Up & go! Jump training with Muzi Pottinger

Amanda 'Muzi' Pottinger demonstrates a typical day’s jump training at home, with her up-and-coming eventer Good Timing. Images by Libby Law

Warming up

I have different warm-ups for different horses. With this horse, I start over the cross, then build it into a vertical, and finally into an oxer. If it was a younger horse, I wouldn’t go to a vertical – instead I would go to a cross bar at the front with an oxer at the back, because young horses aren’t as trained to the front rail and the cross-rail helps to keep them in the middle so they don’t drift.

Style file

The horse has a tendency to jump quite high, but he often doesn’t know how to stretch over the back rail. We’ve built a wider oxer, to help him open up his body. We put the rail just on the edge of the cup, so the rail will come down a little bit more easily if he knocks it, but he’s not going to hurt himself. I won’t help him on the take-off either – he’s got to learn to find the back rail himself. If he gives the fence a little tap, which is what I want, we’ll probably go up a little bit but bring the fence in again, to give him confidence.

This is a relatively easy horse, because he is a very good jumper, but he still has to learn the basics. With some horses it’s about finding the front rail, but with him it’s always about finding the back rail.

Staying straight

We’ve put up a little drift pole on the left-hand side for him. The sooner you can correct the straightness, the better. If a horse is crooked, it’s more likely to have the back rail than if it’s staying straight in the middle of the fence. Because we can’t use drift poles in the ring, the more we can use them at home and prevent the horses from drifting, the better. This was a really good jump – he learnt where the back rail was, and he stayed straight.

Learning to back up and be quick

I’ll always warm up over some form of oxer that I’ve built up to, then I’ll put together a little course. Somewhere in the course, I like to have a fence with a take-off pole in front of it. Often in a round, the horses get longer and flatter and slower, so I like to use the take-off pole to make them suddenly be quick again. I often start with a take-off pole at the first fence, and then put one towards the end of the course. I could feel the horse really back up over this one (in the photo).

A better canter

This horse’s weakness in his jumping is all the carrying on he does in between the fences! He disunites and loses his balance a little, which means sometimes I end up firing him at the fences because his canter is all over the show and it gets a bit weak. That’s just a matter of strength for him and doing pole work and small circles in the canter to help him get stronger.

Training with light poles

These jump poles are brand new – this is the first time the horse has jumped them, so he feels a little green. They are very light, which trains us to be pretty accurate. What I like about them is that they make a racket when they fall down, so the horses definitely know when they’ve had a rail!

This horse is still quite green at jumping through doubles, so in my training with him the double will always stay small, even when I build the other fences up. I want to create heaps of confidence, so when he gets in the ring he thinks ‘I’ve got this, I know how to do it.’ I often build them with a shorter distance than normal for a horse like this, because he doesn’t jump forward through a double. For the other horses, I also build them short at home, so they have to be a bit quicker.

Land and turn

I’m really big on the basics, particularly with young horses, and do a lot of simple pole exercises, mainly to get them bending and turning and landing on the correct leads. They’ve got to be able to be able to land on the lead you want. A good exercise is riding a figure-of-eight (20m circle each way) over a cross bar. They have to learn to follow your hand from the get-go, and not hollow when you open the rein. If they can’t bend with their body over a cross-rail, how can you expect them to turn over a fence on cross-country?

I like to use curving lines and roll-back turns, so I’m practising slightly more cross-country turns, rather than just straight show jumping when I’m in the arena at home.

  • This article was first published in the August 2019 issue of NZ Horse & Pony
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