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Tuesday, 20 January 2015

Chris Burton SJ/arena XC lesson. 14-01-15

Great to see Chris back in the UK again. October was our last SJ lesson and boy have we missed them!  Explained to Chris what we'd been up to and our current confidence crisis.  He dragged out a skinny brush and some short, rustic poles to make a corner and we set about fixing things.  Chris explained his ethos on training skinnies is to never give the horse the chance to learn to run out - bit late for us now but can try and rebuild confidence.

Started with our usual x pole to oxer exercise to get him jumping.  I practised picking which way I was going to go afterwards and getting the correct lead which worked well as long as I remembered to open my rein.  Then we popped over a few SJ's, nothing big but Monts was on a mission and wanting to take everything on a long one which is a weird feeling as most of the time he wants to chip in short ones - wish he would make up his mind!






Moved onto a skinny brush with guide poles which he got me to trot to, then halt in front of - good as he tried to take charge and rush so need to get him listening.  Then rein backed and jumped from a trot then halt again after.  Then in canter and all ok so guide poles got taken away.

We did a little corner on a circle in both directions with a guide pole and he was confident over that so we then combined brush, 4 strides to bigger corner.  Corner became a 1m triangle and he stayed straight and confident on the 4 strides from the brush although we did only jump it with the corner to the right so not his bad rein - can save that for another day.





Told to come at the oxer on the left hand side and I just didn't ride forwards for a good stride so he nipped out a stride away - he could have gone on the stride I had and he would have done had I aimed at the middle but he saw an easier way out so a guide pole went up and I rode more positively and we were fine.  Then made this into a corner and had to ride it on 3 strides from the vertical before which worked well and he was flying.  That was enough for this session but we clearly have a lot to work on with regards to accuracy questions still and there are bound to be many of them at Badminton.



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