The Song Remains the Same

Back for the second year at the Succeed/USDF FEI-Level Trainers’ Conference, Steffen Peters and Scott Hassler prove there’s no such thing as too many repetitions of their training philosophy

Story and Photographs by Jennifer O. Bryant

This story is reprinted from the April 2014 issue of USDF Connection.

I was actually worried I’d struggle to find a fresh angle in reporting on the 2014 Succeed/USDF FEI-Level Trainers’ Conference.

The January 20-21 event, held at Mary Anne and Walter McPhail’s High Meadow Farm in Loxahatchee, FL, featured Olympian Steffen Peters and United States Equestrian Federation national dressage young-horse coach Scott Hassler.

Just like last year.

In the April 2013 issue of this magazine, I covered that wildly successful conference (“Peters and Hassler Raise the Bar”)—pretty exhaustively. The same two men returned to conduct the 2014 conference, using the same format: Peters in the ring, coaching the demonstration riders and intermittently riding the demo horses himself; Hassler offering commentary from the sidelines. How different could their message be?

I was foolish to have worried.

Dressage is so simple yet so complex. The classical training principles—the pyramid of training and so on—are not that difficult to comprehend. Yet they are so hard to execute correctly that we keep coming back, year after year, generation after generation, to learn from masters who all keep saying more or less the same thing. And judging by the large conference turnout—337 registrants, up from just under 300 last year—we never get bored.

Peters’ and Hassler’s standards are high—world-class high—and almost certainly stricter than your own (or mine, so please don’t take offense). Watch these men in action for a while and you will become painfully conscious of what Peters calls the compromises we make with our horses, or our willingness to “kick the can down the road,” as he puts it. You will become acutely aware of whatever rationalizations, sloppiness, laziness, or impatience creeps into your daily training. And you will be reminded that salvation is not to be found in bigger spurs, a longer whip, a stronger bit, or the latest gizmo or gadget. It is to be found within your own body and your own brain.

Training the Response to the Leg

“It is easy to say the horse must go forward. No; he must go respectfully forward,” said Peters as he coached demo rider Mette Larsen aboard her somewhat hot and tense five-year-old KWPN gelding, Deklan.

“Think about your driving aid,” Peters told Heidi Degele, as she worked to get a prompter reaction from the six-year-old Oldenburg gelding Don Fredo HD. “Can I keep my horse forward with my leg nice and quiet on his sides?”

Here is where many riders have been known to make a deal with the devil—by tolerating a reaction to the leg that is less than immediate and respectful. It’s a good thing that Peters was narrating while he rode the demonstration horses, for otherwise it would have been hard to see what he was doing. His invisible aids result from a combination of perfect timing and an insistence that the horse respond to the lightest aids. He refuses to escalate his driving aids—light leg, strong squeeze, kick, kick some more, spur, whip, and so on.

There are three building blocks when working a horse: suppleness, suppleness, and suppleness.

– Steffen Peters

Instead, “I use the part of the boot right below the knee. I like to use that as my driving aid—a gentle pressure point to get a reaction. I use my spur as a reminder, not as a supporting aid.”

And if the horse doesn’t react sufficiently for Peters’ liking? He doesn’t hesitate to use a strong leg, or the spur, or a tap with the whip; but he immediately repeats the light aid to see whether the horse has learned his lesson. Rinse, repeat, as many times as it takes.

When you try this on your own horse and you’re feeling frustrated, try to recall Peters’ words:
“I believe we can make 98 percent of dressage horses sensitive to the leg. I don’t kick. The leg is an aid. A kick is punishment. The whip is a poor excuse for the leg.”

Correct leg aids start with a correct leg position: “a nice straight leg, the toe underneath the knee. This is a neutral leg position,” Peters explained. “If I need to create more energy, I close the leg and cluck with the tongue; I might draw the leg a little bit back for a moment. Then I go straight back to the neutral position.”

At home it’s all about training and high standards, but in competition, sometimes you have to git-r-done, Peters said. “That’s my goal, but in the show arena I have pictures of myself with my heel up, supporting the horse. If the horse won’t piaffe, I can’t say, ‘Well, those are my principles. I have to get it done if I ask for piaffe and I get a square halt.”

Along with his emphasis on light aids, Peters uses his leg in a quiet way—no exaggerated movements or wildly differing positions. He told a couple of the demo riders to quiet their flying-change aids, for example. When he rides, his leg position changes but it’s subtle—rarely enough to distract the eye. When the horse is truly in front of the leg, of course, he’s conditioned to respond to these subtle movements, and the result is that sought-after appearance that the rider is sitting there doing nothing while the horse dances of his own accord.

Connection: The Other Piece of the Puzzle

If a correct response to the leg is half of Peters’ holy grail, then correct connection is the other half.

By correct he means quiet and relaxed in the mouth and jaw, reaching for the bit in a respectful and elastic manner, and supple and yielding in the body so that the driving aids go “through” the horse and connect the hind legs to the bridle.

“I find this one of the most confused issues in the sport—‘Push him from behind into the hand,” Peters said. “The horse needs to understand the idea of suppleness. Relaxation. Working within the gait.”

