Looking at an old Plaid Horse article and thinking. Local well run program has a few schoolies who do a LOT of classes at both schooling and smaller rated shows. Like 20 over the course of a 5 day show. Several different riders and most of the classes are small jumps or ground rails. Am I wrong to think this is too much?
Based on your description that these are ground pole or crossrail classes, I’m thinking 20 classes / 5 days = 4 classes a day, which is plausibly WT, WTC, OF, OF. I do not think that is inappropriate for the average horse- it’s 20 minutes in the ring plus 10 minutes of warmup.
When I think about how much is too much, I think about total time under saddle to prepare and compete and number of jumping efforts in a day and across the competition week. For the average horse or pony, a crossrail is a big canter step, so my mental wear and tear equation is different for those divisions.
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It’s not just the classes, it’s the warm up and cool down and standing around and going back for a jump off etc etc. We have always stuck to 2 over fences a day max unless the courses run back to back and are easy in which case I’ll do another if needed (a morning schooling or warm up and 2 easy “real” classes later). Flat classes I imagine take little effort as long as the warm up isn’t excessive.
Young horses who aren’t making much effort physically still usually do 2, as long as they are building confidence. Then they are done so they can process
Dressage I’ve never seen anyone do more than 2 in one day.
I think it would depend on the show classes and the type of school horse it is. If the school horse is fit and sound is used to doing three or four lessons a day I don’t think it unfair to ask the horse to do 4 or 5 beginner type classes as long as the schooling is carefully managed.
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Decaven at Autumn Sky did 26 classes in one week!! People think this is okay? His multiple riders think this is okay? I don’t care what height, that is cruel.
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