Coaching vs riding technique, Alexander work and saddle fitting

I would estimate that "dressage", at least the kind with self carriage and throughness, is 99% rider effectiveness and 1% horse. Certainly, if you want to be competitive, you have to have a suitable horse but if you don't ride him well you won't win in todays competitive arenas. And even if you never care to compete(certainly understandable), it is hugely more fun to ride well:->.

There are a lot of approaches to teaching dressage: "Coaching" i.e., 'get your horse to do "Z"', is the most common. This assumes that the rider is riding/communicating at a high level. If it becomes apparent that the rider is not.... then if you're lucky, a "teaching riding" i.e.,'sit deep, heels down, sit tall, look up, shorten your reins' type of lesson will ensue. All of which can be excellent suggestions and sometimes work well IF the rider doesn't have a more fundamental issue in her body that is preventing her from being able to comply. There are some master coaches who use precise horse exercises to teach the rider how to ride and firmly hold that the instructor should not be sharing the details or biomechanics with the rider, Conrad Schumacher is one of these. Other masters use only rider exercises, Eckart Meyners, Mary Wanless, Sandy Howard, Sally Swift all teach the rider directly and the majority of the rest use some combination. What distiguishes the "masters" from the majority of trainers that I see is that they do know that it is the rider and they have a plan to address that. My concern is with those who do not either understand the basic problem is the rider or have no idea how to address it. To expect the horse to leap up and offer the correct movement just because the coach on the ground keeps asking for it is silly and rather rude. So how do I choose to teach riding skills so that I get correct results when I start "coaching" again? I start by explaining to the rider what we want the horse to do and why using simple biomechanics and the training scale. Once the rider and I agree then I use an easy mirroring exercise e.g., the horse is tight and hovering over the ground so I help the rider to "ground", have them walk off and watch the mirroring by the horse. The riders almost always feel it so then we have a basis for communication. We feel the horse and decide on what would work better, then we help the rider to feel that change in her body. Simple, but not always easy. 1. improve her awareness of what she is doing, 2. why it isn't working the way she wants, 3.what to do about it. Simple steps if you have a good guide/teacher. I have mentioned above some masters that I have directly or indirectly studied with and in particular Mary Wanless has used Alexander work.

The "Alexander technique" knows nothing about riding horses (nor ballet or singing for that matter and it has been used in these fields for many years. Alexander work, on one of it's levels, is a "users guide to your body". Just the simple understanding of how our bodies were biomechanically designed to function is hugely useful, regardless of what you want to actually do! Every day I see the rider make a tiny change and I am still astounded at how quickly the horse can hear you and mirror the change. Pretty soon (sometime hours) you get pretty clever and when the "coach" says more bend, they see more bend. I have a number of students who are to this place and it is sooo easy to teach "dressage" to them! Knowing how the horse moves most efficiently, is a much better understood body of knowledge than how the human moves best (odd really there are a heck of lot more humans than horses).