The dressage is the path that your horse and carriage travels on during combined driving. Learn about the importance of dressage training with help from a combined driving expert in this video clip.
Hi, my name is Sterling Graburn. I'm the head driving trainer at the Gayla Driving Center in Georgetown, Kentucky. The dressage, I mean, that's basic, and I, you know some people look at the marathon and they say, wow, that's all I want to do. I don't want to worry about the rest of it. But you know, and everybody says it and everybody thinks it's trite, but if you don't have the dressage, the hazard isn't going to go well for you. If you don't have the bend in the trot, in the canter, in the dressage test, then you're not going to have it in the trot and the gallop in the hazards. So, and the cones, forget about it. If you can't, if your horse can't change, bend left and right, how do you drive a zigzag that's 14 meters apart and 20 centimeters wide? You have to have the dressage. So everything, whether I'm doing hazards or I'm doing cones, it's all based off the dressage training that I've done. And yes, sometimes I do that under saddle to help because I have my seat in my leg. When I drive, I don't have seat and leg. I have voice, I have whip, and I have my reigns, but I don't have my seat and I don't have my leg, and I still find myself after driving for, you know, 20 to 30 years now. I still get cramps in the back of my leg from squeezing the front of the carriage. Doesn't have much effect on the horse, but I still do it. So, you know, the communication to horse communications to driver and navigator, that's all critical and that's probably the biggest thing that we train other than fitness, you know. Fitness, I'm lucky here in Kentucky, I've got a lot of hills, I can do hills, I can do flat work, and so my condition problem if my horse isn't fit, it's because I haven't been out going up and down the hills. We do a lot of slow work up and down the hills in the beginning, do till the end when we're cantering down hills, galloping up and down hills, working on our lung capacity, and all those things so our horses are fit enough to do the job we ask of them, and strong enough.
