Is it normal to jump 95cm classes in trot?!

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Jesstickle

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I went to Keysoe last night and I swear to God I could not get my horse to canter (too busy gawping at his own shadow, he's never jumped inside with the lights on before). I felt like such a tool! It's fine, he's happy jumping them from trot, it just isn't terribly dignified. At home he's obviously ok but out he does still have to look at everything. He was only out 10 days before.

Any tips on how to stop him looking at ridiculous things? He's fine with the fences, they're not scary at all but scared of his own shadow? How on earth do I deal with that?! Children on ponies were whizzing about jumping everything which just made me look even more ridiculous on my big lumpy horse. Good job I'm not easily embarrassed isn't it? :D I'm afraid there are no photos of our absurd round, from the way my knee hurts this morning I can only assume I was doing some pretty impressive pony club kicks :o
 
i think it's fine tbh, it's better than haring off in canter and losing control if he was being really silly. i've taken baby horses out in public and popped most of the fences from trot. it's very educational, teaches them to use their bodies well, plus it's much harder for them to run out from trot. usually they'll start wanting to do the last few strides in canter to make things easier for themselves, after a while...
i think the golden rule "he can look with his eyes but he can't turn his head" (drilled into me by a very good trainer years ago when i had a particularly eyes-out-on-stalks kind of mickey-taking horse) is worth working on. you might need to really channel him strictly from 2 legs to 2 hands with the reins short and firm to keep his eyes FRONT, until he realises it's not worth the hassle of trying to crane his neck about!
i've got a rather 'looky' one and am wavering between buying her a mojo (I know, I know, but if it works I don't care!) or trying Cool Calm and Collected from Equifeast, which SpottedCat keeps raving about, it seems to have turned her lairy, loony, looky, unhackable horse into a paragon of virtue!
 
kerilli said:
i've got a rather 'looky' one and am wavering between buying her a mojo (I know, I know, but if it works I don't care!) or trying Cool Calm and Collected from Equifeast, which SpottedCat keeps raving about, it seems to have turned her lairy, loony, looky, unhackable horse into a paragon of virtue!
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The GBO would take issue with that description - he's perfectly hackable, he doesn't nap or spook, he merely feels that as *the* most important thing, well anywhere, but mainly on the roads, everything should slow down, and preferably stop completely whilst he takes his daily constitutional!

Joking aside, cool calm and collected has made a huge difference to his hacking - but his problem was only ever that he completely over-reacted to things making a noise. He's always been like that - when I first got him you could not undo velcro without him having a complete melt-down....which made travel boots (and in fact boots in general!) rather exciting!

I've got a couple of expired bank cards if you wanna test the hologram theory first though.... ;)
 
kerilli said:
"he can look with his eyes but he can't turn his head" (drilled into me by a very good trainer years ago when i had a particularly eyes-out-on-stalks kind of mickey-taking horse) is worth working on.

i've got a rather 'looky' one and am wavering between buying her a mojo (I know, I know, but if it works I don't care!)
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Thanks for the advice, will try that. I am a spectacularly useless jockey so how well it'll go I don't know! I really must have some instruction over fences this year. I haven't had a jumping lesson for 10+ years probably and I could do with some help. I'll add it to my list of things I need to sort out.

And what is a mojo? :confused:
 
Ahh glad its not just me who has to trot to everything when competing!!! He will either canter on the spot or canter and take off with me then stop/runout before a fence mainly because hes going that fast!!! So we are now trotting to everything, it allows him to see things take it in, and realise it will not eat him. Not as pretty but to gain his confidence i dont care!! ETA hes fine at home!....arnt they all!! Damm animal
 
Nothing wrong with jumping 95cm from trot.
As an additional ot K's point. Make sure YOU are not looking at the things he's spooking at. The simple act of the rider looking at things a horse might spook at can cause exactely what they dont want to happen.
 
jesstickle said:
And what is a mojo? :confused:
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As a lab scientist, you will love the Mojo ;) It's a hologram imbedded in a plastic bracelet, that they charge you £30 for. The hologram is programmed with your body's natural frequencies to help improve your performance. There is a spectacularly funny thread about them on here if you search it, and a similar company has lost a class action lawsuit in the US and been taken to task by the Australian version of trading standards. Oh, and the trials by the American Council on Exercise show that they have zero effect.
 
SpottedCat said:
It's a hologram imbedded in a plastic bracelet, that they charge you £30 for. The hologram is programmed with your body's natural frequencies to help improve your performance.
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roflmao.gif
 
To redress the balance slightly, and being fair, given how much of performance and recovery (both in sports and illness etc) is to do with your mental approach, the placebo effect they may give people could help. But the ACE study was a double blind trial....
 
