I spent my morning with one of my favorite creatures. He’s t..

I spent my morning with one of my favorite creatures. He’s tall, dark, handsome, and makes me feel like I can fly.

Today, O and I worked on walk to canter departs, then did a little jumping through a grid. A grid consists of a series of fences spaced for ideal stride lengths. Usually horses enter the grid and take the first fence at a trot, then canter through and away from the remaining obstacles. While grids can be done different ways it’s common to allow 1 full canter stride between each jump. The jumps grow in height and can consist of as many elements as you’d like or as space will allow.

Exercising over grids can help train or refresh horses on finding ideal take off distances and helps contain them between fences to encourage a proper stride length between the fences. These techniques carry over into jumping courses where take off, pace, and stride length become vital for jumping clear courses and gaining necessary points for clean jumping in hunter classes. A horse who gets too deep or takes off too soon in front of a fence may cause dropped rails. It can also be nearly impossible to hold a steady pace when a poor jump distance soils the fluidity of a course.

For those who are curious, an average sized horse has a working canter stride length of around 10 feet. Most horses will take off about 4-5’ in front of a jump and land about the same distance away from the base on the other side. As the jumps grow in size the take off and landing will become slightly further from the base of the fence.
This means the first fence and second fence of a grid should be roughly 18’ feet apart. The second fence about 20’ and the third about 24’ from the second. In this snippet I had already removed the trot poles in front of the fence and only had 2 elements up, but you get the idea.

Since the trot is a 2-beat gait the trot rails are placed 4-4.5’ apart and the final rail in front of fence 1 should be 10’ from the base. This setup gives your horse the correct footing to help them find all the best places for a smooth and fun jumping partnership between horse and rider. 💜🏇💜

I like to build a grid before shows and/or when I feel like my eyes or my horses eyes just aren’t finding ourselves where we want to be in front of fences.