Ridely

Counting strides is crucial for riders to understand their pace on the course. Olympic Medalist Meredith Michaels Beerbaum emphasizes the importance of matching desired strides, especially when approaching combinations that require specific strides. However, she advises against counting out loud, as it can be distracting. Instead, riders should focus on reacting to their horse's movements to adjust speed and achieve the correct distance. Meredith demonstrates an exercise where her daughter, Brianne Beerbaum, practices cantering between poles of varying distances. Brianne adjusts her speed upon landing to achieve the desired number of strides. The key takeaway is to focus on the distance to the pole and react accordingly, as this helps riders maintain the appropriate speed and pace during their ride.

Having small but clear aids is fundamental in dressage. In this video, Olympian and Chairman of Dressage4Kids Lendon Gray demonstrates the common errors some riders make when using the rein aids. She shares her tips for how to prevent these from happening and how to keep your hands still.

In this exercise Ellesse Jordan Gundersen shows how to improve the connection with the outside rein by flexing your horse slightly to the outside. This helps you get control of the outside shoulder and to make the horse more supple. It also helps you to ride your horse between the inside leg and the outside rein.This is a great exercise to make your horse more equilateral and to build the foundation for the counter canter.

Circles may seem easy, but they are often more challenging than they look! In this masterclass, Olympic dressage rider Yvonne Losos de Muñiz demonstrates how she rides her circles using 4 points.  Instead of thinking of the circle as a whole, Yvonne breaks it down into four points. As if there were four poles forming a cross shape, the points would be in the middle of the pole, creating a diamond shape. For dressage training, there would be no poles so Yvonne insists on visualising the points and using landmarks within the arena to make them as accurate as possible.  As demonstrated in the video, she rides a turn at each point, heading straight towards the next point. The turn creates a natural drift which allows the curve and creates a circle rather than a diamond shape.  When riding the circle using four points, the first attempt should be ridden in a simple way and not necessarily 'pretty' as Yvonne explains. This first attempt is for the rider to find out the horse's weaknesses and tendencies so on the next attempt, the rider can respond accordingly to what the horse does. The rider must remember to ride from the inside leg to the outside rein, and should adapt to the horse's weaknesses and habits on the circle.

Finding your distance to a jump is super important, especially in jump-offs. In this video, International Show Jumper Chloe Reid explains her top tips for finding your distance to a jump while ensuring you get a good take-off at the jump. Chloe demonstrates why keeping the rhythm through the corner is key as it means she has a good pace underneath her ready to find her distance to sustain the power over the jump. This video is full of advice and tips for finding your distance and why this is important as well as some great exercises to help you practice this at home.

Establishing flexion and bend is important for horses of all levels, but the two are often mixed up. In this video, US International Grand Prix rider Katherine Bateson-Chandler explains the difference between flexion and bend. Katherine demonstrates the parts of the horse’s body where the bend and flexion should be present.Katherine also explains how to establish bend and flexion correctly, some exercises and tips you can use to do this and she also shows you some common mistakes and what happens as a result.Bend gets more extreme as you move up the levels so it is important to know the difference! Check out the video to find out and make sure you’re getting the correct types!

Straightness is an important part of show jumping. For training, competitions, and jump-offs, the horse should be straight before and after the jump.In this video, Olympic gold medallist Henrik von Eckermann demonstrates some useful exercises for making sure your horse is straight. He uses two jumps to test this and corrects the straightness with his leg aids. For Henrik, turns should be made with the leg and not the hand in order to keep the horse straight.This is essential for jump-offs! Check out the full video for all of his tips.

Meredith Michaels Beerbaum, olympic medalist and the first ever woman who was ranked #1 in FEI:s world rankings, shows how she warms up a horse before jumping a course. Meredith explains what the most important aspects of warming up are and why it is so important to have all parts of the warmup in place.