What should I work on between dressage lessons?

What to work on between dressage lessons should be determined primarily by the specific assignments your trainer gives at the end of each lesson rather than by your own independent assessment of what needs work, because the trainer's perspective on what is most productive to practice between sessions reflects their observation of both you and your horse in a way that your own assessment cannot fully replicate. Most good dressage trainers end each lesson with one to three specific things for the student to practice before the next lesson — a specific exercise, a specific position element, or a specific quality to develop — and genuinely practicing these specific assignments is the single most effective between-lesson work you can do. Rather than trying to practice everything that came up in the lesson, focusing on the one or two things the trainer identified as most important prevents the scattered practice that reinforces no single thing thoroughly. The exercises assigned between lessons should be practiced with the specific quality the trainer was developing in mind — not just doing shoulder-in, but doing shoulder-in with the specific attention to outside rein connection or inside hind activity that the lesson identified as most important. Video of your between-lesson riding, reviewed with the trainer's instruction in mind, provides self-assessment information that is more objective than your sense of how the session went. It is also worth noting what you observe in your horse's responses between lessons — when specific exercises feel better than in the lesson, when the horse shows something you have not seen before, when a specific difficulty persists — because this information enriches your next lesson's conversation with the trainer. Keeping a brief training journal of between-lesson rides creates a record that makes patterns visible over time.