HGG Community Forums

So I have been riding western for the past 15/16 years, and recently decided to switch to english specifically dressage. Oof it’s been hard. The place I live is primarily ranching. Horses either have a job as a ranch horse or are a rodeo horse. There are probably 10 people in town who own an English saddle. So finding an instructor is pretty much impossible at the moment.

I have always compared teaching a horse is comparable to teaching a child to read. First they have to learn the alphabet then put the letters together to form words. A rollback would be a 4 letter word. Go, stop, turn, go. Western was easy to learn there are several books and YouTube that go step by step on what to teach the horse and things you should work on in a methodical manner that works for the horses.

English is different. They give you hints for how to make advanced things better, but I have yet to find something that gives steps 1-10 they usually go on about how important the basics are but don’t show any for a rider just starting. I tried watching some videos on retraining OTTB but that doesn’t quite work for me, they don’t really show a novice how to do the training. Just what they the skilled trainer are doing.

So if anyone has a good A,B,C list of things to start with I would love to see it. Or if you know of a good YouTube channel that teaches the basics...