Hourglass Gymnastic

Last week I did some pole work to help the horses develop better canter rhythm and adjustability in the canter.  This week I made the exercise slightly more difficult to push them a little and help them use the skills they'd practiced the week before.

This is the diagram I used to set the fences.  Everything was relatively short in height, since I wanted the horses to work on striding not power.  This is a nice exercise to use for practicing bending lines as well as straight lines.  Between each set of two fences the horses should have put in three strides.

"Should have put in three strides" was the tricky part for Highboy.  He loves to go fast, so he kept insisting on doing the middle line in two strides.  Here's the video of him charging through and doing the line much too fast.  He can get away with it because of his size and stride length, but it's difficult to control and honestly not safe to be bombing through courses like that, especially cross country where the jumps are solid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUicsDQLEEo

As he did it the other direction he couldn't decide whether to jump the second obstacle or just step over it (the pole had come down and was on the ground).  He compromised by stepping over with his front legs and jumping with his hind legs.  This resulted in some humorous footwork, a maneuver I like to call his Tennessee Walker impression.

To slow him down and get him to do the line in a more civilized manner I added a bunch of stuff to the center line.  It now looked like this:

This setup pretty much forced Highboy to do the line in three strides, because he had a pole or a jump to go over as part of each stride.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyR75T1_vTM

Highboy makes me laugh, because he has zero difficulty with this more complicated footwork.  It's as if he says, "Oh, I'm totally capable of doing it correctly and in the requisite three strides, I just choose to do it in two to make it more exciting.  If you're going to make it more interesting with extra jumps and poles I'll do it in three, otherwise I'll just spice it up myself."

Highboy is totally capable of being quite a nice horse, it's just getting him to choose civility that's the hard part.