Exercises to steady speedy showjumper

FlyingCircus

FlyingCircus

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My boy gets very very excited when jumping. This manifests in going sideways and FAR too quickly up to the jump.
It's not so much a problem at a low level, as the courses he has jumped haven't been massively technical and the jumps are small enough for him to hop over even if he has come at it sideways... But now I'd like to start jumping bigger with him, I really need to work on slowing him (the sideways seems to go away when the jumps go up, and he also slows down but not by much!).

At the moment, I'm doing lots of gridwork with him..which is all fine and dandy through the grids but as soon as he gets to a single fence he's whizzing at it again. It's nice to know he can turn and jump from a fast pace, but I can just envisage the poles flying if we tried a more difficult course! Because he's so focused on jumping quickly that he doesn't like any rider interference!

Does anyone have any exercises that will help me bring him back to me?
 
tda said:
My instructor used to make me pop the jump and then halt in a straight line immediately after!
Click to expand...

The idea of that seems quite laughable at the minute, if I'm honest!! How did you work up to doing that?
Short of hauling on his mouth (which I of course won't do!) there's no way he'd happily halt after the jump right now. Even if he trots up to a tiny jump, he's raring to go after :')
 
if you circle as soon as you can after every jump as well, it teaches them not to run on eventually. and poles after jumpes as well, so they have to focus on them instead of running off.
 
Flatwork with the occasional jump here or there... If you focus on doing flatwork (shoulder in, leg yield, transitions etc) and just jump randomly every now and then, the horse will start to think of jumps as just an occasional occurrence in a flatwork session. The more of it you do, the better the horse will get.

To be clear, I mean set up a couple of jumps in the school and do flatwork around them. Then when the horse seems fairly settled, choose one and jump it when he isn't expecting it. Then go back to flatwork. Wait until he doesn't seem to be thinking about jumping and jump again. And so forth until the horse stops thinking about jumping immediately after the jump. Once you're there, you can try doing two jumps followed by flatwork. You should see improvement over a few sessions.
 
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