Ashely Madison Clinic: Do More Nothing and Ride Straight

Last weekend our barn hosted a clinic with dressage trainer Ashley Madison, who operates her Yellow Wood Dressage program out of the jaw-droppingly gorgeous Riveredge Farm in Maryland. It's been in the works for a while, and I was SO excited that we finally managed to pull it all together and coordinate a day of fun and learning for all the dressage riders and eventers at the farm. HUGE thanks are due to my friend, coworker, and vet extraordinaire Rachael who spearheaded the whole thing. Thanks to you never giving up the dream of having quality training, we all got to benefit in a big way! It's always nice to head into a clinic with a positive recommendation from someone you know and trust, and I had high hopes for an educational day.

Thanks to Best Show Buddy Chris, I also have video of nearly my ENTIRE LESSON. I can't express how unbelievably helpful it's been to sit and review the audio of Ashley's teaching over the past week, allowing all I learned to really cement itself into my brain. It's going to make a big difference in being able to implement the tools I was given during the clinic so I can use them daily until our next lesson.

I got to watch a bit of the lesson before mine in between getting Dino ready, and I was a little nervous that it would be very physically demanding. The first pair spent A LOT of their ride trotting and cantering, without many walk breaks. I wasn't sure the old man and I were up for that level of intensity! But Ashley did an excellent job of tailoring each lesson to the individual pair in front of her, and most of ours was spent at the walk.

Observe Cranky Dino TM

After the typical getting-to-know-you conversation and watching us 'warm up' (i.e. she watched Dino be an incredibly grumpy old man and then saw my bombproof horse SPOOK WILDLY AT A SPOT ON THE WALL), Ashley started by digging in to my seat position. She had me drop my stirrups a big hole (eep) and had me lean alllll the way back (I literally put my head on Dino's butt) to get the feeling of where my seat should be tucked under me.

Dressage is SERIOUS BUSINESS, YOU GUYS.

It was really, really tucked. I felt like I was sitting on my pockets like some kind of cutting horse rider. My inner hunter princess was screaming. But it had the positive effects of really gluing my seat into the saddle, solidifying my torso, and allowing my leg to relax and hang down long and completely off of my pony, which leads us to the meat of the lesson: Do Not Touch That Pony With Your Legs Unless You Mean It.

I, uh, have a bad habit. It may or may not involve my constant nagging of Dino with my leg, using aids that are way way WAY too strong, and carrying us around all the time because for some reason I just think it's a better idea to do everything myself than to teach Dino to be responsible for his half of the bargain. While I'm a LOT better about this than I used to be, it's still my biggest fault as a rider (and maybe a human being?).

Ashley totally saw me in my Type-A control-freak mode, and I felt like I had just been to therapy.

Most of our lesson was spent in long-rein walk. Dino loved it. 

In gently guiding me more towards being able to do nothing while Dino does most of the work, we focused on training him to respond to very, very light forward aids. Which I've definitely worked on before in clinics, and it's usually the first thing that a new trainer wants to dig into, but coming at it with more education and skill than I had years ago made the work so, so much more effective.

Ashley wanted me to ride with my legs completely off at all times unless I was giving an aid - like visible air space between my lower leg and Dino's barrel off. She wanted me to push my heels down (inner hunter princess loved this) and make my leg as long as possible, leaving him to maintain our given speed on his own. If he slowed down at all, I was to ask once nicely with a very very light leg aid, and if he didn't respond, kick him hard until he shot forward. And he had to be FORWARD, not just moving up into a slow trot and canter, but really moving from behind in whatever gait he picked up. It only took about two strong kicks for Dino to get the picture, and after that I hardly had to get after him at all. Wash, rinse, repeat, forever and ever until Dino maintained the pace I wanted at the walk without reminders.

Ask nicely, then MAKE THE PONY GO. But tell him he's a Good Boy. 

