give me a gymnastic jumping exercise for tonight pleeeeease.....

M

Morgan123

Well-Known Member
Joined
2 January 2008
Messages
1,405
Visit site
Ideas?

Aiming to improve suppleness mostly. Am in an arena and would prefer not gridwork (so I don't have to keep getting on and off). Not jumping on a serpentine or figure of eight as did these last week. Other ideas?
 
why do you have to get off to do gridwork?

I just build a grid and take my horse down it straight away. As long as you get your distances right, and your horse is warmed up there is no need to introduce a fence at a time.

I usually do a bounce to a one non jumping stride, to another non jumping stride to an oxer, or a two non jumping stride.
You want to keep your distances shorter than conventional distances as you need to encourage a better bascule. I set my non jumping at seven of my paces, and two non jumping strides at eleven of my paces. For a bounce you put a pole between the one non jumping distance (3 1/2 paces).

Don't put a bounce at the end of a grid unless your horse is very experienced at grid work.

You only need to do the grid five or six times, off both reins. Don't forget to slightly alter the distance between the fences if the jumps go much higher.
 
I think part of the benefit from gridwork is building it up gradually, making tweaks to the striding or height/ spread depending on how the horse is going and what requires working on, to put up a line and jump through may be beyond many horses, especially young ones and you are not able to build something in reaction to what the horse does, I would also worry about straining them, even if well warmed up the muscles required to jump are different to those purely for flatwork.

I think the OP will need to get on and off to make some changes whatever exercise they are doing to get real benefit the fences probably need to go up or change in some way, I quite like to put on fence on the center line, a second 2 strides away on an angle, a 3rd on the other angle 3 strides away, so set like a Y and use them to work on stride pattern, jumping from every direction, if you set them up so they can be jumped both ways you can do a fair amount, possibly add a 4th fence on the centre line so you have that 4 strides away from the first or put the first as a bounce to mix things up, it keeps the horse waiting as it does not know which jump comes next, suppleing as there are different distances, turns to make use of.
Another is jumps on the 4 points of a 20m circle a good exercise for accurate riding and very difficult to do well, otherwise there are plenty of variations of grids that don't require too much moving about once set up, you could do one on each side with different distances, bounces one side to a single fence to get it pinging, a couple of wide oxers on the other, or across the diagonal, to get the horse moving more forward across the ground and in the air.
 
one of my favourite exercises is put some tires/a barrel/a jumping block or whatever you can find in the middle of the school and then build a cross from that being the middle of the cross (this is really hard to explain!).. so a jumping block in the middle, 4 poles coming from that in a cross shape with a wing each end of the poles, then you jump over a pole and make a 10(ish)m circle round to the next jump and repeat this. you can also jump right over the middle piece too and you dont have to keep getting off to adjust it. its really good for getting the horse to listen to you as he has to slow down, make a circle and try to get a straight line into the next jump. brilliant exercise to do. i'll try to find a diagram of it to understand it better :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top