The Training Scale — Rhythm, Suppleness, Contact, Impulsion, Straightness, Collection — is presented in FEI literature as the distillation of centuries of classical wisdom. It is not. It is a German military innovation of the early twentieth century, systematised in cavalry manuals, refined after World War Two, and adopted by the FEI as the international standard for a sport that had not existed when the manuals were written.
Steinbrecht and the H.Dv.12
Steinbrecht's Gymnasium of the Horse, published posthumously in 1886, was the foundational text. The German H.Dv.12 cavalry manual of 1937 codified what Steinbrecht had articulated into a systematic training progression. The continuous elastic contact as a goal — the horse always on the rein, always going forward into a maintained connection — appears in this tradition as a military requirement.
A cavalry horse needed to be reliable. Consistently on the aids. Manageable under stress. Not brilliantly light in moments of inspiration but steadily available throughout a day's work. Continuous contact served this requirement. The looped rein of the classical Baroque masters was not what a cavalry training programme needed.
The Telephone Became a Circuit
In the classical tradition, the rein was a telephone: available, used when needed, otherwise quiet. The horse maintained its carriage. The contact was intermittent by design.
In the German military tradition, the rein became a circuit: always present, the horse always going forward into it, the energy always circulating between leg and hand. This is elegant as a theory. As practical reality it creates a horse that has never experienced release of contact as reward, that has learned to lean on the bit because the bit is always there.
The Retrospective Claim
The Training Scale was codified after World War Two as the FEI attempted to create a consistent international standard. The German system won, partly because Germany had the strongest dressage tradition in the post-war period and partly because the system's clear progression made it genuinely teachable.
What was lost in the adoption was the question of where the system was going. In the classical French and Iberian traditions, collection was the beginning of a different conversation — one that ultimately required less, not more, contact to maintain. The German military tradition had no use for that conversation. Its horses needed to be on the aids, not beyond them.
Presenting this tradition as the continuation of 2000 years of classical horsemanship is historically false. It is a category error that the FEI has never adequately examined.