Horse hangs shoulder/jumps like deer

[fermecinqsens]

My young mare has a very odd jumping style.
I’m looking for specific ideas of how to tackle this mare’s specific … Style.

I have read deep distances help but she doesn’t have any problem getting deep - in fact she always prefers to add than take off long.

She does move similarly - she is very bouncy but moves UP rather than OUT. She is quite straight behind.

thankfully she is generally quite respectful of jumps and does not lack air time. But her jump is very awkward and does not instil me with confidence. She actually feels like she has a big jump because she does bascule - it’s like she doesn’t realize she’s meant to bend her legs.

https://m.flickr.com/#/photos/ecorrie/25913231504/sizes/m/

https://m.flickr.com/#/photos/ecorrie/25913241404/sizes/m/

[Boo]

Grids may help but my own limited experiance (showjumping not eventing) with this style of jumper is that they just jump higher as the height goes up.

[bornfreenowexpensive]

Not unusual for green. You need to keep fences lower to keep her confident, work on grids with placing poles, bounces but also low wide oxers. But most important…make sure you are not jumping ahead on her. Even tilting your shoulders a fraction of a second too soon can cause a horse like this to drop their front legs.

[Winding_Down]

[QUOTE=Boo;8626505]
Grids may help but my own limited experiance (showjumping not eventing) with this style of jumper is that they just jump higher as the height goes up.[/QUOTE]

Agree. If she were mine, I would run her through a jump chute to see how she does with bigger fences, and whether she starts to bring her knees up. It may be that she would benefit from this on a regular basis. You definitely do not want her to jump over her knees once the jumps get bigger.

[fordtraktor]

Yeah, this would not be my first choice for a XC horse personally. It is considered a dangerous trait for a reason – it lends itself to rotational falls. If you want to keep this horse, keep it to jumps that fall down at least until it consistently never does this when deep or at a bad distance.

horses don’t have to be perfect all the time but one that is consistently a poor jumper – well, I value my life too much.

[Gumby80]

Grids with square, wider oxers at the back can help somewhat, but start small and build up slowly. Jumping over the shoulder like this can be pretty unsafe, even with poles.

IMHO, how they jump is generally how they jump. Sometimes you’ll get one that is a bit casual over the lower fences, but picks their knees up more as the jumps get larger. Unfortunately, many leg-hangers will jump worse as the jumps get bigger or the spots get deeper.

In your second photo, you’ve got a good spot and a balanced takeoff to a nice, inviting jump and she’s still really hanging her legs. It may be that this is just how she jumps.

[downen]

She jumps like an Arab! I evented a 14 hand Arab with the same jumping style to Training level, so as long as they leave the rails up, style only counts in Hunters!

[fermecinqsens]

I saw her over a free jump when I bought her. The guy let her loose in a pen and set up a 4’ oxer with no ground line, placing pole, or wing, and she ran aroun and around jumping it on her own. She got over it by about 2’ every time but jumped like a deer with legs dangling.

my last horse was a rubbish jumper for the first season. He would plow through everything with legs flailing everywhere. With good schooling he turned into a super catty and clever jumper and never took rails. He could have been an intermediate horse if he wasn’t such a wimp on xc but I stopped schooling him at prelim because the wimpy ness got in the way.

this mare is super brave. I took her to her first xc clinic on the weekend and she was dropping into water, perfect over ditches, etc. So I’m liking that. But she really has no idea what do with herself Over a jump.

i haven’t got to school anything complicated with her yet because she came to me as a problem horse (rearer) and has until recently been super stressed ever at the presence of a canter pole.
hoping that with the right exercises I can start helping her form. I like her a lot and she is super athletic.

[fordtraktor]

Style counts when they hang a leg like that to a big table and have a rotational fall. I wouldn’t keep one of those to jump XC on. There is a reason it’s considered a safety issue.

Do jumps that fall down until it goes away completely or until you decide to sell her to a dressage or show jumping only home. Not kidding, it’s a good way to break your neck, riding one of those. It’s fine until it’s not and then it is really, really not fine.

Bounces, low wide square oxers, lots of placing poles 9’ out, time. and ONLY SHOW JUMPS. Get her to the deep quiet distance. Bounces, bounces, bounces. Wear a vest and don’t jump alone.

