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Tension: How It Shows and How It Scores

By the Dressage Wiki Editorial Board · Updated 9 July 2026

Tension is the absence of Losgelassenheit, the suppleness and mental relaxation that form the second element of the training scale, and it is the most pervasive fault in dressage because it attacks everything built above it. A tense horse holds its back tight, and a tight back shortens the strides, stiffens the transitions, hardens the contact and drains the swing from the whole picture. Judges catch it twice: in every movement it touches, and again in the submission or harmony collectives that aggregate the pattern.

What tension looks like

The signs form a ladder from atmosphere to distress, and an educated eye reads them cumulatively rather than singly:

  • The held back. The foundational sign: the back stops swinging, the tail stops its pendulum movement, the neck shortens, and the strides lose their overtrack and spring. Everything else on the list is downstream of this.
  • The breathing and the mouth. A relaxed horse breathes in rhythm with its stride and chews the bit softly; a tense one holds its breath or blows in snorts, and the mouth goes quiet-rigid or busy-resistant.
  • The tail. Swishing beyond the occasional flick is among the most legible signs at a distance, and judges see it from every seat on the panel.
  • Teeth-grinding. Audible at C on a quiet day, and read as sustained internal tension even when the mechanics survive.
  • Spooking, jogging, anticipation. The behavioural tier: the walk that jogs, the halt that will not stand, the horse that leaves before the aid.
  • The extreme tier. Genuine distress signals, where the judging system stops scoring and starts protecting: the FEI’s guidance requires signs of discomfort to be penalised significantly, caps movement marks where problems are serious, and ends the test for blood or lameness.

The ladder’s lower rungs are ordinary competition reality: few horses are entirely unaffected by a stadium. What the judging system prices is the degree, the persistence and the cost to the work.

How tension scores: the double deduction

Tension is arithmetically the most expensive fault family because it deducts twice by design. First, movement by movement: the tight back flattens the mediums, shortens the collected work, stiffens the transitions and hollows the frame, so each affected movement loses on its own merits. Second, in the collectives: the submission mark on national sheets, and the FEI’s harmony collective, exist precisely to aggregate the cooperation picture, and both carry coefficients. A test of technically survivable movements ridden throughout on a held back therefore finishes points, not fractions, below the same movements ridden in genuine relaxation, which is the scoring system enforcing the training scale’s priority order.

Tension also launders itself into other fault families, which is where diagnosis matters: it appears at the mouth as contact faults, in the walk as the lateral tendency, in the changes as croup-high or anticipated changes, and in the piaffe as the rigidity the definition’s “supple and elastic back” excludes. A judge’s remarks distribute these symptoms across the sheet; the collective gathers them back into one diagnosis.

Show tension and installed tension

The distinction that matters most, to trainers and to anyone evaluating a horse, is between tension as a state and tension as a trait. Show tension is situational: the young horse electric in its first indoor arena, the seasoned campaigner lit up by a championship crowd. It varies with the venue, improves with mileage, and often coexists with a fundamentally relaxed way of going at home. Installed tension is structural: a horse produced under sustained pressure carries the held back and the worried mouth as its default everywhere, and warm-up footage looks like test footage. The first is a stage in a career; the second is a property of the production, repaired — where it is repaired — over long timescales and at real cost.

The sport’s own formats encode the distinction. Judges reward relaxation demonstrably: the stretching exercises that appear from the lowest levels to the 2026 revisions of the FEI tests exist because a genuinely supple horse can lengthen its frame forward and down on a light rein and a tense one cannot, making the exercise the sport’s built-in tension test.

Reading tension in a test or on a video

For evaluation purposes, tension rewards structured watching rather than impressions. The context questions come first: where is the footage taken, what is being asked, and is the tension proportionate to both? A big-moving horse electric in a prize-giving is information of one kind; the same electricity in a quiet home arena at working trot is another. The comparison questions come second: does the horse settle across the session or wind up; does the walk, tension’s most honest gait, survive; does the stretch come when offered? And the pattern question last: across several videos and score sheets, do the submission collectives and the tension-flavoured remarks (“tight in the back,” “tense in the walk”) recur? A single tense test is a day; a submission collective sitting persistently half a point below the movement average is a trait, priced accordingly. The structured method, alongside the other families, is in reading sales videos, and the temperament questions behind it belong to the buying decision proper.

The welfare boundary

One boundary deserves plain statement. Ordinary competitive tension and its management are training matters; sustained distress is not. The sport’s regulatory line (judges required to penalise discomfort, stewards empowered against aggressive riding in the warm-up, tests ended for blood or lameness) exists because the difference between an excited athlete and a distressed one is real and visible, and the wiki’s descriptions of tension throughout assume that boundary rather than blurring it.

Sources

Frequently asked questions

What does tension look like in a dressage horse? A held, unswinging back first, then its symptoms: shortened strides, a rigid or busy mouth, a swishing tail, held breath or snorting, teeth-grinding, jogging in the walk and anticipation. The signs read cumulatively, and the walk shows them most honestly.

How much does tension cost in a dressage test? It deducts twice: each affected movement loses marks on its own merits, and the submission or harmony collective — carrying a coefficient — aggregates the pattern. A tense test typically finishes several percentage points below the same movements ridden in relaxation.

What is the difference between a hot horse and a tense horse? Energy versus anxiety. A hot horse offers more forward than was asked with its back still swinging; a tense one holds its back regardless of pace. The distinction is visible in the swing, the mouth and the walk, and it matters because heat is manageable while installed tension is a retraining project.

Can tension be trained out of a horse? Show tension — situational electricity — routinely improves with mileage and management. Installed tension, produced by sustained pressure during training, is repaired slowly if at all, which is why persistent tension signals across multiple videos and score sheets are weighed heavily when evaluating a horse.

Why do judges care so much about relaxation? Because suppleness is the training scale’s second element and everything above it depends on it: a tight back blocks the connection, the impulsion and the collection alike. The scoring system enforces the priority through the collectives, and the stretching exercises in the tests exist as the built-in check.