SpottedCat said:
As a lab scientist, you will love the Mojo ;) It's a hologram imbedded in a plastic bracelet, that they charge you £30 for. The hologram is programmed with your body's natural frequencies to help improve your performance. There is a spectacularly funny thread about them on here if you search it, and a similar company has lost a class action lawsuit in the US and been taken to task by the Australian version of trading standards. Oh, and the trials by the American Council on Exercise show that they have zero effect.
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Hehe! I can actually picture Jesstickle's reaction to this, and am now sniggering even more :D
 
SpottedCat said:
As a lab scientist, you will love the Mojo ;) It's a hologram imbedded in a plastic bracelet, that they charge you £30 for. The hologram is programmed with your body's natural frequencies to help improve your performance. There is a spectacularly funny thread about them on here if you search it, and a similar company has lost a class action lawsuit in the US and been taken to task by the Australian version of trading standards. Oh, and the trials by the American Council on Exercise show that they have zero effect.
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:D *like*
 
SpottedCat said:
As a lab scientist, you will love the Mojo ;) It's a hologram imbedded in a plastic bracelet, that they charge you £30 for. The hologram is programmed with your body's natural frequencies to help improve your performance. There is a spectacularly funny thread about them on here if you search it, and a similar company has lost a class action lawsuit in the US and been taken to task by the Australian version of trading standards. Oh, and the trials by the American Council on Exercise show that they have zero effect.
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it's almost worth £30 to watch my OH's face while I explain seriously what it's for.
OP you just need to keep repeating the experiance until the horse gets more confident.
One my young ones was areal stuck in trot in public horse at first it was quite embrassaing it took around four or five trips to little shows for her to get it then we did half trot half canter for a while .I did get some stick for a while !
I am about to start taking out a young one after a five year break because of injury I suspect it might be me that's gawping and stuck in trot !!!!
 
Perhaps I should invest in this magical hologram :p At least I've had a giggle now. Somehow it makes my horse's knobber tendencies seem almost worth while :D

I don't know why you all think I would be disparaging of an alternative therapy though? When have I ever been negative about such things? PMSL :D :D
 
Puppy said:
*snigger* :D

I am really tempted by this CC&C stuff, just reluctant to part with the pennies :o
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If you want, you can wait until the GBO is properly fit, when I intend to take him off it (on the basis that it won't make any difference if I don't hack for a couple of weeks at that point!) to see if it is that which is making a difference or not. I need to hack him for fitness work now, but once we are up and running, I'll do a test without it and report back.....
 
I'm quite interested in this cool calm an collected stuff - spottedcat do I remember rightly that you are a pure feeds fan? Do you feed CCC in addition to this? As my boy is perfect in terms of energy at the moment (on half rations of pure easy as he's a fatty!) and has the best work ethic ever in the school but at the moment is being a pain to hack - your comment about your horse being not particularly nappy or spooky but expecting everyone to stop or slow down for him is EXACTLY how roo is. If there was no traffic I could hack for miles alone without a care in the world but I think at this time f year with limited opportunities to hack anyway, he is being ridiculous about random cars that he takes exception to, and will spook and try to spin - I usually catch it before he manages too much but on a slightly slipp hill that culminated in us ending up on the road in a heap the other day!
 
ecrozier said:
I'm quite interested in this cool calm an collected stuff - spottedcat do I remember rightly that you are a pure feeds fan? Do you feed CCC in addition to this? As my boy is perfect in terms of energy at the moment (on half rations of pure easy as he's a fatty!) and has the best work ethic ever in the school but at the moment is being a pain to hack - your comment about your horse being not particularly nappy or spooky but expecting everyone to stop or slow down for him is EXACTLY how roo is. If there was no traffic I could hack for miles alone without a care in the world but I think at this time f year with limited opportunities to hack anyway, he is being ridiculous about random cars that he takes exception to, and will spook and try to spin - I usually catch it before he manages too much but on a slightly slipp hill that culminated in us ending up on the road in a heap the other day!
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Sounds identical - even down to half rations of Pure Easy!
 
Right sounds worth a try then! Will see if I can get some from my feed merchants - it didn't affect energy levels etc I am guessing?
 
ecrozier said:
Right sounds worth a try then! Will see if I can get some from my feed merchants - it didn't affect energy levels etc I am guessing?
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Buy it online direct from them - world's most awful website though. No, it doesn't work by 'calming' them - just changes their response to things. It's to do with the way calcium affects nerve function. Different from other calcium-based supplements such as ulcer ones (which is what my horse is also on) because of the bioavailability.

ETA: Best way I can think to describe it is that he makes better decisions now! So rather than completely over-reacting to say a bus, or a rattly trailer, he will still look and go a bit 'alert', but he does not dance like a lunatic, piaffe/passage, and generally behave like an idiot. I can also now hack on a normal contact rather than enforcing 'nose in overbent' at all times (the alternative being ears up my nose and no real way of putting a lid on him). He's not perfect - a skip lorry the other day with rattling chains was a bit much - but normally that would set the tone for the whole hack and you'd get no sense out of him whereas now he will react then go back to being sensible as soon as it is gone.
 