[fermecinqsens]

[QUOTE=downen;8626875]
She jumps like an Arab! I evented a 14 hand Arab with the same jumping style to Training level, so as long as they leave the rails up, style only counts in Hunters![/QUOTE]

Yes she’s a bit araby (actually a WB) but Arabs tend to jump with no bascule and back inverted but tight legs. She is really round over the back and uses her neck well but it’s like she forgets to bend her legs.

[beowulf]

[QUOTE=bornfreenowexpensive;8626527]
Not unusual for green. You need to keep fences lower to keep her confident, work on grids with placing poles, bounces but also low wide oxers. But most important…make sure you are not jumping ahead on her. Even tilting your shoulders a fraction of a second too soon can cause a horse like this to drop their front legs.[/QUOTE]

Agree – in addition to that, start jumping her free. Some horses will just jump how they jump and no amount of drilling will change it, but at least then you will get an idea if this is truly her ‘style’ or if it is just her jumping w/ the weight of rider.

I would keep jumps low, but challenging - I personally like fan jumps and swedish oxers for these type of jumpers. Keep them low but keep them very angled/steep.

I wouldn’t be all doom and gloom re: rotational fall just yet… Lots of green horses will jump that way until they’re stronger and more confident carrying a person over a fence. Many green horses I’ve started have jumped like that at first until they figured out they can jump just fine with a rider abroad. There is also a fair amount of pilot error to consider - I’m not always perfect when I jump and if I do lean forward in the slightest, it does cause that “porpoise” type jumping form.

I would be thinking about dialing it back a notch, put a canter pole before a small (but wide) oxer, and a stride after - practice driving her into the distance rather than hovering down the line. Keep her head up and give a little nudge right AFTER the pole to get her to bring her shoulders up.

[fordtraktor]

sure, but you either fix it in the ring or you don’t. Don’t take them XC over anything decent sized when they jump like that.

Plus, I don’t care to ride horses XC where if I make a tiny mistake it is going to cause them to screw up in a way that is going to be dangerous. a horse with “bad instincts” is not my choice to jump big solid things. I like horses with an instinct to be snappy in front when possible, not necessarily like a hunter but at least parallel.

[beowulf]

[QUOTE=fordtraktor;8626914]
sure, but you either fix it in the ring or you don’t. Don’t take them XC over anything decent sized when they jump like that.

Plus, I don’t care to ride horses XC where if I make a tiny mistake it is going to cause them to screw up in a way that is going to be dangerous. a horse with “bad instincts” is not my choice to jump big solid things. I like horses with an instinct to be snappy in front when possible, not necessarily like a hunter but at least parallel.[/QUOTE]

I’m in agreement with you re: keeping the schooling in the ring for now. Hopefully it is just a greenness/strength issue… Jumping with a rider takes a lot of strength and lifting the shoulders even more – OP didn’t provide a lot of information so I’d be wanting to know how long she’s been in work and how long she’s been jumping… sounds like she is green and it may be solvable with lots of careful, intelligent riding.

[fordtraktor]

Also, OP, you say the horse gets lots of air time and has a lot of up and down movement to her gaits. reading between the lines, I would guess some of her issue might be that she’s getting hung up in the air and not moving forward across the fences. make sure that you keep your leg on and encourage her to jump forward through the air and keep a steady, consistent canter forward to the fence instead of bouncing around like a pogo stick on approach and then leaping in the air. do a lot of canter poles, then add an X in the middle, then add the bounces, make sure she’s coming forward all the time. it might seem counterproductive to let go of her but the hotter ones have to learn to move out and not up. keep your hands very light and your leg on all the way through, let the jumps back her off the gymnastics. keep everything about your ride quiet and just do little stuff until she can do it like it is no big deal instead of UP UP UP and LAUNCH. BTDT a lot because I like hot horses.

[Stitch_In_Time]

[QUOTE=fordtraktor;8627083]
Also, OP, you say the horse gets lots of air time and has a lot of up and down movement to her gaits. reading between the lines, I would guess some of her issue might be that she’s getting hung up in the air and not moving forward across the fences. make sure that you keep your leg on and encourage her to jump forward through the air and keep a steady, consistent canter forward to the fence instead of bouncing around like a pogo stick on approach and then leaping in the air. do a lot of canter poles, then add an X in the middle, then add the bounces, make sure she’s coming forward all the time. it might seem counterproductive to let go of her but the hotter ones have to learn to move out and not up. keep your hands very light and your leg on all the way through, let the jumps back her off the gymnastics. keep everything about your ride quiet and just do little stuff until she can do it like it is no big deal instead of UP UP UP and LAUNCH. BTDT a lot because I like hot horses.[/QUOTE]

This is helpful advice for me because I ride one of these. She has really good form over fences and is quite scopey, but we tend to pogo stick the whole way to the jump and then launch. I think it is mostly my problem and she is trying to tell me to let go and trust her but it is so hard to let go of the hot ones!

