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Riding Cross Country - at home

with DAVID GREEN

Not every rider has access to a cross country course to work over - but that doesn't mean you can't school the fences you'll meet on cross country day, at home, using ordinary show jumping gear. We asked DAVID GREEN to outline a series of exercises, you can do at home

The cross country phase of the one or three day event is still the most influential and forms the most basic criteria for an event horse to be successful. You can teach flat work, you can improve show jumping technique, but you cannot impart courage and honesty to a horse no matter how hard you try!

If your horse has a nervous breakdown at the mere sight of a ditch, or is blessed with a water phobia that makes puddles appear scary then you may not be blessed with a future Badminton winner.

However, what you can do is to start each horse off with a series of exercises that teach balance, rhythm, cadence and an acceptance of the aids that enable you to form a partnership through each cross county obstacle you tackle.

The training exercises that are detailed over the next three months form the education and training that I teach and follow with my own youngsters, pupil's horses and my advanced horses such as Chatsby who won both Saumur and Fairhill CCI***'s in 1995, using these methods.

I have outlined some specific fences that cause problems cross county and show how I reproduce them at home in my arena in familiar surroundings for both horse and rider to build up that all important confidence you need.

The arrowhead requires absolute straightness and needs to be ridden accurately and with the horse in a bouncy, short canter, truly between hand and leg to ensure the horse remains in the rider’s control. Since a horse is naturally wary of a narrow fence it has to trust the rider to teach it that it has got room to land safely on the other side!

I begin by building an arrowhead that is generously wide and has a pole on takeoff to help the horse determine a wide ground line. First the horse is jumped through the inverted arrowhead to show it that there is room on both sides of the fence in which to fit. Then the horse is jumped through the fence with the arrowhead towards take off.

Finally the horse and rider are taught to jump through a very narrow arrowhead with no pole on take off as the horse has learnt confidence and trust through building up to this from the basic beginnings.

The same fence can then be used to help with the accuracy and scope a corner demands. A corner requires the same things as the arrowhead, straightness, obedience etc, but also usually needs a little more impulsion to create the energy that a spread fence requires. Again, the exercise is built up slowly, beginning with a very narrow corner that the horse learns to treat as an oxer. When both horse and rider are confident it can be built up to a wider corner with horse and rider trusting each other.

Here I show how I negotiate this type of fence as a schooling exercise at home.

It is important to stress that neither the arrowhead nor the corner need to be big fences in schooling. The whole point of schooling exercises are to encourage confidence and build up trust. This is why it is so easy to set these exercises up at home using materials that will give way if something goes wrong; whilst schooling over fixed fences has its place, it is not something that can be done every third or fourth day like these basics can be with no risk to horse or rider.