Where Real Dressage Begins: Shoulder-In

Shoulder-in is one of the best lateral movements for testing and improving your horse’s fine-motor controls of steering, collection and engagement. In a correctly ridden shoulder-in, the horse’s hind legs stay on the track, parallel to the rail. His front legs come to the inside of the hind legs, so that the outside front leg tracks directly in front of the inside hind leg, and his body makes a 30-degree angle with the rail. This way, instead of traveling on two tracks with the inside hind leg directly behind the inside foreleg and the outside hind leg behind the outside foreleg, the horse travels on three tracks: the inside foreleg and outside hind leg on their own individual tracks and the outside foreleg and inside hind leg sharing the same track.

The shoulder-in is not physically easy to perform. It requires significant bending through the horse’s body, beginning with the compression of the abdominal muscles, continuing through the neck and culminating in a slight inside