Ep 5: A head full of structure and a body full of feel

Structure will get you further in the sport than feel by itself. Someone riding around airy, fairy, fluffy, with the most beautiful feel in the world is not going to train their horse to do such a structured sport as dressage.

From performanceriders.com this is the Pabry podcast. I'm Nat Foxen, and each episode I challenge World equestrian Games top 10 dressage rider Brett Parbury to explain and discuss what I call a pabraiism. That's a pearl of wisdom. I've written down the years of working together in our performance writers programs. Brett doesn't know what today's pabriism is. Let's get into it. Okay, Brett, I am ready with your pabriism for this episode. Are you ready?

I'm ready.

Okay. Today's papyism is I'm aiming for a head full of structure and a body full of feel. I was almost going to make you finish that sentence.

Ye could have finished it.

You could have. I know.

You said that. Yeah.

Exactly where that was coming. And a body full of feel.

And.

And this one is, you know, from your perspective, because the parism is I'm aiming for a head full of structure and a body full of feel. So it's all about you and what you're working towards every day. Because just like the rest of us, believe it or not, you're a real human, too, and you're constantly trying to improve yourself as a writer and an athlete as well.

Always. Always.

Do you want to explain this pabrism to us?

That comment was made in one of the calls that we make on performance riders. And basically where I was going with that is I often mention the word structure when I'm coaching or doing my calls or just talking to people in general, and they look at you like you've got two heads as if to say, you know, what are you talking about structure? Like, what does that mean? And then you mentioned. Then you sort of elaborate further on it, and some people will go, oh, you know, but I just like to feel. And yeah, so what I was trying to make out there is, yeah, there's room for feel and there's a room for structure. You know, it doesn't have to be one or the other, but there's room for both. So in the attempt, after having had to have that conversation many, many times over, and then found myself trying to describe that in the program, that's how it came out. It was just like a head full of structure and a body full of feel. Because it is about that. Right. You can't disregard Feel. But structure is so important because riding the test, or not even the test, riding structured lines that relate to dressage, riding the 60 by 20 meter arena, corners and straight lines and center lines and diagonals, that's the structure. And then training your horse on those lines. And not only that, training your horse in the structure of what is going to be asked of it in the test. Trot, canter, transitions, canter, trot, and just repeat things over and over and over. You know, don't make one trot counter transition in the whole session. Do multiple like. So basically there it was about understanding the test, understanding what dressage is about. Be structured to train the things that you know you're going to need line transitions and have that in your head and stick to it. Even when stuff's going badly, stick to it, but then apply it with feel.

Okay, So I think this is going to be a great conversation to dig deeper into those two ideas of feel and structure. And I also wanted to tell you, Brett, that this parism was actually suggested by one of the writers in our gold program. She said, I've been listening to podcasts, loving everything. Here's a great potteryism you should do. So we're starting to get them requested now.

Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. You know, the legacy I'm leaving of all these sort of, you know, statements that I'm making. But in, in saying that they do. Trying to just make it as clear to understand as possible and try to get people to think openly about, you know, there's not, it's not an exact science. It's, it's. It's a sport where, yes, there are a number of views on how to do it. There are a number of methods, there are a number of roads to roam, if you want to call it that, number of roads or paths up the mountain to get to Grand Prix and go up through the levels, everybody's got an opinion and the end of the day, there are many, many ways to do it. And. But the two things that I know that you need, one of them is a structured approach so you can be methodical and consistent. And the other is feel, so that you can feel when things are going to happen or feel when things happen and correct them. So, yeah, having the structure in your mind each day you ride and that, that involves arming yourself with knowledge, having a clear plan, knowing the sport you're in, knowing exactly where you, what you want to do on that given day, and being very structured, strict about it, but then allowing yourself to feel the horse. Don't be too rigid and feel the horse. But then also don't let your feelings take you on enormous tangents. And that's, that's what will happen. Feel alone will just take you nowhere. It'll take you down the path of correcting one thing. But then it becomes. You get. You get fixated on it and then all of a sudden 40 minutes is gone. You realize you haven't done anything. So, yeah, feel alone can be dangerous.

So people often do say that writing is all about this sort of magical or elusive factor of feel. It's kind of like people refer to it as, well, either you have good feel or you don't have good feel. And something that I think we've all learned working with you in the programs in performance writers is that so much of this can be learned. You know, so much of this can be learned and how. It's not 100% about your God given talent or feel per se, but let's go into this concept of feel and let's start at the beginning. What are we talking about when we're talking about a rider's feel?

Look, it is extremely important feel. What we're talking about there is the ability of the rider to feel the horse and feel the horse underneath you feel the way that they apply aids to the horse. So with. With the aids that they have available seat, legs, reins, body, how you apply the aids and how you can apply those aids in a way where the horse doesn't get frightened of them, learns to respond to them and have those aids eventually being refined to a point where they are very, very subtle. And going back to the philosophy that we try to share in performance riders is that when you're doing this job really well, it should appear like you're not doing much at all on the horse. So that's how you refine those aids to the minimal aids. And those minimal aids make it look like you're doing not much. The feel allows you to do that. It'll give you. It allows you to feel when you put the aids on, feel when you need to do something so. And need to kind of work through a resistance. Feel is enormous. Now, I believe feel can be developed. You'll often hear old horsemen go, oh, such and such. You can't train feel. Well, I disagree. Yes, you might not. Some, some riders will have more feel than others. And that can be said in nearly every sport on the planet that there's a reason why the top Formula one drivers are the top Formula one drivers. They have more feel for the car, you know, than the other ones. That doesn't mean that the other drivers aren't great drivers. They just lack that last bit of feel. Well, it's the same as in riding. You know, the top riders have extra talent. It doesn't mean that we. That all of us can't improve our skills in feel with feel. So. And it, it all boils down to giving yourself time to feel things and, and allow it and, and thinking about it, consuming yourself with it off the horse. I had a call this week from a young girl from New Zealand who was wanting to come and ride, wanted to come and pay us to ride some of our horses. And I said, we, we can't do that because the horses we have for clients. But why do you want to do this? And she said, well, I'm trying to search for the correct feel that I'm looking for. And I could understand what she was calling for, and I could understand what, you know, that that would help her. But in the same time, you can also create a feel by visualizing, by watching other horses, by kind of thinking about what it might feel like yourself. And you will develop. You will develop something if you keep working on it. You will. You will improve your feel.

And what about then if we flip the side of the coin and talk about structure? Well, to be honest, I've never really heard anybody else talk about structure other than you in that way. Lots of people talk about feel, but do you want to go a little bit deeper into what you mean by structure?

Yeah, I mean, that's. I was just thinking then, as you're speaking, like, you can't train feel. You can develop it, and it will continue to develop, but you can train structure. Structure is knowledge. It's the thought process. It's discipline, it's focus. It's an amount of focus. So if we know that it's proportionately structure and feel, you could be the world's best structured rider and work on being that. And what that means is be disciplined, just to stick to stay on the lines, to work through problems, to know what the test is going to ask you to do or the competition arena is going to ask you to do. And break it down with the structured approach. Break down the elements of the movements that you're having to do or trying to improve. Conjure up great exercises around those individual components for each movement. Work through them, work through the problems. Break it back to walk if you have to. Just keep having the structured approach will give you the confidence to break Things down into little components. Work on every single component and then bring it back together to put the movement together. And that structure will help you develop your feel. So I think that if you can ride with this view of, well, yes, I can develop my feel. I might not have the feel of the best riders in the world at the moment, but through being really structured, really disciplined, really focused, having a mind of breaking things down, working off the horse, that will help me put this all together. And I think you can definitely that that there's a very close alignment with the ability to be structured and the intelligence for the sport. Having a real intelligence for the sport. There's a real relationship there.

