Jumping exercises to build confidence
Jumping exercises to build confidence are super important. Showjumping is all about confidence, for horse and rider. This exercise helps set you up for the bigger jumps to try to avoid any confidence-breaking mishaps. Once you’re doing that part of the exercise well, you then progress on to the slightly more advanced part. You’ll also be working on your accuracy. The more accurate you can become the more confident you will be as a showjumper.
This exercise will help the novice rider keep a nice rhythm to a jump. It’s great if you tend to fiddle a little in front of the jump, which a lot of novice riders do. This exercise will help set you up for a good takeoff spot for some of the jumps, and the others are for you to practice figuring it out for yourself. And because young horses are quite difficult to get good takeoff spots on, this will benefit you as well. You will also be able to introduce your horse to a bounce in this exercise. They’re excellent to help with a young horse’s balance agility and strength. The warm-up exercise over cavalettis, in the beginning, is also super important to help with accuracy for the rider and adjustability for the young horse.
Watch the jumping exercises to build confidence video for all the details.
How to set this exercise up
So this setup isn’t extremely complicated, but as always when you’re trying to cram a lot in, you have to be aware of the paths you’ll be riding and to take care that jumps don’t get in the way.
Jumps 2 and 3
So let’s start off with the line down the bottom long side of your arena. So it’s a cavaletti, four strides to a vertical. And it walks 18 paces.
Jumps 5 and 6
Next, you set up this line diagonally across your arena. It’s 2 cavalettis set up as a bounce, and then 4 strides to an oxer. So the measurements are 3 paces for the bounce, and from the second cavaletti to the oxer walks 19 paces for the four strides.
Jumps 7 and 8
Next, you set up another four-stride line, also going diagonally across your arena. It’s a vertical to an oxer. It rides down on 4 strides, and this one walks 20 paces.
Jump 4
Then in this little spot here, you set up an oxer at an angle like so.
Jump 1
Then kinda squeezed in the corner like so you set up these two cavalettis as a bounce with a placing pole in front of them. So it’s 3 paces between the two cavalettis for the bounce. And I did 2.5 paces for the placing pole.
And finally, you set up these 2 cavalettis across your arena like this. Make sure you can ride to both of them on a circle.
If these instructions a difficult for you to follow, the setup instructions in the video are a lot easier to follow.
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