Soft Eyes, Corners and Skinnys

The jumping exercise for this week is all about steering.  The heart of this challenge is all about whether you can keep your gaze steady, while using your peripheral vision to engage your legs for steering, in order to keep your horse straight on the path you have chosen.  In my riding instructor certification, Centered Riding, we call this particular basic Soft Eyes.

A quick example of soft eyes can be performed by first picking a doorknob to stare at.  Look at it super hard, focusing on the tiny highlight of light on the metal.  What do you notice in your body?  I always feel a bit of a headache caused by the immediate muscle tension in my neck and jaw.  I also feel my shoulders rise up.

Next, aim your eyes at the same doorknob, but soften your gaze so that you can also see the screws holding the doorknob in place.  Soften your eyes further until you can see the entire door.  Soften your eyes even more until, with your eyes still aimed at the doorknob, you can see most of the walls in the room where you're sitting.  What do you notice in your body now?  I feel everything get more relaxed, my shoulders drop, and I feel more balanced when I use my peripheral vision this way.

This Soft Eyes technique is an incredibly important part of learning to jump corners and skinnys.  The crux of these types of fences is:  can you see the whole obstacle with your peripheral vision (as well as the next jump coming up), while keeping your horse on a true course exactly where you plan to ride over the jump?  The center of the jump is your doorknob, the other fences and parts of the obstacle are the walls in the room.

The way I introduce jumping skinnys and corners using soft eyes is with the following exercises.  It's next to impossible to do them correctly unless you are able to control your vision, particularly by softening your eyes. 

Step 1:  Blue diagram
The black dot is a barrel or small wooden block, the dark blue lines are poles, and the light blue circles are the path through the obstacle.  The poles are slightly raised off the ground by standards on one end and the barrel on the other.  The goal is to have the horse go over the point of the angle, and we start by having them go in the direction drawn at the walk.  We start like this because, as with all jumping exercises, it's best to start slowly over small obstacles.  Once the horse and rider have the technique down we increase the speed to a trot or even a canter, we raise the jumps, and/or change the angle.  This first step is easiest to start with, because the poles sort of funnel you into the point you want to be jumping.

This first step was fairly easy for Highboy, he just had to wrap his mind around jumping the small barrel instead of jumping the center of a pole as he had previously been taught to do.

 Step 2:  Blue Diagram
This second diagram is nearly the same as the first, but you can see the arrows point to going over the jump in the opposite direction.  This second way is harder because jumping the point with the poles arcing away from you mentally invites run-outs.  That's why this direction comes second.  

This was much harder for Highboy, because visually it doesn't seem "right" to the horse to jump a narrow obstacle and land in between standards.  We had quite a few comical tries as he learned this part.

It was important when Highboy missed the jump or started to run out that I caught him and corrected it right away.  If I let him go all the way past the jump he might have learned that he can go around something I've told him to go over, and I never want to teach a horse that it's ok to run out the side of an obstacle.  When he dodged the fence I stopped him, backed him up to where he went off course, and then redirected him to the path I had originally designated.  Eventually he got the idea and had a perfectly straight, centered jump over the middle of the obstacle!

Step 3:  Red Diagram
The next step in the Corners and Skinnys lesson is to go over the same shaped jump with two standards, a barrel, and two poles, but do it going across both poles at the same time.  I start out with the poles relatively close together in an acute angle and the jump set low so if the horse messes up footing and it all comes crashing down no harm is done.  The horse learns to jump it both directions, and as he gets better at it I raise the poles, make the angle wider, and have them jump it at faster speeds.

This was easy for Highboy, since we have done it before.  He instantly remembered the task from last time we schooled corners.

Step 4:  The Pinwheel / Green Diagram
The pinwheel is set up with a barrel in the middle, four poles set in a cross pattern, with standards on the far ends of the poles to raise them.  This can be jumped in a multitude of ways.  You can go over any one of the four poles, jumping between the barrel and standard.  Or you can jump across the whole thing diagonally, going over the barrel in the middle.  This is a later step in the Corners and Skinnys lesson plan because your steering must be accurate so that you are clearly guiding your horse, who is listening carefully to you, over the selected portion of the obstacle. 

By the time we got to jumping the center of the pinwheel Highboy understood the day's task:  aiming straight.  He cleared the pinwheel from all angles and even leaped over the center going across the diagonal of the obstacle.  This horse likes to think about his jumping tasks!  Even though none of the jumps were over 2' today, it was technical enough to keep him interested in the task at hand so I was able to teach him some new skills without a lot of pounding on his joints or body.  My goal in jumping training is to teach the horse and rider how to do all the difficult technical things when the jumps are small and they are going slowly, so when the jumps get bigger and the speed is faster it's all the same skills they already know.

This is how I set up my arena for the exercise, with all three types of obstacles.  This way I could teach one idea, then another, and revisit the previous ideas to keep the horse thinking.