Practice Makes Progress

One of my tae kwon do instructors when I was younger used to love the phrase ‘practice makes progress’ and thought that ‘practice makes perfect’ is a lie because we would always have something more to work toward. Much to Tiger’s dismay, and aside from a recent vacation while I went to Michigan, we have been practicing, and we have been making progress. A friend videoed a ride we had before my vacation, and you can see the improvement compared to our dressage test at Coconino!

Tiger is more consistently through his topline, especially in the trot, and this has the effect that his hind end can actually come up under him more and isn’t so disjointed.

However, we still need to keep practicing and keep pushing to make progress. I recently realized that even though riding definitely exemplifies this ‘practice makes progress’ concept and I generally find it easy to be eternally hard on my riding, I also have never treated my riding as I have been coached to treat other sports. I focus on concepts, but I don’t usually force Tiger and I to do an exact movement over and over and over until we make progress with it. This seems particularly important for basic movements like trot-canter transitions. These are like the horsey equivalent of the 100 push-ups we used to do in conditioning class for tae kwon do, which made me stronger and more ready to do the other activities required of me. So, ever since a friend recently helped Tiger and I with our flatwork and said we should do trot-canter transitions until we drop dead, we’ve been doing the horsey equivalent of 100 push-ups: 3 sets of 10 trot-canter transitions each direction. I supposed I should not be surprised that this idea has been extremely helpful, since dressage is supposed to be strength training like weight lifting. So often we practice dressage movements to build strength in a horse, yet we seem to expect to build that strength and thus progress by practicing a movement only a few times per ride. It turns out that (at least with Tiger) I can make a lot more progress by practicing the movement more! (Duh, right?)

With all of this progress, Tiger has gone through a gradual emotional progression related to dressage. Tiger’s emotional progressions are one of the funniest things about this horse, because you can watch them on his face. With newer and harder work, he goes from defiant to begrudgingly accepting to happy to be doing it. I am happy to say that with this dressage boot camp we are finally reaching that ‘happy to be doing it’ phase! Let’s just hope he keeps that attitude for our upcoming shows!

As a side note, and just because it’s entertaining, here’s an example of Tiger’s emotional progression after he was naughty and reared on a trail ride:

(Left) "I was bad; I'm not sure I'm gonna get a carrot." (Middle) "What a *****! She's really not going to give me a carrot!" (Right) "Ooo, maybe I'll get a carrot after all!"