Really need help please

[Izzy_billy]

Hey, I have been riding for nearly 10 years now and have just got a horse on a 3 day loan. He loves hacking however I need some advice on 2 things please.
1- does anyone have any good warming up exercise which are good.

2- he hasn't jumped in ages and needs to basically be taught from scratch, need some help on how to though.

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you

 

[godfreyy]

I've recently started teaching jumping to my youngster. We started off with a lot of polework on the floor to help him gain his confidence over those bright, man eating, coloured poles! Used a mixture of wooden and plastic poles at different times - the plastic ones and nice and light, but the wooden ones really help to teach them to lift their feet up as they're quite hard and heavy so kicking/knocking them isn't much fun!

When we'd got confident going straight and through the middle of the poles on the floor, we put it up to a small cross pole and did this several times. Gradually increasing the size, though we've never gone massive - if you saw it in a jumping ring it'd still be small, but it's big enough for him to actually have to jump it (he's 16.1hh). To start with always had 3 poles leading up to the jump, spaced as canter poles, to show him where his feet needed to be for taking off.

Once we'd done that a few times, we introduced a double. And then eventually a small straight. All the time trotting into the first jump so he doesn't think he needs just speed to get over the jumps.

We've now started introducing canter into the jump, and also having one jump onside of the school and another on the other as a way of introducing him to a "course" of jumps.

My main bit of advice would be not to rush him. Whilst it's good to sometimes push them, you don't want to knock their confidence.

 

[wkiwi]

Good advice from godfreyy. It also might be worth getting an instructor and/or using textbooks for more detail than you can get from brief posts on a forum.

 

[Palindrome]

Warming up I was told to always start with 5 good minutes active walk on a long rein (as reins held at the buckle) to warm up the back muscles. While I do that I try to ride circles, serpentines, diagonals, transition to halt to keep the horse interested. Then I do a little bit of trot and start to pick up the horse a bit more with some 10 meters circles then going shoulder in on the long side on each hand or leg yield on a circle in trot. Then I do some canter, walk to canter, canter to trot (with stretching over the topline in trot for a few strides), 20 meter circles in canter. Hope that helps .