How do you plan your schooling sessions?

BYR

BYR

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Apologies if this has been covered before, but would be interested to hear how other riders plan their schooling, especially if they do not have very regular trainer lessons to follow up. Lacking a bit of inspiration at the moment and would be keen to hear about favourite exercises etc particularly for dressage based schooling. Thanks!
 
Depends on what I am doing really, I have a diary for each horse I am excersising and I will plan my 'objective' for the schooling session. I have been known to build obtical courses to improve a horses balance and suppleness.
 
I make a plan..get to arena..he gets bored and goes to sleep/trips over/finds pretend things to spook at...plan goes out of window as concentrate on impulsion/keeping his face off floor/correcting wild spooks!;):D

Seriously though I find it really helpful to either work on instructor stuff or if it's been a while between lessons then I like the stuff they have in some of the magizines e.g Richard Davidson did a really good bit in one recently with lots of useful exersizes.

Also do something like dressageanywhere, pick a test that suits your abilities then practice the individual movements with the aim of entering the comp online in a few weeks. I find this motivates me and helps me focus on something.

good luck:)
 
I usually walk through whichever dressage test I have coming up next as part of my warm up - this helps me to learn and plan the test while my horse warms up. I have recently bought 101 dressage exercises for horse and rider - lots of ideas in there to help plan a session, I usually do a couple of the warm up exercises, and a couple of the excersises for whatever area I think I need to work on at the time (I usually use the remarks on my last dressage sheet to identify the areas which need attention). I try to plan 1 lungeing session, 1 hack (hill work) and 3 schooling sessions each week - ideally one of these would involve some pole work. As suggested earlier magazines are always a good source of ideas. I also keep an eye on the time when schooling - 15 mins warm up - 10 mins this excersise, 10 mins that excersise etc etc obviously with some flexibilty if things don't quite go to plan and a total change of direction is needed - no point hammering away at something that isn't working. I also make notes after sessions which went especially well - or especially badly, quite nice to read back later and see how far we have come, or how we dealt with a problem when it occured 6 months ago and has all been forgotten about.
 
I have to mix it up a lot as my one horse gets bored in a nano second. So, I might want to make shoulder in the thing to improve, but I'll probably do some canter transitions, a couple of jumps, quarters in - and then spend five minutes on shoulder in. I never spend more than five minutes on any one exercise with him. Seems to work fo rmy horse.
 
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