simple but effective: jumping exercise

I feel like it's really easy to get caught in a cycle of complaining about the weather haha. It's too hot. Too cold. Too wet or too dry. This summer we were as dry as we were wet last year. And, uh, idk if you forgot but the Mid Atlantic region of the US was very wet last year.

But the dry is equally problematic too, especially as it relates to our poor beloved behemoths existing full time on increasingly hard and unforgiving ground. Charlie was.... not a fan lol.

early morning means harsh lighting angles, but i'm super grateful that trainer K nabbed so much video!!

But. Actually, I'd like to take a moment to appreciate the truly pleasant fall weather we've had lately. Daytime temps are more or less around the 50s, with overnights still hovering above freezing. Plus we've had enough intermittent rain to make for pretty pleasant ground.

It's clear that the winter cold and wet are on the way, but for now I'm just gonna enjoy it haha.

simple yet effective exercise! you can basically endlessly loop through it, too

Charlie and I have been capitalizing too. Lately we've been riding a lot with our barn's resident upper level eventer, Trainer K. Loch Moy and Waredaca both ran on Saturdays, Trainer P's normal teaching day, so we had to tweak the schedule a bit. Luckily it worked out that Trainer K was available to help with the show prep rides.

Unfortunately I don't have any media at all from those rides. So they've languished growing cobwebs in the back of my head instead of germinating into fresh posts here. Sorry...

Realistically tho, this act of writing out my lessons has very real value to me. Often I can uncover new takeaways or knit a more cohesive narrative of the lesson just by writing down the details. Like taking the unstructured fleeting wisps of memory and feel, and cataloging them for future reference.

Or. Um. Something haha.

hard to tell that this is an oxer, but this is the red oxer in the bottom right side of the course map, ridden right to left according to that diagram

Anyway, tho, about halfway through our most recent lesson, trainer K whipped out her cell phone and started taking video - completely unprovoked!! Which, ya know, is awesome haha. I'm such a visual learner and it's so so so useful to connect my memory of a feel with the real time instruction and what Charlie looks like.

This was especially helpful bc it's been a few weeks since I've gotten to see real time footage of us in action. Considering the changes I've been trying to make with my hands since the Martin Douzant clinic, this was a bit overdue.

vertical going out of that same red 60' line

Anyway, onto the lesson. Specifically, that exercise trainer K set up in the above diagram. I don't recall ever doing anything exactly like or very similar to this construction of elements.... But actually I really liked it.

It's super simple, extremely symmetrical, and offers a wide variety of options depending on what you want to address with your specific horse. It doesn't require an inordinate amount of poles and/or standards. Plus, it's easy to keep just looping through over and over. And actually - if you made all the oxers square you'd have even more options.

So yea. Two thumbs up for that pattern. Would highly recommend for anyone looking for ideas.

this is the dark green single vertical according to the course diagram. we'll land and roll back to the left to jump that vertical on the right edge of the frame

For me and Charlie, the goal would be maintaining balance, rhythm and shape in our canter on a proper 12' stride.

You may recall that much of my training with Charlie has been about compressing his stride, asking him to move and jump on a shorter step. The idea is that on a short step, he's forced to sit down more, to rock back and use himself over the fences. And I'm fairly convinced that especially in the early days, this really helped Charlie unlock his longitudinal balance.

like so - vertical jumping into the blue 60' line from the diagram, again ridden right to left according to that image

Now-a-days, tho, it's kinda a different story. Charlie knows how to jump a jump now. With ever-unreliable Emma in the irons, Charlie's become quite adept at jumping from a very wide range of distances haha. Over time, we've sorta learned how to make all the mistakes.

And, for the most part, Charlie's got an answer for almost any gauntlet I throw down (intentionally or otherwise...).

out over the final oxer in the top blue 60' line per the map

However, as we all have learned the hard way at some point or another, sometimes horses are learning a slightly different lesson from what we think we're teaching.

For Charlie, this means that he's kinda figured out the secret to shortened distances. I mean, sure, he could engage his abs and step under and find that big compact basketball bouncy canter... But like, that's hard work, yo. It's MUCH easier to just slug down the line behind my leg to make the short distance work.

yellow diagonal single oxer per the map. and proof that i can still get left behind even when i hold the neck strap!

Meanwhile, because we haven't practiced as much on open distances, I lack the feel and eye for them. I'm too good at riding Charlie on a short stride backwards, but then can't keep our shit together when we start opening up.

This, you may have observed, explains in part why our show jumping courses in competition kinda start falling apart by the end. Like at our last two shows, where it seemed like we only kiiiiinda just barely made it over the last fence by the skin of our teeth haha. Like if we had to go right back in for a second course immediately after, it'd possibly be a bit of a shit show.

charles smashies!!

