Back to School For Horse and Rider

We never stop learning. I think we all fall into a slum of thinking we know everything and that its much easier to makeup our own rules to play our way. I find myself easily falling into this grey area as a young trainer who spends a lot of hours riding young horses without critical eyes watching. I am grateful for the hours I spend under Dave Minteer who will correct me when I'm wrong, but I still desire to become a better horseman and with this new segment in my blog I hope to do just that! I just purchased Linda Allen's book 101 Jumping Exercises for Horse and Rider and I have decided to pull some exercises from this book and ride a horse through them. After my video review I will put together a critical section for both horse and rider highlighting what we can learn from the mistakes. So here you have our first video!

 

 This is a young horse I have in training currently who started jumping in March of 2014. He is a Percheron Thoroughbred cross. As I mentioned in the video his biggest struggle is to jump up and round. He has a very laid back personality that doesn't get excited over much. Being close to 17hh its also difficult for him to keep everything together. I chose this exercise specifically for him because he is such a "lazy" jumper in hopes to wake him up and put his hind end underneath himself. 

I am the rider in this video. (hopefully in the future I can have some guest riders!)  My biggest tenancy is to get ahead of my horse with my upper body when we start going over fences. This sends my lower leg back too far.In honor of no stirrups November

I have been working on dropping my stirrups to make a stronger base to hold my whole body from tipping too far ahead. 

Overall I think it was a great exercise for the both of us. After watching the video and the mistakes I made I will be much more aware of them when I ride next time. Back to School!

Let me know what you guys think of this type of post! I know for me it was good to see how the horse jumped and how I rode him in different situations. Again, I don't want this post to look like I know everything their is I will forever be a student in this vast world of equines!

Hope you all had a good weekend enjoying your horses! Here in upstate NY we might have to pull out the heavy's come the end of the week so stay warm and happy riding!