Windfall Farm Dressage

06/03/2026

Once, I watched a coach bring a rider and horse in front of an audience at the end of an intense lesson. He wanted to show them something he had noticed. Something he thought was good.

He reached toward the neck and shoulder, pointed to a sweat patch, and said: you see this? This is good. This shows the horse has worked here.

The rider smiled. The audience nodded.

You are in the presence of someone who carries authority. The people around you confirm it. Someone with a name, a reputation, a lifetime of accolades is telling you it went well. Of course you smile.

But what was pointed to was friction.

The muscles overlying the mid and lower cervical region, C5-C6, are not designed to carry concentrated load. They are built for phasic, elastic work, brief, coordinated, shared across the whole structure. They participate in movement. They are not designed to manage imbalance.

When the thoracic sling can no longer support the ribcage and spinal oscillation begins to reduce, those muscles stop moving the limb and start managing the imbalance instead. Sustained work in tissue not designed for it produces heat. Heat produces sweat. An isolated patch at that region tells you exactly where the system has run out of options.

The horse is not working well there. It is coping.

A simple way to hold this:

When horses sweat, it appears first in the high-density regions: the neck, behind the elbows, between the hindlegs. That is normal physiology. What we are reading here is sweat concentrated at one precise point while the surrounding tissue remains dry. Not general neck sweat, not effort. A system that has stopped distributing.

Isolated sweat in a working horse is not a sign of good work. It is a sign of a system that has stopped distributing. The horse is not moving through that area. It is stuck in it.

After hot work, a correctly organised horse carries an even dampness across the neck, shoulders and quarters. No concentration anywhere. The absence of an isolated patch is the sign of effort distributed correctly.

The rider in that moment did nothing wrong. She trusted the person in front of her.

I stood in dissection rooms, carefully removing layers of damage left by people who never meant to cause it. I have wondered, in those rooms, whether we should ride horses at all. It is possible, but it requires care, accurate knowledge, and the willingness to be corrected. That is what calls me to write about this. To offer clarity where I am certain, and to remain genuinely open to being questioned on everything I teach.

This is the responsibility of those of us who teach. When we name something in front of an audience, in front of a horse that cannot correct us, we are not sharing an opinion. We are shaping what that person will carry forward, repeat, and pass on. The difference between interpretation and knowledge matters enormously when the body receiving that teaching cannot speak.

As coaches we cannot afford to let the pull of a moment, the crowd, the performance, the pleasure of apparent mastery, substitute for knowing what we are actually looking at. We have to test our own interpretations against evidence, hold them up to scrutiny, and be willing to be wrong. That is not a limitation on great coaching but a condition.

Reading the horse accurately is the foundation of our work.

06/02/2026

There has been a trend going around lately about “10 Things I Hate About Dressage,” and honestly some of them have been hysterical… and painfully accurate. Thank you, Lauren Sprieser. I fully agree that walk pirouettes deserve their own category.

So here are mine.

1. “You have to be rich.”

I hate this one.

Mostly because it keeps people from chasing the dream before they even start. I understand where it comes from, and yes, horses are expensive. But I did not get into this industry because I wanted to make a million dollars. I got into it because I had a dream that would not leave me alone.

The opportunities came first.
The money followed the opportunities.

I never sat down and said “How can I make the most money?”
I asked “How can I make this work?”

Maybe that is terrible financial advice, but it worked for me. I worked relentlessly, kept saying yes to opportunities, and figured things out along the way.

But let me also say this very clearly:
None of it works without the work.

2. The idea that being “good” is supposed to feel easy.

Absolutely not.

This sport is hard.
It will stay hard.
And most of the time you will still feel like you are not good enough.

That feeling does not go away when you become successful. If anything, the standards get even higher.

Learn to love the process before you love the results.

3. The idea that top trainers are not supposed to get dirty.

Please.

Yes, I have a groom. She is also my other two hands. We work together. We are both filthy by the end of the day sometimes.

If you think you are above scrubbing buckets, wrapping legs, bathing horses, or sweeping aisles, then I question how connected you really are to the process.

4. Trying to control the environment at all times.

This one drives me insane.

The arenas do not need to be silent.
The kids can run around.
The tractor can drive by.
The staff can mow the lawn.

How are we supposed to create emotionally balanced horses if they only know how to function in a perfectly controlled environment?

Teach the horse to manage emotions first.
Then worry about the movements.

A horse that cannot emotionally regulate will never truly perform consistently anyway.

5. Bits are for comfort, not control.

Find the bit that gives your horse the most confidence and comfort.
Not the one that gives YOU the most leverage.

6. Stop hating worthy competitors.

Business is business, and competition is competition, but there is absolutely no reason we cannot respect and care about the people we compete against.

Save your frustration for abusive training methods, shortcuts, and actual mistreatment of horses.

Not the rider who beat you fairly with good horsemanship and classical training.

7. Maintain your horse before they are lame.

This is a huge one for me.

