- Rodrigo Pessoa encourages Allison Kroff to make sure her horse is listening to her leg aids and working forward from him hindquarters.
- © Deb Dawson/Practical Horseman
The gymnastic looked as if it would be the bugaboo as day one of Brazilian show jumper Rodrigo Pessoa’s first North American clinic began. Instead, it was the shoulder-in. The Olympic and World Equestrian Games show jumping gold medalist and three-time World Cup show-jumping champion described the shoulder-in as an exercise “found on page one of any flatwork book” and the equine equivalent of doing a few forward bends after getting out of bed every morning.
Of course, the clinic wasn’t just about nailing the shoulder-in. That challenge, though, provided numerous opportunities for Rodrigo to hammer home his priorities as a coach: using aids effectively, especially the leg; insisting on quick reactions to those aids; challenging horse and rider to “push their limits;” and working the horse in a purposeful way that builds suppleness, strength and confidence.
“Make it happen!” was the motto for two days devoted to giving riders the tools needed to do just that. “At the end of the day, it’s just you and your horse in the show ring,” Rodrigo emphasized. “It’s your job to make it happen.”
Simplicity and creating naturalness in coaching, training, riding and thinking were common threads throughout the two days. Enjoying the ride was essential. “If you are not enjoying it, your horse isn’t either,” Rodrigo said.
Held at the new Sonoma Horse Park in Northern California’s Petaluma, the August 1–2 clinic was comprised of three groups of five riders each. Sponsored by Taylor Harris Insurance Services, the sessions were divided by 1.15 meters (3-foot-7), 1.25 meters (4-foot-1) and 1.35 meters (4-feet-5) fence heights, with a jumper emphasis throughout.
About That Shoulder-In
Rodrigo opened each session by asking the riders to warm up their horses on their own, at the trot and canter and in both directions. “The first five or ten minutes of your work should be spent with your horse in free, natural and forward movement,” Rodrigo explained. “We are getting them stretched out without asking anything special.”
Next he requested a large circle, about 140 feet in diameter, and a gradual uptake of connection, always initiated by the leg, so the horse was working from his hindquarters, and supported with the hand. “Every action of the hand must be covered by the leg,” Rodrigo told participants for the first of many times.
He introduced another repeated concept: progressively asking the horse for more, rather than settling for “just OK,” or worse, nothing. Rodrigo wanted more active gaits as trot work continued on the large circle. This segued into the “compression” of shoulder-in along approximately one-quarter of the circle, then “decompressing” the stride by moving promptly into extended trot for the rest of the circle.
Rodrigo loves the shoulder-in for many reasons. For the horse, it’s great for suppling and strengthening his back and building balance in his body while also teaching or reinforcing responsiveness to the aids. For riders, it teaches feel for where their horses’ feet and body parts are.
In this basic dressage movement, performed at the trot, the horse’s body is bent around the rider’s inside leg and his head is turned slightly into the bend. Moving both laterally and forward, the horse’s hooves create three tracks as the inside hind leg and outside foreleg travel in the same track.
The rider’s dominant aid is a strong inside leg, with the outside leg holding the horse’s hindquarters on track. Rodrigo coached riders to keep their shoulders and eyes facing forward. In keeping with his emphasis on the importance of leg aids, he said very little about rein aids for the movement, typically a light inside rein to direct the bend and a holding outside rein.
The circle created a natural setup for the exercise. Riders were later asked to do it on the straightaway, where the rail provides a better gauge for the approximately 45-degree angle of the horse’s sideways and forward track. “The horse is not a crab,” Rodrigo said. “It’s not all sideways!” A few times, he held a horse’s inside rein from the ground, telling the rider to focus only on the leg aid. He pressed for the correct angle off the rail. “Don’t content yourself with just a little bit!”
Only a few earned “almost goods” on their shoulder-ins. Rodrigo guessed that two of the 15 horses, including one in the highest jumping section, “had never taken a sideways step in their lives.” The most common problems were loss of momentum, too shallow an angle and, the biggest, resisting the leg.
He characterized the resistance exhibited by several horses as normal. “It’s more effort for them, but if you keep insisting and if they are intelligent, they will understand what you want and realize that it’s good for them.” It made no sense to Rodrigo that any horse and/or rider should compete at the clinic’s jumping heights without being able to do shoulder-in properly.
“I don’t mean 30 mediocre strides,” he clarified. “I mean four or five good strides.” A well-schooled horse will do well with two shoulder-ins in each direction during an average day’s workout, he said.
One horse gave his owner and Rodrigo an extensive challenge. He hopped, bucked and bobbed his head in defense against the shoulder-in aids, all stemming from oversensitivity to his rider’s leg. But the horse made it up to Rodrigo toward the end of a 20-minute school by demonstrating the clinician’s claims about the exercise’s relaxation benefits. “He just pooped twice in five minutes,” noted Rodrigo, who eventually made progress in loosening and “unblocking” the horse’s back through the shoulder-in.
Rodrigo suggested the horse return the next day with a standing martingale to reduce evasive head bobbing and help the rider quickly regain a frame after applying her leg. With the martingale’s effect and new respect for and understanding of the leg aid, the horse was a rock star over the second day’s full jumping course.
As the group of 1.35-meter riders, all professionals, warmed up at the trot and canter on a large rectangle, Rodrigo gave them a free-form challenge to test their horses’ responsiveness. “Imagine there is suddenly a huge fireball coming at you, a big wall or a ditch too wide to jump.” The idea was to be instantly able to stop, turn and step on the gas.
He noted that America’s hunter and equitation divisions often produce riders with nice positions, but sometimes the riders become frozen in those positions “waiting for things to happen, rather than making them happen.”
