Blog :: Horses and Riding
October 2006
Videos on Dressage
Following the post on Books on Dressage, I was asked via email if I know any good videos on dressage.
I’m afraid I know even less about videos than I do about books to recommend. On the forums (when in doubt, see what a bunch of stranges have to say…), when videos come up people say “pick your favorite instructional video” and go from there. I can’t find any old threads where videos are discussed in detail.
On a whim, I did try NetFlix. You never know. Turns out, in a search for dressage, Star Trek, the Original Series, Vol. 16-28 comes up. I’ll leave it to you to find out why, but I think we can scratch NetFlix off the list.
A Google search for “dressage video reviews” did come up with a helpful site: Classical-Dressage.net. Scroll down on the menu on the left to find the “Video Reviews” link.
One bad thing about this site: they don’t list which videos they’ve reviewed in any way I can see, so you can’t jump quickly from review to review. But at the bottom of each review page, they have a link to the next video review. I don’t know how many reviews they have total, but they have at least three–just keep reading the reviews, scrolling down, and clicking to the next one.
I didn’t see any other very promising sites in the top ten results (Equisearch has a book and video review page, but it looks like they mostly have book reviews. You can try the site, though, and scroll through all the results–there might be videos in there somewhere). But if you have particular videos in mind, you can always search for them +review and see if anything comes up.
You might also try talking with your local tack store–sometimes, they have videos to rent out. This way, you can preview them and, if you find one you like, you can always buy a copy. If the tack store doesn’t have videos to rent, the owner might still know which videos are ordered the most often–at least you’d know what was popular, even though that doesn’t always mean good.
And a last-ditch option is to try E-Bay. You should be able to buy videos cheaply. If they work for you, great! If not, you can always resell them on E-Bay. You might be able to get back at least part of the cost of buying the video in the first place, and even if you don’t, at least you won’t have spent as much money as you would have buying out of a catalog. Just be careful with E-Bay–most sellers are legitimate, but there are scammers on there. E-Bay has FAQs and help pages that deal with scammers, I’m sure, so take some time reading them if you aren’t familiar with how the E-Bay scammers operate/how to identify a scammer’s auction.
Per Request: Books on Dressage
Riderone’s request for information about books on dressage comes at a good time, because I’ve been thinking about this topic lately. I actually don’t own any instructional horse books. I don’t know why I don’t, and lately I’ve been pondering the same question: what books to buy first?
Funny but true: the only instructional horse book I’ve ever owned was called Judging Hunt Seat Equitation or something like that, and it was given to me for Christmas when I was a teen. I promptly “lost” the book, because I was certain my mother and my trainer were plotting some devious scheme to make me actually judge a local schooling show (one the older teens put on every year for the young kids). It never occured to me that my trainer might have recommended the book simply because it was a good overview of what judges look for in equitation. Boy, talk about distrustful teens!
Anyway. Dressage books.
Fortunately, I have a solution for us both. I lurk (and sometimes post) on the Chronicle of the Horse bulletin board. In the dressage forum, someone else recently started a post called “If you could recommend ONE dressage book…“. The votes for books (and some of the comments as to why) are:
- Dressage in Harmony (Zettl)—5 votes
- Podhajsky—; 5 votes (not everyone gave a book title, but his name comes up several times)
- The Principles of Riding (Handbook from the German National Equestrian Federation)—3 votes
- Dressage with Kyra (or similar title, by Kyra Kirkland)—2 votes
- The Dressage Manual (by Benjt Ljundquist)—2 votes (“understandable”)
- Riding Logic (Museler)—2 votes (and one poster who thinks some of the examples are wrong)
- Horsemanship (Suenig)—2 votes (and another poster who likes the book but wouldn’t recommend it to a beginner)
- Basic Training of the Young Horse (Klimke)—1 vote
- Dressage: A study of the finer points of riding (Henry Wynmalen)—1 vote
- The USDF Book of Dressage—1 vote
- Dressage in Lightness (Sylvia Loch)—1 vote (“some very good descriptions of how a horse interprets the aids”)
- Common Sense Dressage (Sally O’Connor)—1 vote (recc’d for the exercises)
- Dressage Forumla (Erik Heberman)—1 vote (“great concepts to take down the road”)
- Real Life Dressage (Carl Hester)—1 vote
- Riding and Jumping
Personally, I lean towards Podhajsky and Zettle, as these are the names I see most frequently in “recommended reading” discussions (in addition to this thread).
