Hi this is Will Faeber from Art2Ride with my lovely wife Karen Loshbaugh and we are going to tell you about one of the secrets of dressage. In an earlier video we talked about how the legs are used and how the leg can be used to make the horse move sideways, straight forward or when we come underneath to engage the horse’s back. One of the things that most people have wrong when I see their position is the outside leg. The outside leg is one of the keys to getting a horse to bend correctly.

Usually when I tell people to put the outside leg back, they usually swing the leg back from the knee and they think that means to put the leg back. What that does as you will feel when you try this at home is …

Hi this is Will Faerber from Art2Ride again, and today we are going to talk about the three uses of the leg. Now there is one very important thing that is missing from most people’s riding and that is the third thing that the leg must ask the horse to do.

Now everyone knows that the legs are used to ask the horse to move forward, that is when we impulse with both calves of both legs the horse should move straight ahead and move away from your legs. And most people understand that the leg can also mean to move laterally, that is the horse can move away from the leg towards the side and we can displace the haunches from one side to the other. But the third thing that is so important to collection and correct riding is …

Today we are going to try to answer a question from one of our friends in Denmark who has written to us saying when she tries to stretch her horse she goes on a loose rein, and in her particular case, the horse stops moving and seems to fall apart. So what we are going to try and answer is the correct contact.

The correct contact in the stretch is contact, the weight of the rein, it is not a loose rein (this is one of the biggest misconceptions about the stretch). The horse should be just as much on the bridle in the stretch as it is when up in the working trot, as we see Karen doing here in the video. She is going to stretch the horse correctly first and we are going to watch the horse stretch …

This is Karen Loshbaugh on Perhaps, and today we are going to once again do a demonstration, with a horse that has a more advanced level of training.

This horse has shown through I1 successfully, Karen won her silver medal on the horse. It has been trained exclusively by us for some 5 years or so. We are going to demonstrate how we begin at the same place. These foundation exercises, developing the horse through the top line are something that you do at every level of training. You should always come back to it to relieve the tension across the horse’s back, and that is why they are so much more willing to work because we are letting them out of that tension.

So now what we are going to do is Karen is going to bring the horse up and …