What We Wish We’d Known About Dressage

Those who have excelled in their dressage careers offer wisdom

By Emily Esterson

This article is reprinted from the September/October 2023 issue of USDF Connection magazine.

Ten thousand rides, 20,000 hours, or a lifetime in the saddle. However you choose to measure the amount of time it takes to gain expertise in dressage, it is undeniably a long process.

Those who have spent many years learning this always-fascinating, often-difficult, occasionally-frustrating, and ultimately-rewarding sport have much hard-won wisdom to share with the next generation of dressage enthusiasts. For this article, we asked a selection of judges, instructor/trainers, and amateur riders what they wish they’d known about dressage when they were embarking on their own journeys through the levels.

The Judges

The “three mysteries of dressage,” according to US Equestrian “S” dressage judge Maryal Barnett, are: Will I ever be able to sit the trot? Will I ever be able to get my horse on the bit? Am I ever going to be able to truly collect my horse?

Barnett, an instructor/trainer and former USDF L program faculty member from Holt, Michigan, recalls scribing for the late Maj. Gen. Jonathan Burton when the Roemer Foundation/USDF Hall of Fame member put her on the spot by asking her to describe the three most important things in riding dressage. He then answered his own question: “The seat, the seat, and the seat.”

Barnett herself was judging a lot locally at the time, and she agreed with Burton’s assessment. “I thought, Oh my god, [riders] can’t sit the trot. How are you going to be able to do anything humanely, do the movement, if your seat is not there?” She wants aspiring dressage riders to know that the way to develop a good seat is first to know what a good seat looks like, and then to take lunge lessons with a knowledgeable instructor.

Although Barnett has ridden since her aunt put her on a horse at the age of four, she did not know that dressage existed until she and her then-husband took their two children to the 1961 Michigan State Fair, where future Roemer Foundation/USDF Hall of Famer Chuck Grant gave a dressage exhibition.

“I had never seen anything like that, and it hooked me,” Barnett says. She soaked up as much dressage education as she could, taking lessons and clinics and attending judges’ forums. Her own competitive career stalled for a while, but she kept at it and eventually reached the Grand Prix level, winning numerous awards along the way.

Even if a dressage enthusiast has no interest in becoming a dressage judge, “you will learn so much” from auditing the USDF L program, Barnett says. “There is so much information, in that it is an accumulation of everyone who has been on the faculty. It’s the knowledge I had to fight for in my life, rather than it being presented to me.”

Likewise, the USDF Instructor/Trainer Development Program workshops have much to offer, even if a rider or trainer does not aspire to earn instructor certification.

Thanks to the proliferation of online videos, educational opportunities exist today that were unheard of when Barnett was climbing the levels. She cautions, however, that students of dressage must be knowledgeable enough to identify experts who follow the established basic principles. She explains: “When I talk about basics, I mean the pyramid of training. Everyone should know and understand that.”

Dressage can be all-encompassing, but Barnett recommends cultivating other interests and friends who are outside the horse world. At dinners at the competitions where she judges, she makes a point of trying to sit next to non-riders “so we can talk about things other than horses.”

“S” judge Natalie Lamping has learned the value of patience and preparation in producing both correct training and high-scoring dressage tests.

“Things take time,” says Lamping, of Ocala, Florida, a USDF bronze, silver, and gold medalist whose silver medal was the first one ever awarded. “You have to be patient, and you have to teach the horse to wait. Everyone is trying to catch up to the horse; that’s when horses take over and become short in the neck and overbent,” she says. When the horse anticipates, “you will end up playing catch-up with your horse, and it gets worse as the movements get harder.”

Preparing to show should be a thorough, detailed process, says Lamping, who adds that she doesn’t often see a truly well-executed test. Before competitors go down center line, she says, they need to learn the test, read the directive ideas, and truly understand what is expected of a horse and rider at that level.

Another frequently missing piece is the understanding of how each dressage test builds on the previous ones. Competitors who skip over tests often have missing skills, says Lamping, who shares test-riding advice on her Facebook blog, LampPost.

The Eventers

He taught high-school English before he became a world-class eventing competitor, so it’s not surprising that 1974 World Eventing Championships veteran Denny Emerson, of Strafford, Vermont (How Good Riders Get Good; Know Better to Do Better; Begin and Begin Again), brings a thoughtful, intellectual approach to an otherwise adrenaline-fueled sport.

Eventing in the 1960s and ’70s was pretty rough and ready, Emerson says, with most riders not truly understanding what the dressage phase was about. As a result, he says, “There were flexed jaws that were levered on to make the horse obedient.”

In Emerson’s 53 seasons at preliminary or above, he has learned the importance of gauging his mounts’ anxiety during training.

“A horse would rather be left alone,” he explains. “When humans train or teach horses to do things, the horse first of all has to be physically strong enough to handle the pressure. A horse can only do what it is strong enough to do, and then it can only do what it has been taught to do.”

We train horses through pressure. When we ask a horse to bend, to go forward, and to half-halt, we are applying pressure, both physically and psychologically. Emerson now understands that “when those pressures go past the anxiety threshold, you may get the horse to do it; but if you make the horse nervous, you have won the battle but lost the war. An anxious horse doesn’t learn well.”

Emerson tells impatient equestrians to consider how long it takes to become a doctor, or a lawyer, or an engineer. Acquiring a horsemanship education is likewise a long, slow, time-consuming, difficult activity. There are no shortcuts— something he finds younger riders may not want to hear. “Part of that has to do with age; kids are fierce and have competitive fervor,” he says. “They lose sight of what’s going on, and they might not listen.”

He has also learned that not every horse possesses the physical ability or the temperament to perform high-level dressage. So “if you are struggling, take a look at the horse you are sitting on. What are his abilities for the sport you are doing?”

Laine Ashker, of Chesterfield, Virginia, wishes she could turn back the clock to when she was a teenaged Pony Club member and eventing enthusiast who was offered the opportunity to train with the late German dressage master Georg Theodorescu for a few months.

She turned it down, saying that she wanted to be an eventer, not a dressage rider.

“I am still kicking myself for that,” Ashker admits.

Ironically, although Ashker did indeed become a successful eventer, competing through the five-star level at Kentucky, Burghley, and others, she has also become a “dressage queen” in her own right, earning her USDF gold medal in 2019 aided by coaching from Canadian dressage Olympian Jacquie Brooks.

“Dressage has taught me so much about fitness, nutrition, and balance,” Ashker says. “It’s been a learning and humbling experience.”

She describes dressage as the art of patience. “There are a ton of different exercises and a whole different symbiosis and harmony—a lot of ‘less is more.’ For example, I didn’t understand what a proper half-halt was, and that you have to do way less.”

That epiphany came courtesy of Olympian and Roemer Foundation/USDF Hall of Fame member Michael Poulin. Ashker was training her mount Atlas in piaffe when Poulin told her that she was kicking too much. “We eventers ride with two active legs,” Ashker says, referring to the way she approaches a jump. But for piaffe, Poulin explained, “I needed to use my leg, but it needed to be a whisper. In dressage land, you use whispering aids.”

Along the way, Ashker gained a new appreciation for top dressage riders’ skills.

“It’s incredible what they do. It doesn’t come from force. It comes from patience, really good training, relaxation. That’s one thing people miss in getting expression. It comes through relaxation.”

It was Brooks who gave Ashker the self-confidence to problem-solve issues that she encountered in dressage training. Atlas wasn’t easy to ride in the flying changes, and Brooks “asked me how I would work through it with an event horse.” Ashker responded by saying she’d try a bit other than a snaffle for schooling purposes, and a Waterford triple ring proved just the ticket.

Finally, if Ashker had it to do over again, she would tell her ambitious younger self that success in dressage may take a while.

“I’ve taken years to become an overnight success,” she says. “You just have to keep plugging away.”

Ashker won her first CDI at the Mid-Atlantic Dressage Festival in Virginia in May.

The Adult Amateurs

When Arizona State University associate professor Mary Jane Parmentier got started in dressage, she didn’t grasp the fact that the levels and the tests are training guides, not just patterns used in competition.

“The levels are designed so that you’re training a Grand Prix horse, and I didn’t really understand that,” says Parmentier, who has brought her Polish Warmblood, Tango-S, to Fourth Level from a four-year-old, going “through every test and every level” in the process.

Parmentier got the dressage bug at 15, when she worked with a trainer who was short-listed for the Olympic team, which gave the girl the opportunity to groom for her coach at US Equestrian Team Foundation headquarters in Gladstone, New Jersey. Later, Parmentier purchased a Quarter Horse named Dundee and moved to Colorado, where she rode with dressage pro and judge Janet “Dolly” Hannon.

“I learned a ton working with Dolly,” Parmentier says.

Parmentier has also learned the value of schoolmasters—well-educated dressage horses, but ones that aren’t necessarily easy to ride. When she moved to Phoenix to take the job at Arizona State, she began riding at Central Arizona Riding Academy with Ulrich Schmitz and Dorie Vlatten-Schmitz, who allowed her to show their schoolmaster, Bennigan, through Intermediate I.

“Bennigan was not always round, but I learned a ton on him,” Parmentier says.

Dressage can be hard work, but New Mexico-based amateur rider Holly Dietz, DVM, has learned that if the fun goes out of it for horse or rider, then the pair is on the wrong path.

“It still has to be enjoyable. If you drill them too much, it becomes no fun, and that’s when injuries occur,” says Dietz, a former reproductive specialist veterinarian for the Albuquerque- based sport-horse breeding facility Horses Unlimited.

Instead, “The key is to get a little bit every day, and every time you ride ask for a little bit more,” she says. “It has to be fun.”

Dietz, who has ridden reiners and jumpers during her lifelong involvement in the horse world, has brought several horses up the levels in dressage, has won numerous Great American/USDF Regional Championship titles, and most recently has shown her Hanoverian mare, Daxia, at Intermediate I.

Training a horse is “all about the little things,” says Dietz. “It’s all about the forward and the connection. It takes time to develop that, but then the rest comes easy.”

Studying the judges’ comments on her test sheets has helped Dietz to learn and likewise to improve her scores. She calls showing an important part of the dressage education process because it “gives you critiques about what they saw, and then you realize what the details are that you need to work on. For example, when they comment about the hind end being out, or comment on shoulder-in [being] one-track to the inside, you start to connect the judges’ comments to feel….I love going back and looking at my test at the end, and I’ll think, ‘Oh yeah, I felt that.’”

Have Patience

Above all, dressage veterans say they wish they’d understood the importance of patience in developing themselves as riders and their horses as willing, capable partners. They would strive not to let an educational opportunity slip by, and they would value their own horsemanship instincts and also pay closer attention to what their horses are trying to tell them.

About the Author

Emily Esterson is the author of The Ultimate Book of Bits and writes about horses for various publications. She is an eventer and a dressage enthusiast who competes her Connemara cross, Rivendell’s Olive Lucy.