Bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce – the wonderful thing about highlands!

Another retrospective post:

I’ve chucked together a short video of Fergs running through some simple, smallish grids.  This is at least partly so I can keep track of which exercises I’ve done (I have a very short memory!) and keep the challenges varied.  However, I think it’s worth looking critically at what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, how well he’s responding to the challenge and what I’m doing to influence him for better or worse.  It’s worth it for me, anyway – doesn’t mean anyone has to read it!  These clips are all from July 2013.

The first video is from the day I tried Scottie the jump saddle – just a simple standard length 3 stride double.  Clearly Fergs puts four strides in every time, but happily and smoothly so, which means no complaints from me.  He’s actually rather springy out of the second part, which is all good, as far as I’m concerned.  It’s not big and not much of a technical challenge, but it was enough for me to be confident he “likes” the saddle (which, for the record, has been fitted to him – but that’s a different matter him actually liking it).  He fairly consistently changed legs (not very cleanly) after the first element, which I think is due to the presence of another fence to his right, roughly on a 20m circle from the first cross pole.  We had been turning and jumping this fence after the first, so when I corrected him and straightened towards the upright, he responded with a lead change – I’m not concerned about this.  I am more concerned about how noticeably I fall on his neck on landing, particularly first time.  I also have a bad habit of standing up and leaning forward to stop – very logical, huh?

The next grid is a bounce, one stride, small spread.  He handles this really nicely, I think.  The bounce barely seems to exist and certainly doesn’t cause too many issues for him.  The stride is short (not horse standard length) and puts him on a decent shot for the last fence, which he tackles neatly.  First time over, I’m probably a bit in front of him; I seem to have rectified this over the larger spread though so not the end of the world.  I actually really like the latter clip, and it’s not often I watch a video and don’t regard it with a degree of horror!

Next up is a small (80cm-ish) spread.  Nothing much to say about it, other than the rational being that jumping grids is fine and dandy, but not very useful for a competition – you don’t often have a perfect set up for a fence, and we need to be able to see a stride over an individual fence and jump it effectively.  This is probably something we don’t do enough of, and a not insignificant factor in my abject failure to jump courses well.  He hits a decent stride and puts in a nice enough jump.  I don’t sit up at all on landing, which is definitely tied in to the “fall on neck” issue.

Finally we have a mass of poles – trot pole approach, bounce, one stride (with pole) and little fence out.  Rational – calm, sensible approach (sometimes lacking with us as I seem to like to “fire” him out of the hedge line over fences), impulsion without speed, activating his hocks and sitting up through the bounces and keeping it up over the pole/fence out.  We were also working on trickier exercises with small fences as the ground was drying up more that I’d like.  He handled it nicely, enough – possibly needing to take off nearer the first part of the bounce as he seems to need to stretch over it, but generally good – though I appear to be unable to control my lower leg and keep weight in my stirrups.  I can also confirm that shorts and “normal” stirrups on a close contact saddle are not a good combination – I suffered for this!

Not on video, we were also working over a split related distance yesterday – fence in, option of two fences out, all smallish cross poles (on account of being bareback).  I was working on balance and keeping the focus and listening to me, taking my steering requests on board.  The right branch was also downhill and provided and a good opportunity to work on both this and keeping a straight line away from the fence.  I can’t really analyse this without video footage, but it’s an exercise we’ll revisit with a saddle and increase the difficulty of the questions we’re asking.