The piaffe is the pinnacle of Dressage. It is an incredibly difficult movement to train and execute and, believe it or not, at the Grand Prix, the piaffe and passage counts for nearly 1/3 of your score!
In this week’s video, I am going to break down the exact steps that you need to take to teach your horse to piaffe. And guess what?? Groundwork is the key to introducing piaffe!
Believe it or not, I introduce the piaffe from the ground with every single horse that I ride and train. Groundwork is an extremely important skill – especially when you are introducing a new and difficult concept like the piaffe.
Why is the piaffe such a difficult movement?
The piaffe requires a huge amount of strength and coordination from your horse. In order to execute a correct piaffe the horse engages the hind end, stays on the spot, and has impulsion. When you think about it, horses are prey animals and they use their energy to run and get away from scary things that might eat them! So to exert a huge amount of energy in the piaffe and not move anywhere seems counter intuitive.
How do you train the piaffe?
When training the piaffe, the mistake that a lot of people make is they start whipping and pulling on their horse and put way too much pressure on them without breaking things down and teaching their horse in a way that the horse can understand.
Here are the steps that you want to use to introduce the Piaffe:
- Leg lifting – start on the ground and teach your horse that when you touch them with the stick, you can get them to lift and hold up their leg
- Walk halts walk transitions with contact on the ground – teach your horse to accept the contact and do walk-halt walk transitions on the ground
- Get 1-2 baby trot steps from your horse on the ground. You can also practice rein back into the piaffe. That is another good exercise.
- Under saddle – at first, get someone to help you from behind
- Piaffe like a boss – remember that it takes many, many years to confirm the piaffe on a horse. Stay consistent and patient in your training.
Want to teach your horse to piaffe? Or how to stay round? Or how to improve your half-pass? Sign up for the Dressage Groundwork Masterclass.*
I go into much more depth on how to train the Piaffe (and passage) on the ground in the Dressage Groundwork Masterclass.
Click here to learn more about the Dressage Groundwork Masterclass*
Happy Riding,
Amelia
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