Tonight I headed back to Hartbury’s beautiful arena to see the legendary William Fox-Pitt running his own clinic. He first went over some aspects of dressage and pointed out what many riders do wrong regarding centre lines and circles. With the centre line he said you have to look the judge straight in the eye and dare them not to give you anything less than an 8! You also have to make sure that not only is the horse straight but that your own body is straight too, as if you’re crooked or bending to one side it makes it more difficult for the horse to follow through.

Regarding circles, William demonstrated how people usually put in a bit of a bend, then go straight, often staying at the markers for too long, or if the circle is at C or A, then people again fall into the corners and causes the circle to appear more like a square. With the circle, it can be good to place out some ground poles so that they hit each point of the circle. If you imagine the circle has four points, so one at X, one at C, (if we’re doing a circle at C), then you want to just touch the track at either side. Ride around the poles so that you touch the track at the points and then immediately come off the track again, and don’t go deep into the corners of the arena as it appears that you’re going large. This way the horse is bending more throughout the movement and you ride an actual circle instead of a curved square.

William also said that the art to dressage is to treat it like a conversation with your horse. Each movement needs to be thought of like a sentence. Beginning with a capital letter, then the words, and a full stop. So with each movement you need to initially prepare for the movement (the capital letter) then follow through with the movement, and finish the movement (full stop). However in turn by finishing one movement you always need to be preparing for the next, and in turn with all dressage tests you need to keep the horse distracted and busy so that he doesn’t begin to get distracted.

Another tip was to always film yourself if you can when you do a dressage test, being able to see what you’re doing from the ground can really help and you can see as to why something went wrong or where you could improve. Personally I hate going through my videos as something like my legs or hands are behaving terribly! However even if you go through it once you are aware of the problem and so can take action against it next time.

Onto the jumping part William showed us some XC tips. For when introducing strange fences to the horse just make sure that it is really obvious to them as to what they need to do. This can be helped by making a wide skinny, and then gradually decreasing the width, or placing poles on the ground in a ‘V’ shape to guide them into the fence. This way the horse becomes more accustomed to jumping strange objects and so builds up his confidence.

He also did a little showing off towards the end by throwing himself round these crazy angles, but this too is something good to practice at home ready for the complicated combinations on XC courses, although I don’t see myself at Badminton any time soon! Overall it was a great night, it was probably a little less exciting that Ben Hobday but I still learned just as much, I even treated myself to a signed copy of William’s autobiography, so I’m looking forward to reading that and learning more.