Confidence in the Dressage Ring
By Blake Dudzik
Every dressage test is an exercise in perfectionism, and for many riders, this demand can often feel insurmountable when months of work all come together for one ride down centerline. With so many marks, the opportunities for something to go wrong seem endless, but with proper preparation, you can enter the dressage ring with confidence, approaching each movement with a “how can we do this better”, rather than a “how can this go wrong” mindset.
The key to confidence in the dressage ring starts at home and months before the competition. The beauty of dressage: they tell you exactly what they want to see, in order and in detail. Too obvious? One of the most common mistakes for inexperienced dressage riders is to practice the test, not the movements themselves. Over and over again they go through the motions, repeating the test in full, movement for movement. The result, memorization without mastery.
Memorizing the test is the easy part, but in order to truly develop confidence in the ring, the devil, or rather, the angel, is in the details. In the test, the judge is essentially taking for granted that you’ve memorized the order of the test — it’s a prerequisite. What they’re really looking for is the quality and accuracy of the individual movements themselves, which is far more than simply executing a transition at the respective letter. Read the test, break it down into its particular movements, and make sure that you understand the qualities that the judges are looking for in each.
In practice, this attention to detail means not riding the test as it is, but riding each movement in itself. Riding the full test once or twice to familiarize yourself with the pace and timing of each transition is a good idea months or weeks before the competition, but after establishing this reference point, forget the order and focus instead on the particularities. Doing your homework on each element of the test will give you far more confidence in the ring than simple memorization. Having mastered the essentials, all that remains is to do them in a particular order, and that’s just a matter of memorization.
Next time you ride down centerline, the weeks and months of diligent attention to the details will ensure that your ride is a success. And if a movement doesn’t come together? There’s always the next!