I only recently picked up this book by Kottas, and it is part of my self-enforced journey to review as many equestrian books as possible. This will help me see what other people are teaching and how much sense it makes to me as a coach and author. Inevitably I will agree and disagree with different things the authors say, but there will also be some learning. It is very easy to become closed minded to new learning, but it is also important to make your own decisions too and stick with an approach that works for you.

Dressage Solution: A Riders Guide

is a beautifully bound book with crystal clear, high quality photographs and diagrams. It’s layout is among the best I have ever seen and the information is easy to find. It has a good contents page, index and a glossary of the terms. It is the sort of book you could use as a reference book throughout your progression in dressage.

There is nothing I should need to say about the author’s credentials and you can read ‘About the Author’ further down the page. Let us just say that Arthur Kottas is worth listening to!

The book is truly a ‘Dressage Solutions’ guide and starts off with the rider, moves through the basic paces, basic training problems and finally on to the most advanced work. Within each of the sections Kottas proposes typical problems, and provide a series of solutions with suggested exercises you can use to help solve the problem. He also adds in a ‘Why does this matter?’ section in most of the problems so you understand why the problem is detrimental to the training of your horse.

Let me give an example, which related well my own discussions on medium trot in my post Gunning Across The Diagonal – I have removed quite a bit of the material from this section for copyright reasons and length but I will note what I have removed to give you an idea of the depth of answers provided by Kottas.