It was here that we talked about the discipline of dressage - meaning the discipline to be consistent in training the horse to respond to the aids we give, riding the same way day in and day out, to create a happy, willing partner who knows what to expect from his rider and what the correct response is to the aids. This is, for me at least, the hardest part of it all. So often I want to skip building these responses in my horse and just decide to do all the work myself so we can get to the "fun stuff" like riding tests and showing and jumping and doing cool movements. But, as you all can discern, this leaves us with huge gaps in our training that stretch wide open as we try to progress. While Dino is a very good boy and has come a long way, he's still not terribly educated because of my tendency to shoulder all of the responsibility in our partnership for getting things done. He only knows what I teach him - which generally has been that I'll do all the work for us and use big, loud aids and he's just to plunk along while I do way, way too much.

After that excellent discussion on training philosophy while working on calibrating Dino to very light aids and me trying to leave him alone the best I could, we moved straight into canter work.

And I'd like to pause here and say that it was not an issue, at all. Which just feels like such an accomplishment for us in and of itself since the canter has been A Thing for so, so many years, especially in a lesson setting! Dino picked up the canter and we went and did the work, no drama, no fuss.

Not the best quality GIF, but you can see the straightening exercise! This was so challenging and so good for Dino! 

The first thing Ashley saw in our canter was that Dino likes to hold his haunches to the inside, throwing off his alignment and making throughness very difficult to achieve. To remedy this, she had us do a very effective straightening exercise. We were to come out of the corner onto the long side of the arena in a counter-flexion, and then make a long, shallow diagonal line vaguely towards the quarter line near A or C. So, essentially we'd correct any over-bending with the counter-flexion, and then use the diagonal line to put Dino's shoulders, head, and neck back in front of his haunches, creating straightness in the canter.

The pattern confused me a little at first, I wanted to ride it like a shallow leg yield instead of pointing my pony straight down a long diagonal path, but once I figured it out WOW did it do what we needed it to do! This exercise was the magic spell for straightness in the canter that we needed. It was tough for Dino to really use himself so correctly and he broke to the trot after the long line several times, but it was so, so effective in getting him straight and allowing all the power from his hind end to flow forward over his topline. I got to feel that "inflation" of his withers that I talked about a few weeks ago, and couldn't help but feel a big grin start to creep across my face! Plus, Dino kept a lovely quality canter going without me having to hold him in it with a vice-grip from my legs. WINNING.

HI HELLO CAN WE TALK ABOUT THE ELEVATION IN THIS CANTER PLEASE?!

We ended the lesson with just a little bit of trot on a big circle, getting a feel for the "Legs off and ask nicely" sort of ride we had accomplished at the walk and canter, and using polite leg aids to ask for more carrying power and push from Dino's hind end in the trot vs. just speeding up the tempo. I got a good idea of what I needed to do, and Dino kept up the great work, ending the session on a wonderfully positive note.

Such a vast difference from the first clip, right?! Peep that swing all the way through his tail! 

I absolutely loved working with Ashley, and am SO EXCITED that we have her booked to come teach once a month at our barn. Her teaching style is so laid-back and positive, she's completely non-judgemental about "atypical" dressage horses and riders, she wants horses to be happy in their work, and I LOVE LOVE LOVE that the concepts we worked on effected big change while actually being things I could replicate and work on between lessons on my own. While I had a great time at the Pilates In Motion clinic over the winter and Dino did some of his best trot work ever, it was really hard to recreate what Brooke had done for us in our lesson. It was just too much information, too fast, with a sort of riding-my-horse-by-proxy feel to her teaching. Valuable in its own right for sure, but after riding with Ashley this past weekend, I feel the structure of working on understanding a handful of simple concepts very well in the lesson and then practicing on my own will work much better for us. I've already been able to practice the new seat and leg position, riding with my legs off, and the straightening exercise, and had success in all of it without an instructor there to hold my hand. As someone who just can't do weekly lessons any more, being able to replicate on my own what Ashley helped us with is so, so important to me!

I'm really excited to keep working on the things we learned, and looking forward to seeing how the work improves our scores and Dino's way of going.