Helping you enjoy your dressage and improve your marks!
Our site aims to help riders and judges alike to get the most out of dressage.
Please see the riders and judges pages for tips and for templates that are free to download so that you can plan out your tests, from A for riders or from C for judges.
We also sell mini practice arenas which you can use to help learn your dressage tests on your feet. It is probably the next best thing to learning on your horse and avoids the problem of your horse anticipating movements.
See below for more information on our practice arenas and for how to buy a mini arena.
See separate pages for riding and judging tips and templates.
About the Easy Dressage mini practice arenas
Practicing on your feet with our mini arenas helps with:
- Stronger learning
- Better recall, even under pressure
- Less stress and risk of your horse anticipating
- Boosting confidence
- More enjoyment
- Higher marks
Our mini practice arenas help you learn your test by navigating a mini arena on foot.
For adults and children, whether novice or experienced riders. The mini arenas help build familiarity with the dressage arena layout and with the movements of particular tests, so building your confidence and helping you perform on competition day.
The
best way to learn is by doing - but practicing on our horses leads them to anticipate, which can disrupt the test. Few of us have a spare horse to use, or the time or
energy to run round a full size arena on our feet!
Navigating your test using the Easy Dressage mini practice arenas leads to stronger visualisation and deeper learning than learning without moving. This will improve your confidence and free up more of your mind to focus on your riding or to deal with unexpected. You and your horse should be more relaxed, your test should be more fluent, your day more enjoyable and your marks higher!
The mini practice arenas comprise four pre-printed arena borders, marked with the letters of a dressage arena and to scale (long and short arena versions available). They are made of tough PVC and are waterproof, suitable for using indoors or outside. They can easily be wiped clean with a damp cloth. They are easy to set out and put away, to store or to carry. Use them at home or whilst away at a camp or a show.
See the notes below for suggestions on how to use your mini practice arena and for more details about the products.
Using your arena to build familiarity
No-one
knows the rationale behind the dressage arena letters, and the apparent
lack of logic makes them difficult to learn. Most people use
mnemonics (such as All
King Edward's Horses Can Make Big Fences).
But now you can also build
your familiarity by playing games. Try getting your friends to call out
letters at random while you find them in your mini arena, or call them
out for your children and their friends, and see how quickly they learn.
Using your arena to learn a test
You may find it helpful to use our free templates to plan out your test before you walk it through in your mini practice arena. The example plan
shows how to use the blank arena template with a dressage test
sheet and coloured pens to plan out your test, movement by movement.
Once you have your plan, lay out your mini arena and get practicing!
See the test riding tips page for more tips on how to prepare for your test. There are pages of templates for judging (orientated from C, rather than A) and preparation tips for judges, too.
More about Easy Dressage mini practice arenas
The practice arenas come in two sizes:
- Short arena - 3m x 6m, to scale of 20 x 40m arena
- Long arena - 3m x 9m, to scale of 20 x 60m arena
The
scale is designed to be big enough to think through your test as you
practice it on foot, and small enough to set out easily.
Each arena border is 12cm in width, marked with the letters and dimensions of a real arena.
More details are available on request by emailing sales@easydressage.co.uk.
Patent and design rights applied for.