The “leg into hand” concept frequently gets misinterpreted as a push-pull activity, Peters said. Unless the horse is truly supple, he said, “push him into the hand” doesn’t work.

Peters does not resort to using the bit to stop the horse. “When I give a bit more rein, does he stop running? He needs to stretch into the bit when I give the rein. I see way too many horses taking complete advantage of this.”

Hassler added: “If the horse is running, his mouth is not running. His brain and his legs are running.”

When Peters rides, every step has a purpose. Although he is a stickler about giving plenty of walk breaks—he said many riders work for too long between breaks—there is no aimless meandering on a loose rein. (He said he thinks extended walk during breaks, to ensure good activity.)

He’s also a master at riding the horse in the outline that will best develop his muscles and his mind at that moment. When he got on the tense Deklan, he explained: “I had to ride him a little lower in the neck [to put him in] the best position to relax”—quickly adding, “Not long and low. Not pulling forward or down on the bit.”

Peters maintained a steady, elastic contact through a series of simple transitions and figures until Deklan settled into the work. “I’m riding him a bit low and deep,” Peters explained. “This is the best frame for learning to use the correct muscles, not the under neck.”

“As frustrating as this can be with young horses, I just have to be patient,” Peters said while riding yet another circle. “Giving the rein would be counterproductive. I use my core muscles when he comes against the bit. I have to wait for him to take a deep breath.” And even when there is tension or a lack of suppleness on the end of the rein, “Let’s not let our horses talk us into fussing with the bit.”

Climbing aboard a tense and spooky Sir Velo on the first day of the conference, Peters picked up a forward rising trot, explaining that he doesn’t sit when the back is tight. “He will lose the connection if I try to get him to stretch down,” he explained. “Find the best, most productive frame for every horse.”

Peters reads a horse’s mouth the way a fortune-teller reads tea leaves. “Nothing expresses the mood of the horse more than the mouth,” he said.

Although a horse’s acceptance of the bit can be improved, Peters believes it’s inherently better in some horses than others. Guess which kind he chooses?

“Ridability, the ability to carry—they’re either born with or they’re not. I like to get on a horse and address what is it like in the mouth. Some have made it their mission to fight the bridle for the rest of their life,” he said.

I don’t like the term “relaxation.”
I like “inner peace.”

– Scott Hassler

“It’s never bothered me when a horse is too light,” Peters added. “It’s harder when the horse grabs the bit.” Crossing the jaw, pulling—these habits are more difficult to break, he said, whereas there are many things he can do—such as switching to a milder bit—to encourage a too-light horse to take a gentle contact.

At the same time, Hassler cautioned, “Lightness can be misinterpreted as connection. Air is not a connection.”

The Trainers’ Toolbox

When Peters gets on a horse, he makes riding look effortless. That is because he trains the horse to be the one making the effort.

“We have to teach our horses to offer the movements,” he said. That includes even mundane elements like corners. When he rode Angela Jackson’s mount, Allure S, he commented that “She could offer the corners a tiny bit more. I have to manage the corners too much.”

Coaching Noel Williams aboard Sir Velo, Peters counseled: “He talks you into helping him a bit too much. You might get away with that at Prix St. Georges and I-I, but not at Grand Prix. He wants you to micromanage him too much.”

JJ Tate’s mount, Fabergé, is a “laid-back gentleman,” said Peters, who cautioned against falling into the trap of riding transitions aggressively for fear of stalling out or breaking.

From the trot, “Ride the transition into piaffe passively,” Peters instructed. “If he walks, you know what to do.”

“If my horse is in doubt whether he should walk or piaffe, he should piaffe,” he said. And the horse must always think forward: “If you can’t get out of it [piaffe] in one step, you shouldn’t be in it.”

For passage, “I try to reach down into my heel and then use my entire leg. Th at’s got to be enough to maintain the passage. It’s so tempting to lift him [the horse] with the seat, but it doesn’t work.”

“You want to own it,” said Hassler, referring to the gaits, tempo, and movements. “Don’t be satisfied with less.”

That ownership includes the horse’s mind as well as his body. On day two of the conference, Deklan was reluctant to pass by the opening to the arena, near the spectators. Peters had rider Mette Larsen circle repeatedly—first in walk, and later in trot and canter—edging closer and closer to the dreaded entrance. The rider was not to back off her standards; Deklan’s reward was a pat when he stayed focused and relaxed.

“When you feel the horse get tense, stay composed. The reward is the walk break,” said Hassler.

Circling was the right move for Deklan, as it was for Sir Velo. When the latter got distracted and froze, Peters told Williams to “keep turning. When you turn a horse, you get his attention.”

In dressage we tend to use the rail a lot, but Peters said it can become a crutch. Riding Allure S, he schooled half-steps well off the track.

“I don’t like to use the wall to make them straight,” he said. “I want them straight because of my aids.” He also uses the center line frequently as a test of straightness, asking himself: “Do I have to ride a bit of neck bend or shoulder-fore, or can I keep it simple?”

Another area that’s sometimes overlooked is the halt. Peters had many of the demo riders practice halting along the short side.

