Circle of Doom - Jumper Version

In keeping with our theme of fixing any holes while keeping the jumps small, Butterball and I tackled the circle of doom exercise with PW on Monday. It was hard. I'd also only ever done this exercise with cavaletti. I guess I'm riding with a true jumper trainer now, so jumps it is LOL.  I told PW at one point that it must be good for us because it felt so awful. It highlighted what I see in a lot of our videos: pony pants is smart enough to have his leads for the turns 90% of the time. But when given the choice, he prefers to jump from the right lead and will even change in a related line that we entered in the left lead to leave the ground for the second fence from the right lead. 

Pony vacuum in the barn aisle with the golden light

The circle was only three of four fences, going vertical to oxer to vertical. We started by jumping one and skipping one, you can see a LOT of different leads happening there. Then we added two in a row then the next time through went for the on stride 6 between all three fences. Eesh. I was also struggling with driving him at the fences this ride. You can see PW coaching me to wait for it. In my head I was indignantly going "I'm NOT driving him", but the video says otherwise. 

He also told me I was the problem not looking early enough and not using my outside aids to get it done when I whined about what crookedness was leading to us struggling so much. TBH, we've spent a long time riding FORWARD and STRAIGHT away from fences that landing and doing so much was a whole new challenge for my brain. Look at the next fence as you're in the air, open the inside rein slightly, close your outside leg and lift the outside hand to create the wall to bring him around. 

We finally did get it both directions, sadly not captured on the video. It was more of BB being a clever dude and figuring out what we were going for and less of me sorting out how to ride the outside of the horse and stick to the inside track after/while jumping the oxer. 

We can definitely continue this work at home. I had put two poles on a 15m circle at 12 and 6 and we were struggling with hitting the middle of the poles every time. Some combination of both of our inherent crookedness means that he wants (or I allow or create) to fling his shoulders right when he leaves the ground, widening the arc of the circle especially tracking left. Correctly doing this exercise goes back to what EM had us working on: creating bend and softness and aiming for the inside of the pole/jump so you can slightly leg yield out to get to the center. Otherwise I end up trying to pull him in which further exacerbates the falling out through the outside shoulder. 

But put another check box next to this ride for jumped all the fences confidently. When he awkwardly knocked the rail on the vertical with a hind leg I gave him plenty of pats and good boys for that. PW suggested moving on to some course work after we got the six strides x2 in both directions. I declared my brain dead and opted out. So perhaps if the weather cooperates we'll go back for a second session this week. 

In addition to a lot of leads there was a decent amount of bucking. I am watching that closely to see if that means he is sore somewhere or if that means that he is protesting the challenge of the exercise.