(And if I somehow got the vote count wrong, forgive me. I’ve been known to count my fingers and get eleven, sometimes.)
September 2006
Why Dressage Riders Make Good Webmasters
It’s because we’re anal.
What? Was I not supposed to say that? We’re precise, then. We like precision.
My problem, of course, is that I was never very good a precision. Take geometry, for example. It’s one of the most relevant school subjects to dressage, don’t you agree? All about figures and shapes and things.
My geometry books had lots of sketches of pool tables in them. You had to figure out the path to hit the little white ball so it’d bounce of the little red ball and send the little red ball into the pocket. My brother understood it all, of course. He’s a good pool player. I don’t even know what the little white ball is called.
But since I want very much to be anal, I am convinced the little drawings of pool tables have something to do with dressage. Angles, vectors, I don’t know what. All I know is that I turn the corner to go up the centerline trying to plot my path out so I’ll halt right at X, and suddenly I’m six feet past it and just left of center. Kind of like the way every time I hit the little white ball it goes off in a completely unexpected direction and puts one of my brother’s balls in the pocket.
I keep trying, though. It’s the anal thing. I can do a thousand turns up the centerline, if that’s what it takes to figure out the mysteriously correct angle. Vector. Whatever. The horse will do a thousand turns up the centerline, too, because she’s no dummy and knows that halt-at-x is the last thing that happens before she gets to go off and eat lunch.
The point is: persistence. Niggling. Refusing to let go of something until all the details are perfect.
I’m like that with web sites, too. Other people will look at their hits and go “Oh, goody! Lots of visitors today! Yawn! Bed time!” I look up “hits” and discover it’s a bloody useless statistic, so then I look up which statistics are useful, and then I do reverse I.P. lookups, and suddenly I’m an expert on site statistics.
I could get an entire barn full of hunter princesses who think dressage is more boring than watching paint dry to beg to be allowed to watch an entire day of Intro-level tests, if only they didn’t have to listen to me explain why hits are a useless statistic.
Now I just need to find out a way to translate all the techy details into normal speech so I don’t scare everyone off all the time. I’m sure there’s a book that explains how to do that. I bet it even has diagrams.
I’ll pay extra for diagrams.
When is it “ok” to buy a green horse?
I am not a fan of green riders–whether they are totally new to horses or are re-riders trying to re-learn what they used to know–buying green horses.
I want to buy a green horse.
I’m a re-rider.
Yes, I know. Green + Green = Black + Blue.
The thing is… (and isn’t there always a “The thing is…”?) I’ve never had a chance to really work with a green horse for an extended period. I’ve had plenty of small training opportunities, and I loved them, but never a greenie. It’s something I always wanted to do.
It’s just the danger of failing what could otherwise be a very nice horse scares me. And I know that’s a very real danger for re-riders, who know more than their bodies can actually do.
Six months ago, what I knew and what I could do weren’t on the same page. They weren’t even in the same book. Or library. Actually, I doubt they were in the same time zone. Right now, I’d like to think I’m back in the same book. It might be a very thick book, but I’m pretty sure it’s the same one. Only this time it has footnotes, as the things I used to know sort of “click” what what I’m doing now.
I’d just like to know what page I need to be on by this time next year so that I can get a green horse and not worry quite so much that it’s a completely inappropriate decision.
Where’s that magic checklist? You know the one: you get one point for each of the following skills that you can do right this moment, and a quarter point for each of the following skills that you used to do, plus five points for every day you would be able to work the green horse, plus ten points for each of those days that would be in lesson situations with an experienced trainer, and if your total points are X or more, you may buy a green horse.
The sad thing is this whole “green or school master” anxiety thing is sooooo misplaced. It’ll be at least a year before I can buy a horse of any color, and who knows where I’ll be, skill wise, this time next year? More importantly, who knows if I’ll even meet my financial goals? I shouldn’t worry about this question until I’m ready to start looking.
For all I know, all I’ll be able to afford will be a My Little Pony.
I wonder if there are any green My Little Ponies?