“When they’re square, let them stand still,” he said. “Often they’ll take a deep breath.”

Peters also likes to test the walk pirouettes, noting that “I’ve never seen a horse that does a terrible walk pirouette that does a good piaffe.” To Olivia LaGoy-Weltz on Rassing’s Lonoir, he advised ensuring that the tempo of the walk pirouette remains the same as that of the walk: “Ninety percent of horses need to speed up the tempo in the walk pirouette.”

Mix It Up

Many dressage riders school using the same blueprint every day: warm up, walk, trot, canter, done. Peters and Hassler say they achieve better development of the gaits by alternating sequences. They also use variety within a given exercise or movement to test a horse’s adjustability and to develop collection and improved responses to the aids.

“Mix up the order of the gait work,” Hassler advised. “With many horses, I canter before I do the trot work.”

The clinicians emphasized that collection and the higher-level movements are not off limits to all but FEI-level horses; rather, they are valuable training tools through the levels. A simple example would be walk-canter transitions, which Hassler said “give the horse the feeling of being on the hind legs.”

Both men like to introduce flying changes at a relatively young age. Peters, for one, is not a fan of counter-canter, which he believes diminishes the quality of the gait. And school too much true-lead canter and counter-canter and it may become difficult to get the horse out of the mindset of holding the lead, he said.

Even more advanced movements, like piaffe, are excellent training tools for younger horses. To Heidi Degele on Don Fredo HD, Peters said: “Piaffe is a great exercise for this horse to help him learn to close up [his hind legs]—not to overface him but to help him understand collection.”

Peters looks to the horse’s natural tendencies in deciding how to school piaffe. With a horse that needs to become more active behind, especially one with a laid-back nature, “Trot forward; then bring him back to half-steps,” he advised Ilse Schwarz on the seven-year-old Don Joseph. In contrast, he had LaGoy-Weltz piaffe from the walk because Rassing’s Lonoir already had plenty of “sit,” and also because the horse’s trot edged toward “passage-like” in the collection, he said.

A horse does not have not just one piaffe and passage, Peters noted. “You should be able to ride both a forward passage and a shorter passage—passage, not piaffe—for schooling,” he told Noel Williams.

In schooling upper-level horses, “it’s so tempting to go to piaffe-passage in one part of the work,” Peters said. Just as he mixes up the gaits and exercises, he likes to intersperse piaffe-passage work with other exercises during a session.

Here’s one elastic band of a combination: Right before he goes in the show ring, Peters said, he likes to ride one center line in a stretchy rising trot; then he sits and asks for piaffe.

A Collaborative Process

Although Peters rode most of the demonstration horses, he explained that there were times when it was best he didn’t get on.

The ten-year-old Fabergé is learning the Grand Prix, including the one-tempi changes. As Peters said to rider JJ Tate, “It might not be beneficial for me to get on [and ask for one-tempis] because I might have a different way of asking when he’s learning.”

He never got on Rassing’s Lonoir at all, explaining that the horse had had “a difficult past” and that he and rider LaGoy-Weltz agreed it was best not to introduce a variable when the horse had established a bond with his rider.

Feedback from the riders is important to both clinicians, who said that communication between rider and trainer is a two-way street, not a dictatorship. Likewise, their enjoyment in working with different types of horses was evident.

Of Allure S, Peters said: “She has such an incredible work ethic. She doesn’t want to go to college; she wants to be a professor.”

Some of Peters’ highest praise went to LaGoy-Weltz and Rassing’s Lonoir, whom he said he hopes to be seeing at some national competitions.

“This is one of those horse-rider combinations where we don’t want to come in [and make changes] just because we were hired to do a clinic. We just need to shut up and appreciate it.”

A Clear Path for Every Horse

According to Peters and Hassler, their goals for the 2014 conference were twofold: to show the principles of dressage training in a transparent and understandable way; and to present the material in a positive and encouraging fashion.

“We’ve all been through riding programs where things were negative and demoralizing,” Peters explained. “We want to simplify things and keep things positive, not try to create this extremely difficult riding concept, especially at Grand Prix.”

Their simple methods can help all horses, even those whose training has veered from the correct path, they said.

“It’s never too late” to retrain a horse to, say, be more responsive to the leg or to learn a more correct connection, Hassler said. “It’s a process. It can be greatly improved,” although the rider may always have to counter the tendency toward the old, bad habit, he said. And in doing so, “Don’t just fight the concept,” he advised. “Get creative. If a horse is dull to the leg, don’t just shove him forward. There has to be a reason [for the lack of responsiveness]—maybe there’s discomfort, he’s tight in his back, or he’s on the forehand. Do something that makes him bend and react, such as riding shoulder-in or a few steps of walk pirouette; don’t just shove him forward.

“We see so much mechanical riding: ‘Do this, do that.’ It’s commands,” Hassler continued. “That’s not beauty; that’s not art. That’s not building suppleness and the swing. Too many people are satisfied with the mechanical and don’t follow it up to get the beauty of it.”

The Supporting Cast

The USDF is grateful to the sponsors and supporters who helped to make the 2014 Succeed/USDF FEI-Level Trainers’ Conference possible: