Essay On Dressage

The art and beauty of dressage has been charted as far back as Ancient Greece with the first book dealing with dressage written by the general Xenophone (430 – 354 BC), known as the founder of the discipline. After the disintegration of Greece, dressage disappeared and was only rekindled during the Renaissance period in northern Italy in the 16th Century. The creation of a riding academy in Naples in 1532 brought the teachings to Baroque France. Le Manège Royale, 1632, was based fully on 'understanding the character of the horse and winning its cooperation'. The 18th century brought dressage to its peak with the opening of the reknowned “Spanish Riding School” in 1729 in Vienna, which laid the basis of the modern discipline.

The discipline of dressage has now developed into one of the three Olympic disciplines: Show Jumping, Cross-country and Dressage. The horses used for Dressage have become, through selective breeding and training, very different to the horses that we

The latissmus dorsi and the medial gluteal are both movers and range of movement muscles. They enable the legs to move back when one of the hooves touche the ground. For the muscles to be strong and elastic and to not have spasms and lock sections and to deliver efficient motion, the hamstring group and the deep caudal pectoral muscles give additional strength to the "lats" and the "gluts". The "elastic ring" muscles of the trunk give equine movement its brilliance by storing and releasing energy from motions of the legs. There is also a connection from the bottom system of muscles to the tongue via the hypoid apparatus. There is an overlapping set of muscles from the rider's lower leg by which, when squeezed, the horse can be trained to munch softly on the bit. These muscles, from the top of the coupe to the poll (between the ears or onto of the head): the ventral serrate, the pectoral muscles, the stemohyoid