[beowulf]

[QUOTE=Stitch In Time;8627123]
This is helpful advice for me because I ride one of these. She has really good form over fences and is quite scopey, but we tend to pogo stick the whole way to the jump and then launch. I think it is mostly my problem and she is trying to tell me to let go and trust her but it is so hard to let go of the hot ones![/QUOTE]

green horses also overjump, which from OP’s pictures, looks like what is going on -that is exactly what some green horses looks like over fences… hence the air time… once they’re used to jumping they learn to be more efficient.

[wanderlust]

I have mixed feelings about some of the advice above. I probably wouldn’t free jump a horse who wants to jump over their shoulder like that - it has the potential to create even more bad habits.

I would also set small ramped oxers instead of square oxers, and I wouldn’t set them particularly wide. I’d also leave the distances a touch on the regular or long side, not tight, and try not to get too deep to anything - at this stage in her training, a deep distance is going to force her more over her shoulder and not give her time to figure out how to get her knees up and out of the way. There’s a reason hunters like ramped oxers and slightly gappy distances- it gives the horse the best opportunity to jump well.

Edited to add- you may be fighting conformation here. Some horses just physically aren’t able to get their shoulders up- I had one I bought just backed. She tried, and we tried, but she was sold as a dressage horse as her shoulder anatomy wouldn’t allow her to get her knees up.

[buck22]

Jumping in from driving land… my Morgan used to hang his knees like that and jump over his shoulder. Tall skinny X’s helped quite a bit, as well as trot and canter work over raised cavaletti.

[Heinz_57]

I agree with wanderlust, and would add that in my particular program, I would be doing lots and lots of steep crossrails used in grids with placing poles to teach a more efficient jump from a proper distance. No more buried deep distances, you want to teach her to snap those knees up instead of just hoisting her whole body an extra foot in the air. I might also experiment with guide rails (upside down V) set fairly narrow on the fences for verticals and oxers.

I would also be introducing cavaletti work into our daily routine, both trot and canter, to encourage those knees to come up. But primarily, lots and lots of gridwork with controlled distances.

After say, 6 months? I’d re-evaluate and if she’s still knees down I’d sell as a jumper. I don’t put any stock at all in free jumping, I haven’t personally found it to be a good indication of anything. My own horse is fairly point-and-shoot through Prelim fences with fairly good traditional old hunter-style form, but put him through the chute and he looks like a three-legged mule.

[fordtraktor]

I’d have to disagree, wanderlust. lots of people complain about the rampy oxers in hunters dulling down the jumps on nice horses. They don’t encourage a nice jump, they encourage flat, poor jumping. George Morris regularly notes it in his column.

The exercises I described are the classic ones I was trained to use to improve jumping form, by a GP rider and trainer who himself worked in Europe for Schockemohle. They are pretty basic and standard for sharpening up horses in front. You can improve the front, to some extent, and the back end “is what it is.” Placing poles front and back to a square oxer is a very simple exercise. None of this is difficult or challenging. It is all low and basic and the jumps will teach the horse on their own. a rampy oxer doesn’t ask a horse to be good in front so it won’t help. They can dangle their front ends over a rampy oxer all day and never get near it.

a deep distance is not the same as burying a horse. You need to ride these horses to the base and not jump them off the long spot if you want to improve the front end. Not the chip, just a nice canter to the base. That is where jumpers jump from. the hunter “gap” is not correct for schooling. it’s something pros do to show off extremely fancy horses – but it takes a lot of finesse to be able to gap without taking away a horse’s confidence. it is unsafe to encourage people to go for long spots on a horse that hangs its legs. Long spots encourage poor jumping – long, flat efforts – anyway in the average animal. This is not a Derby horse.

in the long run, you can only improve it so much, and that in times of stress horses often revert to their instincts.

as this horse improves, as it hopefully will, eventually I’d like to see it be able to get in a bad spot and not revert to looking like this. That’s when I’d feel comfortable thinking about it as a XC horse.

but horses aren’t on our timetables. Give her some time to figure it out and realize that if she gets the legs out of the way, she doesn’t have to work so hard. That is why bounces are so great for this issue, they absolutely must learn to do the footwork in a bounce.