I´m surely not qualified to write about Piaffe, because we had our first one only yesterday and today it was gone again. But Titum has shown me which way we will have to take.
I had worked on transistions and they had helped us a lot and I had also asked him to slow down his collected trot. But we have never gotten as close to Piaffe as we did yesterday.
Miriam wrote:
I think teaching the piaffe from collected walk is very good possible. Dr. Nancy Nicholson pointed out in her Biomechanics of Dressage book that piaffe is actually more related to the walk than the trot, so that means that the walk in itself is a good choice.
This works wonderfully for us. Some days ago, we have invented our “stork gameâ€, which is nothing but walking almost in place on my toes with very much tension and lifting my legs very high. Titum collects and does the same. The more suspension I add, the more upwards energy Titum shows. Yesterday, when I increased this suspended moving upwards to a trot (not moving more forwards but only more upwards like jumping up and down), Titum took off too and started something very close to Piaffe. As I said, today we did not get it as well, but when I gradually increased my suspension, he did so too, it only wasn´t enough for Piaffe. We will continue this and wait for a high energy day when he will finally take off again…
So our Piaffe will not develop from adding (forwards) energy in trot and then slowing it down again, but from adding more upwards energy to collected walk.