Horse jumping how to train straightness
Horse jumping how to train straightness. So I recently got asked to do an exercise on straightness. I immediately thought well my horses jump and travel quite straight. Anyhow, I was happy to do an exercise if it was going to help this person out.
Now I use guide poles on the ground to keep your horse straight, however, the guide poles also act as a point of reference that you don’t usually have. And I was quite surprised to discover that my horses weren’t as straight as I thought they were. So I’ll certainly be doing more exercises like this in the future. Aside from the technical problems, you can run into, a horse that jumps straight has more power. This is because it pushes off evenly off both back legs. So I challenge you to give this exercise a try, I’m betting there’ll be a few surprised riders out there.
So in this ‘horse jumping how to’, the aim is for your horse to travel to the jump in a straight line. It then needs to jump over the jump straight, and travel away from the jump in a straight line.
Watch the video of this ‘Horse jumping how to’ below for all the details.
How to set it up.
So this is an easy setup… you’ll just need quite a few poles to use on the ground as tramlines. Also, you don’t have to set this whole exercise up, you can just choose one or two of the line and do those.
Jump 1
So let’s start with the line down the bottom long side of your arena. These are the measurements. From the first vertical to the first oxer is 7 paces for one stride. Then from the first oxer to the second vertical, it’s 8 paces for one stride. And lastly from the second vertical to the second oxer it’s 15 paces for 3 strides.
Then you add the tramlines. One at the entrance to the gymnastic, and the one for every related distance. I Just want to stress, that please don’t make them too narrow. If you do there is a chance that your horse could land on one of them and hurt itself. So I would start off with at least 2 meters apart, and I definitely wouldn’t go any narrower than 1 and a half meters apart. Just a pole on either side of your horse will be enough to work on keeping him straight.
Jump 2 and 3
You then set up this line diagonally across your arena, vertical to oxer. So it’s a four-stride related distance and it walks 20 paces for the four strides. And you finish it off with the tramlines in the middle.
Jump 4, 5 and 6
And finally the line along the top long side of your arena. It’s a vertical, 3 strides to an oxer and then another 3 strides to a vertical. And these are the measurements. So from the first vertical to the oxer walks 16 paces for the 3 strides. And then from the oxer to the vertical it also walks 16 paces for the 3 strides. And you finish the line off by putting in two sets of tramlines. One on either related distance.
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