerline.

Every good experience matters.

Showing is not separate from training.
It is training.

Get down the centerline.