In Advanced Dressage Training, Grand Prix rider/trainer Angela Niemeyer Eastwood outlines the hows and whys of advanced training in a practical, logical fashion, with the aim of helping you to create harmonious partnerships with your horses. Dressage has moved beyond the basics of just riding and training a horse, and now encompasses many complementary disciplines, including psychology. This has always been part of the most successful athletes' repertoires and is now acknowledged as being one of the main contributory factors to excellence in any sport. Technical skills need to go hand in hand with mental commitment, discipline, dedication and resilience. Mindsets can be changed - what is needed is knowledge, support, imagination and perseverance. This book introduces the idea that aids are just that: they let the horse know what the rider wants. When this is understood, the horse should be allowed to do whatever has been asked of him - alone and unaided - until something else is required or the horse needs a reminder. The pursuit of excellence - not perfection - is what dressage is all about. Advanced Dressage Training offers advice and encouragement towards the improvement and development of you and your horse as an advanced partnership, taking you towards excellence in the process. This book will be of great interest to dressage riders and trainers and dressage professionals, and is superbly illustrated with 300 colour photographs.

Just as small streams make big rivers, Divide and Conquer Book 1 explains a myriad of details on how to divide the horses body parts. Divide and Conquer Book 2 regroups these details to show how to accomplish all of the upper level movements and provides several techniques designed to educate riders to achieve their short and long term goals. In a clear and simple method, François Lemaire de Ruffieu describes all the longitudinal and lateral movements, flying changes of lead at close intervals, canter pirouette, piaffe and passage, to mention only a few.All techniques for the upper level movements are natural to the horse and are simultaneously, a sound foundation of training for any level and any discipline.Dressage is an Art and, as in any art, it can be viewed in many different ways. History shows that some extraordinary riding masters were radically different in their theories: Riders physical appearance and differences in horse breeding have influenced riding masters leaving us a rich history of techniques to educate our horses properly. Dressage tends to follow fashion. Nevertheless, the goals of dressage have always remained the same: render the horse agreeable, easy to ride, well-balanced, straight and responding instantaneously to the slightest rider's demands. Dressage is a school of obedience as well as a school of thoughts.

"This book is a must have . . . it really inspires you to greater things and encourages you to believe that anything is possible if you follow the book step-by-step!" —www.horsecity.co.uk

Over the course of her riding and horse training career, Kathrin Roida has progressively gained a deep appreciation for the benefits of gymnastic exercises, particularly those that can be taught to the horse from the ground. "In-hand" training has long been used to help develop the dressage horse, conditioning and suppling his body while at the same time preparing his mind to grasp the movements that may eventually be expected. Roida relies on these techniques when working with young horses, which she prepares for under-saddle training with exercises first learned on the ground, improving balance and enhancing confidence by refining the horse's sense of his body and where it is in space. Roida also uses in-hand techniques to vary the training of the fully schooled riding horse and to solve problems that may be more safely dealt with from the ground. In this book she details her methods, sharing the stories of a number of horses of different ages, breeds, and training backgrounds, and demonstrating the steps to teaching them: shoulder-in, travers, renvers, pirouettes, half-pass, piaffe, passage, canter work, the Spanish walk, and much more. Throughout her conscientious attention to what is best for the horse ensures that not only do the lessons result in a horse that is healthy in body but also one that is healthy in mind and happy in his work.

Accept the challenge of training an advanced-level dressage horse! The demands on the animal are many: high obedience, a calm temperament, a powerful physique. How can you recognize which horse has what it takes to make the grade -- and ensure that it reaches its potential? A former Olympic rider shows you the ropes, backed by over 120 photographs. Review the all-important early training, which establishes a horse's basic work, and perfect all the routines you'll have to run through, at every stage. You'll find several options for going about your task. Choose the one that best suits your own and your animal's personalities. Anticipate potential difficulties and know how to correct them should they arise. You'll achieve a polished, precise blue-ribbon performance!