Just a quick message from us. If any of the ideas discussed today resonate with you and you'd love to dive deeper, head over to performanceriders.com there's a bunch of free content for you. And there's loads of opportunities as well to work with us by enrolling in one of our training or Mentoring Programs, performanceriters.com so the papyrism we're talking about in this episode is I'm aiming for a head full of structure and a body full of feel. So, Brett, how do you personally try to incorporate both these ideas, feel and structure, into your own training sessions?

Well, I'm like everybody else. The. The first thing that will go out the window with me is structure. When I get pulled onto the tangent of feel only, and I have to keep making myself come back to structure. The one thing I've noticed over the years is that structure will get you further than feel. If you had to take one or the other, structure, intelligence of riding, and intelligence about the sport will get you further in the sport than feel by itself. Someone riding around, airy, fairy, fluffy, with the most beautiful feel in the world is not going to train their horse to do such a structured sport as dressage. So structure will get you further. And I have to keep reminding myself that structure is very, very important, because I'm like everyone. I'll just float around riding, looking for the next thing to feel. So there's a lot of stuff now that I do subconsciously because I have made myself over the years be structured. And that will include writing my lines, writing my corners, writing my short sides, writing my setups, all the setups for my movements. They're little things that I just do naturally nearly every day I train. And that's not just something I'm consciously doing on a specific day. It's every day that I will have that in the back of My mind, whether I'm doing it or not is another thing. But I'll have it in the back of my mind and I can switch it on and off, actually making myself do the harder stuff like center lines, hot rainbacks, all the little things that are a little bit nondescript, that don't necessarily stick out as being the big things for the test. Well, I'm like everyone. I have to force myself to do that. And that's through being focused and disciplined and structured. Then also trying to then apply the corrections, my corrections, whatever I feel. So I might be doing a half pass, for example, and I feel a problem. Horses running away, horses leaning all over the inside of the bend, maybe lagging against my outside leg when I'm trying to place them in the position for half pass. Well, then I have to go back to my feel to say, hey, respond to this aid, or I know an exercise I need to do now to improve you in this, so that's when the feel will come. But trying to make myself stay structured, and every single time I, I don't stay structured, I start letting little bad habits creep in. You know, not going into corners, you know, not setting things up properly, not writing enough important transitions. All of those things make a difference, and they're things that I, I can, that I have the choice of doing. And then when I get to the show and I'm doing like a center line, for example, and I can't. A halt, my halt doesn't go very well. Like, well, you know, you knew you had to do this for the last month. Why didn't you do more of them? Yeah, you know, like, that's my fault. I've got to own that.

What, what's an example of someone who might be going a little bit too heavy on feel and too light on structure? So I'm thinking that it would be great for us writers, as we're thinking about this, to be able to identify where do we fall in the spectrum of how much feel we're using and how much structure we're using. And Brett, something that comes to mind when you're explaining about writing your lines and that being part of your structure is that so many of us get caught up on chasing perfection on a 20 meter circle, right?

Yeah.

Like chasing the perfect trot on a 20 meter circle. What are some other examples?

