Teaching your ex-racer to jump

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Stenners

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Those of your with ex-racers.... what steps did you take to begin teaching them to jump and I'm interested to see what you all do with yours now and pictures!

Any pointers would be great!
 
I've just begun on my adventure with my new one. Here's his race info: https://www.nzracing.co.nz/RaceInfoSearch.aspx?q=avistar#horse I bought him end of Feb and began riding him March.

Have been focusing on dressage as a young skinny tb is not strong enough to be able to jump well/high/for a long time - our max has been 50cm and will stay like that for a while!!

I started jumping him with my instructor present - no point in having something go wrong when I'm alone and having a bad experience. We set up 4x poles on a large circle (poles at 12/3/6/9pm like a clock) which we trotted and cantered over. This progressed to trotting poles (max of 3 for now so when he stuffs up it doesn't get worse and worse).

We finally built up to a small x bar with a canter pole to help guide him where and when to pick his feet up, we trotted this and had a great positive experience. I trot everything except when he pops a canter between two elements - if he's happy there I let him keep it, and stay away from tugging on his mouth. I keep changing the exercises/jumps/circles before and after to keep things interesting and stop him from learning to rush. The hardest thing for me is to keep my body still and to keep away from his mouth - he has to learn how to use himself and I shouldn't do everything for him.

I am absolutely useless with putting pictures up on here so I'll have a try but forgive me if they don't work.
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Placing pole to help plus another pole to help keep him straight to the fence.
 
Poles! Poles with wings at the sides, raised poles, skinny poles, offset poles on weird angles, pole obstacle courses. I don't agree with doing single jumps as well. You'll never ever need to just jump one jump on it's own so when I started "jumping" I made sure there were 3/4 jumps, crosses tiny straights, tiny spreads tiny doubles keeping them moving all the time. Well that's what's worked for me anyway and G is awesome if I do say so myself!
 
Used poles on the sides to crack the straightness. Jumps on a figure 8 to crack the tempo.

I don't use placing poles but do use ground lines.
 
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