Training the young horse
Training a young horse to jump can be an immensely gratifying endeavor, but it requires patience and consistency. Since horses learn through repetition, you must perform the appropriate exercises repeatedly for an extended period. Additionally, confidence plays a crucial role in the horse’s training. Jumping can be daunting for them, so it’s important not to rush the process. Otherwise, your horse may lose confidence, resulting in a range of issues that may be difficult to resolve.
This exercise aims to familiarize the young horse and inexperienced rider with a related distance on a curve. First, you’ll practice riding over cavallettis on a curved line to get comfortable with the technique. Next, you’ll advance to a jump with a placing pole that’s related to a jump on a curve. Once you’ve mastered this, you’ll proceed to the complete exercise, which concludes with a standard related distance on a curve. With enough practice, you’ll be able to tackle related distances on a curve with ease, as if you’ve been doing them your whole life!
Watch the video on training the young horse below.
How to set it up
This setup isn’t super complicated, but again there is quite a bit to cram in up this side of your arena so you just need to keep that in mind.
Jump 1
So let’s start off with the jump most of the exercise revolves around. This vertical with a placing pole. Try to get it as close to the center line as you can. And quite close to the bottom end of your arena, because you need to leave the top end of the arena open to do all the big turns in. So it’s a vertical with a placing pole. And the placing pole is 2.5 paces away from the vertical.
Jump 2a
Then 22 paces away on a curve you set up this upright for a five-stride related distance.
Jump 2b
You then mirror this on the other side, but this time you build an oxer. It’s also 22 paces for the 5 stride related distance on a curve. You can go 23 paces for both these related distances if you have a big striding horse. But if you keep the jumps small 22 paces should be fine.
Jumps 3a and 4a
Next, you set up this related distance on a curve. It’s an oxer to a vertical and it walks the standard 24 paces for five strides.
Jumps 3b and 4b
You then mirror it on the other side, this time vertical to oxer, and it also walks 24 paces for the 5 strides.
Cavalettis
And finally, you set up these cavalettis at angles like this, so that you can ride a related distance on a curve between them. Mine rode 8 strides and the distance between them was 34 paces.
Some of our latest exercises:
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