Grid-lock

Last night I had my lesson with Steph and we worked on Grids. It was kind of fun to work on technical footwork for Smash and not just the normal stadium practice. The one thing I liked the best about Grid work was finding Smash's weaknesses. She is not a delicate jumper - she'd prefer to just race around and fly over all of the fences instead of evenly riding to a jump and tucking her legs up nicely.

So we trotting into a 2 bounce to a 2 stride then rode to a short 5 strided line. I noticed immediately how crooked Smash has been jumping and focused on my leg at first - just to get her straight. And then I actually struggled the most with the short line because of rhythm. Watching another rider ride through the line was eye opening because Steph suggested to her to half halt after the first fence to collect her horse's stride and then she was able to ride forward to the second jump in the line instead of the opposite way she had been riding it. I thought it was very cool to think of it that way.

I think it was our final attempt that I finally felt like Smash was listening to me and going at the rhythm I picked and while she knocked almost every pole down because she is a sloppy jumper Steph reassured me I did a good job and Smash will figure it out.

For practice, I'm going to work on rhythm over just poles set on the ground (Smash will jump over poles) since that sort of work can be done a bunch of times with little risk of running into trouble vs setting up a line of jumps and jumping it a bunch of times.

Below is a pretty crappy sketch of the grid we jumped last night but at least you get the general idea. We trotted into the Xs and then cantered out and turned left to canter over the line:

We will be doing a lot of Grids in our future to get Smash to care a little more about jumps regardless of size so she can build up technique.