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Exercises for improving the eye + confidence over fences

I did this too when riding my ‘step-up’ horse and trying to get the hang of a bigger canter. I also found it helpful to pretend the pole/cavaletti was the size of the fence I was schooling - so I’d literally ride down to it like it was 3 ft or 3’3. I did that in all my canter flatwork too, just asked myself “could I jump 3 ft out of this canter right now?” If the answer was no, I needed more canter.

Tricking myself a little bit definitely helped me produce the right canter rather than just cruise around with zero impulsion and feel like I was accomplishing something, haha.

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@173north, this is fantastic advice! I’m in a similar boat - this horse has a much bigger, bolder, more powerful canter (in a tiny package!) than anything I’ve ridden in the past so half the battle for me is getting comfortable with something a little more than our packaged pretty little dressage canter.

We took a step back to focus on just being consistent in the flat since I posted this, but we’ve had some really lovely rides lately so I feel more comfortable shifting my focus to our over fences work. Can’t wait to try some of these exercises!

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Glad to help! I realized one other thing that helped me was that every ride I’d just gallop a few laps. Or hand gallop, because our ring wasn’t too big. Just get out of the tack and leg leg leg until they really open up their stride. I’d often hand gallop the long side, bring him back and circle on the short side, hand gallop out of the circle again. Or just go out in a field and tear around at a gallop. It helped me a lot to be familiar with the stride length and rhythm of every canter my horse had in him, and know how to access each one. And your jumping canter is going to feel a lot less intimidating if you’ve gone out in the back 40 and genuinely galloped around the day before.

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