So this lesson was really helpful bc you can see in the video (plus obvi hear Trainer K commentary) how I tend to chase Charlie a bit. My calibration is totally off. In my head, I think I need to make a big difference in the canter from what I'm used to on the more compressed step.

In reality, tho, when I think I'm dialing up from 11 to 12, Charlie's hearing me go from 10 to 15 haha. Because, shocker, Charlie has a HUGE stride and needs very little invitation to stretch out. Quite a few times we only barely fit in the 4th stride down those lines.... The 14' stride for Charlie is literally right.there.

charles goes LONG!

I do *not* need to fight for it. Rather, it's got to be much more subtle. The sliiightest adjustment to our rhythm.

And what I'm looking for is an almost comfortable feeling. Not flat, not reaching out front. But a steady comfortable push from back to front. Ya know. If only it were that easy haha!

go with him, emma!!

Actually, this was why trainer K set the fences up a bit more than I've seen in.... a while haha. Obviously we don't want to train such that the only way I can get Charlie to respect a fence is to make it giant. But... Also I've got to learn how to make these mistakes on a forward distance and it's gonna take something more than 2'6 to keep Charlie from plowing through the fence.

To this end, we set the lines at ~3' from the start, then bumped them up to around 3'3 to finish. So mostly proper Training height, tho the oxer widths weren't fully up to spec.

same yellow oxer from the other side

A big part of helping me get the right feel for our pace had to do with getting my own position and balance dialed in. Again, you'll hear it in the video, but trainer K talked a lot about the relative position of my spinal column from head down through seat.

I'm still mostly holding the neck strap to help keep my hands committed (tho I'm happy to report that the muscle memory IS happening!! Yay!!!) but it turns out that there's still more to it than that. Trainer K observed that I tend to freeze a bit in my position. As in, if I'm very upright, or if I'm a bit tipped forward, wherever I am, I just kinda stay there.

will land eventually then roll back to the right

Which in some ways is nice that I'm not really moving around a whole lot in the saddle or shifting my center of gravity every other step. This is probably why I always feel "secure." But it means that if I'm going to stay in one spot, it better be a good spot lol.

Specifically, K wants to see me bring my shoulders a bit more back. In the video she uses the description of bringing my head back, tho I'm not quite sure that's the right trigger for me ("sternum" might be what I recommend). Basically, as I understand it, when she tells me to bring my shoulders back, my hands inadvertently follow too. Which... they should not haha.

the harsh angles of the sun for this early morning ride made the whole blue side of the map tricky to video... but i kinda dig the silhouette effect! good boy, charlie <3

You can see it in the video a few times to that yellow oxer in particular, and also the red oxer. My shoulders coming back are ok -- but the rest of me kinda wants to follow, and it's like the second I get my upper body behind the motion I can't see a forward distance any more.

Mostly this is a symptom of not having independent hands (**siiigh**), and is also the reason why Martin told me to use a neck strap lol. Which, yes, is helping. This lesson, and specifically the pattern of single-turn-line off each lead, looping again and again, really helped me dial into the right feelings.

omgosh actual non-first-person video of me jumping my horse!

Also, a bit unrelated to the feelings from the ride, I was kinda happy about the progression too. Charlie's a clever horse, ya know? He will very often give a pretty good answer right off the bat, with the expectation that "If I give you the answer, you won't ask the same question twice!"

But ya know. These lessons are for me as much as they're for him so we *do* repeat exercises. Often, this means that we start on kinda a high note but end up devolving a bit from there.

Which was... the case in this lesson. We'd already done the exercise a few times pretty smoothly before Trainer K pulled out the camera. Maybe seeing that she was videoing made me change my ride or whatever, but you'll see our first few passes in the video had some blips.

Naturally in my mind I immediately started feeling like "Oh boy, here we go, it's all gonna fall apart now!" But... actually, it didn't.

pic unrelated: my new crop has kinda this chunky handle that it turns out makes my hand cramp a bit. i still like the crop.... but maybe if you're crop shopping make sure you're comfortable with the, ahem, girth of your new weapon

If anything, having those few blips forced me to work even harder at internalizing that feel trainer K was trying to convey: The consistency in balance, rhythm, pace in a more forward (but not chasing!) canter throughout the whole exercise. And, go figure, we were able to end on some really solid jumps. Yessss!

Obviously there's still a lot of work to be done (particularly on the back side of lines) but we got a lot of good mileage in this ride. Here's hoping the weather will cooperate a little longer into the season ;)