13/09/2026
Competitions and tension - how do you anchor your horse back to you and make it a good experience for you both?
What Really Falls Apart in a Dressage Test🔥
Today I spent several hours pencilling tests at one of my favourite dressage clubs, watching horse after horse make its way around the arena.
Beside me, the judge was assessing the performance in front of her and I was busily writing down comments about needing more bend, counter-flexion, relaxing into the contact, being more forward, rushing, needing more engagement behind and losing balance.
All perfectly reasonable observations. But sitting beside her, I was watching something else as well.
I was watching varying degrees of what I think of as "pressure-cooker coping".
I was watching horses managing different levels of tension, soundness and physical capacity. I could see natural asymmetries becoming more pronounced as tension increased. I was watching riders managing their own tension, balance and decision-making while their horses tried to process an unfamiliar environment and simultaneously respond to the person on their back.
Sometimes the pressure would build until the horse hovered near that tipping point, caught between the rider trying to contain them and every cell in their body screaming to get out of there. 🫣
And yet this is exactly why I think a dressage test can be such a brilliant stress test of your training.
At home, your horse might maintain rhythm, bend correctly, transition smoothly and work into a lovely contact. Then you put the horse on a float and take it somewhere else, where there are unfamiliar horses, warm-up traffic, announcements, spectators and, in today's case, people casually walking their dogs while somebody's horse attempts to remember the finer points of a 20-metre circle.😎
The horse's attention becomes divided, arousal rises and the body changes.
Tension then does what tension is very good at - it makes a caricature of the horse that is already there.😎
The slightly stiff side becomes stiffer. The weaker hindleg becomes more obvious. The slightly fragile transition becomes rushed. A small balance problem becomes considerably larger. The horse doesn't necessarily develop a collection of exciting new problems at the competition. The pressure simply magnifies the vulnerabilities that were already there.
That means competition shows us which parts of our training and the horse's gymnastic development remain available when the pressure goes up. That is incredibly valuable information.🙏
The problem is that we can accidentally turn up the heat ourselves. 🔥
The rider feels the horse deteriorating and understandably tries to fix what is happening. The horse counter-flexes, so there is more rein. The horse loses bend, so there is more leg. The horse rushes, so there is more holding. The horse comes above the contact, so the rider works harder to put everything back where it belongs.😕
Meanwhile, the horse is essentially thinking, "I was already finding this difficult and you appear to have chosen this exact moment to become considerably more complicated".😱
Tension changes movement, the movement deteriorates, the rider applies more correction, the horse becomes more tense and the movement deteriorates further.
Welcome to the pressure cooker.🫠
Interestingly, the riders who handled these moments best didn't try to renovate the entire horse between K and A. They looked up, rode their line, kept quietly guiding and made sensible decisions. Most importantly, they gave the horse something familiar to come back to.
And this is the training underneath the performance.
You cannot prepare a horse for competition by trying to prevent tension. You prepare them by teaching them to stay connected and responsive as the pressure rises, and, just as importantly, how to find their way back to you when tension momentarily pulls them away.💚
This is something I spend an enormous amount of time developing in horses and riders. We need anchors: familiar, well-practised responses and grounding exercises that reconnect the horse to the rider, help loosen the body and allow the horse to reorganise and become available to the aids again.
Those anchors need to be trained before you need them. Competition day is not the ideal moment to introduce your horse to your brilliant new grounding exercise while they are already struggling.😕
The horse needs to know the exercises and the responses need to be reliable. Just as importantly, the rider needs to recognise tension early, understand how it changes their particular horse and know which decisions are likely to diffuse the situation rather than simply correcting whatever symptom has appeared.
That is know-how, and it is absolutely learnable. It is at the heart of my work because when you understand how to recognise tension, make good decisions and bring your horse back to you, so much of everything else starts to flow. The performance becomes the result of the training underneath it, rather than something you are desperately trying to manufacture in the moment.
So when your judge writes "needs more bend', don't automatically go home determined to manufacture more bend. Ask yourself why the bend disappeared. What happened as tension increased? Which asymmetry became exaggerated? What happened to rhythm, balance and contact? When did your horse become less available to you?🤓
Then ask the most useful question of all:
Do I know how to diffuse tension and anchor my horse back to me?🤔
Your dressage test isn't merely a report card on what happened between A and C. It is showing you how robust the training underneath your performance really is.
And that gives you something incredibly useful to train.
Don't just practice the test. You practice the travel, the arrival, the warm-up, the exposure, the ability to anchor them back to you.
Collectable Advice 291/365. SHARE this with anyone who has ever experienced the "pressure cooker coping".😆
P.S Project Reboot is all about this know-how❤
