Kathy and Dylan came over this morning to ride and set fences for me and Lynx. We took a walk around the fields and neighborhood, with Mahzi the dog right alongside us. Pascal got distracted chasing the barn cats again so he joined us later for the jumping exercises.
We went through it both directions at the walk, then we each trotted through. The basic idea is to start small and go slowly, then gradually raise the jumps and increase the speed. I did make a couple adjustments to the distance between jumps as they got higher so Lynx would have an easier time getting the strides right.
Lynx had looked at these jumps yesterday during our ride, and I could tell he was interested. I wanted to wait until I had someone here before tackling this particular exercise, and Lynx was definitely eager to work on this today!
Once he was cantering through the line accurately we raised the jumps again, making the blue crossrail quite a bit larger on the sides. It was no problem for Lynx, he jumped right through.
I did notice that he was getting a little flat over the last fence, though. This is a common thing as a horse is learning to jump. He jumps harder to get over the bigger obstacle, but doesn't realize he needs to change the shape of his body in the air. We want more of an arc, less of a flat back.
The easiest way to teach this body shape over fences is to make them wider, with an increasing element. So I set up the last fence as an oxer, with a smaller crossrail in front of a slightly higher horizontal pole. This was Lynx's first oxer, but because I've introduced jumping to him so systematically, it seemed to him like the logical next step in the progression.
Here are the videos of the jumping efforts, this is so exciting! Lynx really does like these thinking exercises, I'd love to get him out on a cross country course!
https://youtu.be/X8gn7Fe7Jic?is=-eaXVCJpeak0PjIR
We have another horse show this weekend, so be sure to follow along for his next batch of fancy horseshow photos!
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