Group Riding the Zipper

This weekend I set up an exercise I call the Zipper in the arena.  It consists of about seven jumps positioned in a zig-zag pattern down the middle of the arena.  Depending on what you focus on when riding it the exercise teaches steering, multitasking, finding a distance, collection, among other things.  I also like it because (as with all my jumping exercises) I can easily adapt it to the level of rider so when I have a group lesson everyone can participate at whatever level they are riding.

This ride had Jasi on Beauty, Alice on Sloan, Kim H. on Rain, and Joan on Cole.  They have all been eagerly awaiting a group jumping lesson, and we certainly enjoyed ourselves with this one!

To start this exercise I have the riders walk through the course first to get the idea of the turns and directions.  I do my best to make the jumps different colors and put flowers in the centers of the circles so that they have visuals to aim for if they forget where they are in the circuit. 

The first couple times through the course the jumps were all ground poles, and everyone was walking.  Once everyone had the pattern in their heads I had them all trot through the course of ground poles.  This exercise gets more challenging as you try to make your figures smaller and more precise, as you increase the speed, and as you increase the height of the jumps.  Some of the riders were working on accurate figures and correct diagonals at the trot, for others it was important to get the pattern right at the faster speed.

Next came raising the jumps a little.  I set two of them up as cross rails.  This visual made it easy to get to the center of the jump because you just have to aim for the x, but you still had to make all your turns around the flowers and find your line to the fence.

The final level of difficulty for the riders was to make some of the jumps verticals.  This made it more challenging to find their lines to the jump so they jumped straight and not at an angle.  However, for Cole and Beauty this also made it more interesting and challenging so they tried a little harder.

The last difficulty level in this particular lesson was to add in cantering.  Beauty did a little bit of cantering, but we used the exercise more to help slow her down and keep her calm.  Cole likes to canter because it's easier than trotting, and Joan rode him well enough to do some of their landings in the canter and then continue on around the flowers in the small circle. 

A big thank you goes to Sara for taking photos while our regular photographer was riding in the lesson.  My favorite photobomb of the afternoon was this one where it appears Sloan is eating Kim H.'s head.

Fergie was just grateful we didn't try to make her ride the Zipper.