There is nothing wrong with responsibly maintaining horses. PRP injections can be incredible. I use them on myself too.

And no, your horse does not need to be limping to tell you something is wrong.

Sometimes the signs are:
“He feels sluggish in the changes.”
“He is not sitting in piaffe the same.”
“He is yanking me every once in a while.”

Pay attention to those details.

Inflammation changes movement long before obvious lameness appears. My entire program focuses on addressing inflammation first and then building proper muscle to support the joints correctly.

There is no reason horses should be expected to perform through pain.

8. Even FEI riders need help.

The feel and the reality are not always the same.

You need eyes on the ground.
You need ideas.
You need exercises.
You need someone who can say “I went through this too, and this helped.”

Drilling movements over and over rarely fixes the root problem.

9. Stop getting offended by judges comments.

The judges are literally telling you what they see.

At my last show, I had no idea I was starting to lean forward. The judge commented on it.

Good.
That is what I paid for.

Not every comment is an insult. Most judges genuinely want to help riders improve, and they went through an incredible amount of education to be sitting in that booth.

10. Stop waiting for perfect before you show.

You do not improve by hiding at home.

It is perfectly fine to show Training Level because the basics need strengthening.
It is perfectly fine to take the less confident horse down centerline.

Every good experience matters.

Showing is not separate from training.
It is training.

Get down the centerline.

04/30/2026

04/27/2026

Refreshing the swag shop
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04/21/2026

04/20/2026

There are reasons we do specific things in the horse world. These common standards were not created by an organization like the FEI, USEF or other equestrian governing body. The origins of these practices are military. For example, when we enter a show ring, as pictured in the top image, we ride counterclockwise to the left. This is a centuries old cavalry and mounted military services rule that we still follow today.

Another example is in why we mount a horse on the left or near side? It's because cavalrymen wore their sabers on their left hip. When cavalrymen mounted on the left or nearside, their sabers remained stationary when the riders would swing their right leg over the saddle. This military near side mounting rule is still followed today.

The Haute école dressage movements pictured in the lower center collage are not "art" as many dressage rider believe. They are offensive and defensive cavalry battlefield movements employed against enemy infantry foot soldiers.

The lower left center image is a Capriole used by cavalry riders who were swarmed by enemy infantry. This powerful movement cause infantry to run from the cavalry horse, which allowed the cavalryman to escape the enemy foot soldier swarm. The lower center right image is the Courbette. This was used to break and scatter defensive square formations of infantry on the battlefield. Both are intimidation movements that could be deadly to an enemy soldier.

Another military based riding tradition is mounted drill team. Group drill team movements were a way to identify which riders in a troop that was in training had effective control of their horses, or not. Poor riders stick out in a drill team. Therefore, drill team training accelerated the instructor's ability to identify which riders needed more instruction.

The historical origins of effective horsemanship are most often found in military riding. It has only been since the 1970s that some of these military methods and practices have been replaced by less demanding civilian standards. For example, in warm up arenas today I regularly see chaos as every rider "does their own thing" without regard for any structured standards aimed at improved safety.

If you are doing something in your riding that you do not understand where it came from, the source is most likely military.

11/25/2025

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11/22/2025

Your horse’s skeleton is built for impact — not confinement.

Three decades of equine bone research makes one thing painfully clear: Horses kept in box stalls lose bone density.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

Confinement triggers the same biological process humans call osteoporosis — and it starts fast.

Key findings from the research:

- Horses moved from pasture into stalls and worked only at slow speeds began losing bone mineral content within weeks.
- A single short sprint per week (50–80 m) dramatically strengthened bone.
- Corticosteroids mask pain and increase risk of further injury
- Good nutrition cannot override a lack of mechanical loading.
- A skeleton that doesn’t experience impact simply cannot stay strong.

All of this is drawn from:
Nielsen, B.D. (2023). A Review of Three Decades of Research Dedicated to Making Equine Bones Stronger. Animals, 13(5), 789.

So what does this mean for our modern domesticated horses?

It means bone weakness is not inevitable.

It’s a management problem.

It means many “mysterious” pathologies — stress fractures, suspensory injuries, joint degeneration, chronic compensation, recurrent lameness — are downstream consequences of bone that never had the chance to adapt to the forces nature designed it for.

Box stalls create osteoporosis.

Osteoporosis creates a whole lot of other pathology.

Your horse doesn’t need to be an athlete. But their bones require impact. Free movement. The ability to respond to their own nervous system’s cues to trot, canter, play, stretch, and even sprint.

Turnout is not enrichment.

Movement is biology.

Bone health is built — or lost — every single day.

A question I encourage every owner to sit with:

If you knew your horse’s bones were weakening in silence every day they stood still, would you keep managing them the same way?

Because in the end, it’s not confinement that keeps a horse safe.

It’s a resilient skeleton.

And only you can give them the environment their biology requires.

Change begins with us.

11/21/2025