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Re: the trotting - one of mine trotted all 4 of her BN double clears :cool: by the time we moved up to Newcomers she was confident enough to canter but allowing her to go round at a trot meant she was able to get through the looky phase without really scaring herself or doing anything wrong.... did get the micky ripped out of me though, especially as her stable name was Dilly... :o
 
This thread is such a relief :o There's no way on earth I could get Fergs round a course without doing half of it in trot :o (and certainly not 95cm, but that's another matter...)

Loving the "mojo" - seriously is that a joke?!
 
Blimey SC have you got my horse's hacking twin?! That is how we have been 'coping' recently - working in a strict contact at all times on the road do that I can 'catch' a reaction as soon as it happens. Be nice to let him have a longer rein now and again though as our hacking is mainly roads! And yes once we have had one 'incident' he is on his toes the whole way round, leaping in the air if a leaf so much as gives him a funny look! Off to look at website now.
Back to Op, no shame in trotting :) we were trotting courses til pretty recently and if get in a muddle still drop back to trot to sort the legs out.
 
Yellow pony was super looky in the indoor at keysoe and all the others in the group were feeling silly to and they cram lots of jumps in there.
As for the band things I'm laughing at jt and jftd's reactions will be :D
 
Well, if its any consolation, Phoebe Buckleys approach is to teach a looky or novicey horse to jump from trot..no matter what the height... and more importantly perhaps to teach the rider to allow that rather than panic, cluck and flap on realising theyve just lot canter right infront of a fence.

I'll never forget the day hubby trotted into the Pergola at Keysoe on his first ever BE Intro on Chester (Chester Da Floying Oirishman of EWW "fame") and popped over it. He rode through the finishing line and had an Olympic event rider ride over to him and scoff "what on earth did you let him trot into that for?". Hubby turned to her and said with an incredulous voice "because he asked if he could"....

obviously....
 
I feel hugely relieved you all do it too. Phew. My friend who I was with did remark on the fact it was a lovely rhythmic trot we had going. I guess I can take consolation from that. Better a nice trot than a ropey canter I guess!

I'm off to look at a trailer on Saturday so hopefully we can get out and about a lot more this year and perhaps he'll stop being a spanner. I'm not convinced though. He's not a bright boy!! I think if we went out every day for a month he'd still find things to look at as I think he genuinely forgets he's seen things before lol
 
kerilli said:
i think it's fine tbh, it's better than haring off in canter and losing control if he was being really silly. i've taken baby horses out in public and popped most of the fences from trot. it's very educational, teaches them to use their bodies well, plus it's much harder for them to run out from trot. usually they'll start wanting to do the last few strides in canter to make things easier for themselves, after a while...
i think the golden rule "he can look with his eyes but he can't turn his head" (drilled into me by a very good trainer years ago when i had a particularly eyes-out-on-stalks kind of mickey-taking horse) is worth working on. you might need to really channel him strictly from 2 legs to 2 hands with the reins short and firm to keep his eyes FRONT, until he realises it's not worth the hassle of trying to crane his neck about!
i've got a rather 'looky' one and am wavering between buying her a mojo (I know, I know, but if it works I don't care!) or trying Cool Calm and Collected from Equifeast, which SpottedCat keeps raving about, it seems to have turned her lairy, loony, looky, unhackable horse into a paragon of virtue!
Click to expand...


Cool, calm and collected is amazing! Couldnt take my horse to shows without a rear and constant whinnying at everything and him being a general prat, now he is much much better since the Equifeast!

Would highly recommend it!
I think its Calcium based rather than Magnesium like all other calmers.
 
Sounds fine to me as well, I'm sure he will learn, I think sometimes when they find jumping easy they know that they can spook more at the other stuff, I quite often used to trot my new one into hunt fences and will still slow her down if I can as then she does actually look at the fence not everything else, which would mean she would then nearly jump me off, as jumping was the easy bit :) the horse I had on loan last year was v v laid back, I took him to an indoor xc were he only wanted to trot, bit spooky but mainly backwards, jumped everything though, as I came out the collecting ring steward (woman) said 'well you can tell he's male, he's soo lazy!' lol, he would canter into jumps if hounds were running though and did jump at the RC champs with his owner and managed to canter (most of it anyway)
 
I trotted round a 90cm hunter trial, that's got to be way worse!! If I had of cantered I'd of been in full blown racehorse mode by fence 2!! Better to trot nicely than canter horribly. If I'm being honest I'm not sure how nice my trot was, more gobby and rude but onwards and upwards!!
 
What's wrong with trotting into scary/difficult situations? I wouldn't be galloping into the unknown if I were a horse - shows a great deal of intelligence if you ask me :D.
 
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