The Education of Toti
Same turning exercise to the left. You can see by the length of Cedar’s stride how much Toti is marching forward into his left bend. The long lines are organized in a modified “Plinzer.” The reins start from the surcingle, go through the top rings, down through the snaffle rings and back to the hands through the surcingle rings. This sliding arrangement allows Toti to find his own position on the contact, with his poll generally at the highest point, while maintaining the possibility to stretch his neck forward.
holds or gives. The lesson starts at the walk and Cedar can use the pointing of the lunge whip to help him understand which way he needs to go without getting stuck in one direction or the other.
Make Your Own Vinaigrette Training is like making a vinaigrette: it is governed by taste, not by a one-fits-all recipe. You can make different tasting vinaigrette every day, using whatever is in the fridge, as long as you taste it as you go to make sure it works out. Think of this process of small trials and errors governed by feel as you train your horse. In the end, the horse must be like your salad dressing: not too bland (lack of impulsion), not too sharp (too excited), not too fluid (escaping in all directions) and not too sticky (resist- ing the aids). Anybody who likes salad should make their own dressing instead of buying it off the shelf. Then apply the same sense of observation and deduction to horse training instead of always relying on somebody else’s opinion. That way, you and your horse will progress in skill and timing. The “ingredients” of dressage are described in every
book, but what matters is to observe what the ingredi- ents actually do for that horse in that moment, during that phase of training, according to your (reasonable) training goal. All the resistances we encounter in training can be simplified to a short list: loss of balance (needs to straighten out the front legs laterally), lack of impul- sion (quicken the lift of the foot to remove the brace and ask for an immediate transition from two tracks to one track), loss of direction (quicken the reflexes of the horse to obey the reins and practice a forward one track turn),
40 September/October 2016
and/or lack of suppleness (vary the angle of the lateral movement progressively so the horse can cope with the limited demand). Every one of those lateral exercises and transitions has
many possible variables and the value of each evolves from day to day, so trust yourself and don’t worry about making mistakes. Training is often two steps forward and one step back. In fact, never hesitate to step back and secure each piece of education firmly in the horse’s mind. Use repetition with diminishing pressure until relaxation occurs. There is no such thing as a unique, ultimate solu- tion to training a horse. The work I’ve described here will benefit Toti through- out his career, all the way to Grand Prix. This is why I go back to it so often in the training and will keep mention- ing its progress in further issues.
JP Giacomini’s career spans 50 years, during which he has trained close to 20 Grand Prix horses and worked on thou- sands of remedial horses of every imaginable breed, both in Europe and in the U.S. He first started colts under the direct supervision of Nuno Oliveira and later at the National Portu- guese Stud of Alter Real, where he spent four years. He has produced international winners in all three disciplines and invented a unique training method called “Endotapping,” which is a development of the classical dressage methods he learned in his youth. Besides his client’s horses, JP also focuses on training the Iberian Sport Horses he breeds at his and his wife Shelley’s Baroque Farms USA in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. JP can be reached at
jpgiacomini@gmail.com or at
www.jpgiacomini.com.
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