One of the examples that probably stands out the most is when riders are chasing the concept of lightness, you know, so we all ride around. We none of us really enjoy horses leaning all over our hands. And we can get caught very quickly into, oh, don't you lean on my hands? And we start to sort of move the bit around and move their neck a little bit and trying to get the horse to sort of get a bit nicer in the reins. And that can be very consuming. And. And there's a whole list of reasons as to why a horse will possibly lean against the. The hand. And that might not be because his or, you know, the horse is just wanting to rest on your reins. It could be that the whole way of going is them. They're going down on the shoulders and down onto the front, and the result is the fact that they're on the reins. So the structured. The feel approach would be like, oh, you're all over my reins. And you start sort of going to the problem flexion inside. You know, move off my rein, get off my reins, pick your neck up, whatever it might be. And we only concentrate on the. Where we're feeling the problem. A structured approach would be. Well, you know, this could be coming from anywhere. It could be coming from the fact that he's pushing onto his shoulders and leaning forward in his whole posture and leaning forward and down. Maybe I need to make transitions in the pace. Maybe I need to come back and try and shift him back, bit back off his shoulders and get him to take more weight behind. Maybe I need to make some more transitions here. Possibly. Maybe he's leaning down on the inside shoulder and leaning onto this one side of his body, and I'm feeling it just in the left rein. Maybe I need to actually move him off my leg a little bit and get him to sort of stand up a bit and be more upright and balanced over all four feet. So the structured approach there of. Well, this is not just where I'm feeling it. This could be in a couple of other areas. Let me be disciplined enough to sort out where this is. The feel approach is just feeling where it's happening and, And. And being. And being distracted by that and only going into that problem.

Okay, and what about. Can we come up with another example on the opposite side of somebody who might be writing a little bit too much in the structure side and not enough in the feel side, what would be.

Yeah, so classic example there is training downward transitions. So if someone was saying, okay, I need to do 10,000 downward like transitions. Yeah, and they might be cantering, for example. Let's say cantering and preparing to walk. In their mind, they're doing a walk, a canter to walk transition. Regardless of how bad it feels, and they're cantering along, and the horse, at about, let's say, two or three strides before the rider is making the transition, that horse has already decided I'm walking, right? You can see it on their face, and you can feel it in them. They're quitting, cantering. They're stopping, cantering. That horse has already decided I'm walking. And the only thing that's stopping me from walking is this rider now pushing me and holding me up. At that moment, the rider needs to feel that and go, oh, my goodness, I want to still be in Canada. But my horse is doing everything it can to walk. At that point, forget walking, because you're just confirming his thoughts. You're just saying virtually, if you walk, then you're saying, that was right. You were right. You were actually ahead of the game. You were two steps ahead of me. You are right. We were going to walk. And that horse is like, I'll do that again. So then it comes to the point of saying, well, no. At some point when he thinks about walking, I need to say, no, no, you need to think about cantering now and going out again and cantering and saying, don't think about walking until I tell you when it's time to walk. And that's where, you know, the structure of doing the downward transition will have the rider focusing only on that and not the feel of what the ingredients of a great downward transition are. And the ingredients of a great downward transition is the fact that the horse keeps cantering in front of your leg and in your rhythm, so working right until the very last moment when you decide, we are walking now, and that becomes this positive forward transition that looks like it's really balanced and there's no jumping together strides. And the horse is not thinking backwards. The horse is thinking positively. And they are always the better transitions. That's a classic example of a rider getting caught on the structure and forgetting to feel the little moments when they need to make decisions.

So I think, really what I've heard from this conversation is that structure will actually get us where we need to go, but most of us are probably heavier in the feel component and getting caught up in whatever the horse happens to throw at us that day. And ideally, you would like us to be combining feel and structure and playing between those things all the time as they're equally important.

Well, this is where it interlinks, right? Because with structure comes the understanding of what. What is working trot, what is working candor, what is collected candor, what is a half halt? Like, all of this knowledge that we need to ride with the structure will enable us to say, right, I want to go from working canter to collected canter. I'm going to apply my half halt. And that's the structure. But then the feel is like, okay, he got behind me in the half halt, and now I'm cantering on the spot with the horse behind me. So now I need to go back to working canter. Come on, let's go. And so the feeling of the result comes. The idea is structure, but the feeling of the result and the response is the feel. So you're always getting the feedback from the horse through your feel, but it's your structure that keeps asking the questions, like, keeps asking you the questions. And then you ask your horse the question, they give you the answer, you feel the answer, and then you keep going from there in this sort of round and round discussion with the horse.

I love that. Okay, awesome. Another Parburyism in the bag. Absolutely love it. Thanks so much, Brett.

Pleasure. It's great. It was a good.