Warmblood By Michael Barisone Yellow Flowers: Nothing is Off-Limits I
have an enormous group of students in their 20s and 30s on their way to competing at dressage’s international level. I constantly tell them that they need to make their
young horses think along the lines of Grand Prix horses, and I’m not talking about the movements. On a daily basis, I have to say, “Guys, if you don’t have Second Level worked out, Grand Prix will never work!” You have to put a proper foundation on a horse if you want him to become your future star. When I look at young horses coming along,
there’s an order of operations from when you green break him until he’s five years old, which is when things get more serious as you consider his future. We have the training scale, of course, but you have to take inventory of who your horse is at three, four and five years old.
I like to use analogies instead of generic
riding terms and expressions like “he’s not through.” “Throughness” is an excellent term, but it doesn’t mean anything to someone who doesn’t understand it. The way I look at it, training a horse at three or four years old is like 1960’s psychology: “I’m okay, you’re okay.” I want the horse to understand my legs are okay, my hands are okay, and it’s okay to move off the leg and to yield to and accept my hand. But by age five a young horse is like dealing with a 13 to
15-year-old adolescent kid. Then it starts to be about your parents’ good old speech: “If you’re going to live in my house, you’ve got to live by my rules.” Every mother or father who’s raising a good citizen has said this to their kid. This means I’m going to put my leg on and my horse has got to deal with it—you shouldn’t grind away with roweled spurs, but you don’t take your leg off when the horse objects. These young horses are testing their boundaries; like kids,
some are easy teenagers and some are harder but the fact of the matter is they are still teenagers. When I take the rein and ask the horse to flex, he has to flex—I absolutely don’t mean for the rider to pull the horse’s head to his knee, but he has to give because you told him to, not because he felt like it. With the horses you ride on the way up the levels, nothing
can be ‘off-limits,’ which means every time you ride a corner, for example, you have to ride it in balance. Sure, you can have a marginal piaffe because the horse got behind the leg,
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it happens to the best of us, but it’s not okay if the piaffe is no good because the horse doesn’t know how to do piaffe, or has an intrinsic defect in his training. The young horse who is on the right track understands a
driving leg, a leg that makes him quick, and he understands flexion to the left or right. When I’m coming around the corner and the big mountain of yellow flowers is piled around the judge’s booth and my horse’s eyes get big, I need to be able to make him round and put my leg on and know that it will work. Therefore, the foundation has to be so strong and solid that the horse doesn’t even think about not reacting to his rider. There are three important things I ask myself before I ask my horse to do something: Can he physically do whwat I’m asking
him to do? Can he mentally understand what I’m
asking him to do? Is what I’m asking him to do fair and
reasonable? You’ve reached a good foundation when you don’t have
intrinsic defects, you can do what you want when you want, you’re not limited by something that’s off-limits, and your horse won’t say “no.” The turning point in a horse’s life is age five to seven: you don’t make a Grand Prix horse when he can do piaffe and passage, you make them when they’re five to seven years old with the intrinsic skills and the true acceptance of your aids. At the end of the day you never know which horses are
going to be Grand Prix horses. But if a horse has a shot, nothing can be off-limits. You have to address every single aspect of basic training along the way. Be clear, be fair, be consistent, reward often.
An FEI dressage rider/trainer of Long Valley, New Jersey, and Loxahatchee, Florida, Michael Barisone has a thriving training business and several horses winning at Grand Prix, including HF Victor, Urbanus and Lauren Sprieser’s Ellegria. Michael was reserve for the 2008 Olympic team riding Neruda. He and his wife, Vera Kessels-Barisone, a Dutch native and Grand Prix dressage rider, purchase foals in Holland each year and produce all of their own Grand Prix horses.
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