On Friday 24th of April Shabby and Emma competed in their first event of 2015 season – Hambleden International Horse Trials. Their planned first event (Goring Heath Horse Trials) was sadly cancelled due to unforeseen issues with the ground conditions. Since Emma is bravely taking part in this training diary blog project, please be nice if you do comment on this post, we are all learning and have many ups and downs every day. She is in this venture to improve so is aware of many aspects of her own and Shabby’s training that need working on and is doing her best to make the better performance happen 🙂 Now, let me take you on a little journey through this pair’s performance through my eyes. It goes without saying, I am doing my best to help Emma too but I am always open for coaching suggestions and ideas to improve myself (as long as they don’t involve stuffing the horse into gadgets/fancy bits etc for quick results 😉 )
TRAINING FOCUS & FINAL WEEKS BEFORE THE EVENT
Preparation: My work with Emma focuses on rider’s technique, quality of her seat, ways of dealing with Shabby’s tension, anxiety and post – racing/post- injury issues. We work on the flat 99% of the time with 1% being spend on simple groundwork and pole work/ covaletti work. I aim at long term results and happy athlete rather than quick, artificial improvements that might look good for an untrained eye but create a huge plethora of hidden issues later on (we have enough of those with Shabby already!)
My main aim when we started in winter 2014 was to give Emma more awareness of her ability to control Shabby through her seat as well as creating more responses to rider’s seat in the horse. They are both brave, adrenaline junkies, often working too much “on the muscle” with little regards for finese 😉 We spent some time re-educating Emma’s upper body posture as well as upper and lower leg position. The latter was to add leverage to Emma’s seat (to encourage Shabby to stop his habitual hollowing through his back) and help her distribute her seat aids through Shabby’s ribcage and muscles on the sides of his body not just his back. We also did many sessions concentrating on Emma’s reactions to the feel through Shabby’s back, hind legs and shoulders as well as re-educating his neck and head carriage as he tended to move very over bent and tense in his “ordinary work”.
On his calm “home day” he now works very relaxed with lovely over-track in free walk, no jogging on re-take of the reins and his canter work is more symmetrical on both reins.
Video: Shabby training session at home 1 week before the event
Video: Left canter at home Video: Shabby training session at home. Canter work over poles on curved line. Left rein – Shabby’s “weaker” direction. This horse’s biggest weakness as far as jumping goes is maintaining slower (i.e. not a galloping speed) canter in the turns and sustaining collection without tension. Final pre-event views: from my point of view, at this stage, I was happy with the progress we managed to make. I like the small changes in Emma’s riding and Shabby’s acceptance and focus improving. However, I believe they can do much better than this so we shall be working on 😉
HAMBLEDEN HORSE TRIALS THROUGH COACH’S EYE
I will let you watch the compilation of the clips first before sharing my comments in case you wanted to make own observations without bias 🙂 Here we go.
Main video with clips from the show grounds, warm up for dressage, jumping, the jumping phase and few XC clips.
Video: Full dressage test (sadly, it was so far from where I could stand that you can’t really watch it properly i.e. the arena is too far away to make out much of the test’s floor plan) Comments you can hear in the background are by one of Emma’s friends 🙂 Test: BE 106 (2012)
POST EVENT THOUGHTS
Overall, I am pleased with how Emma dealt with the training issues and from the rider coaching point of view, I feel some of my training objectives have definitely been achieved while the others emerged.
I hoped for Shabby to remain calmer once the initial anxiety and tension subsided. The warm up went all right in the end, I wasn’t expecting him to be much better at his first event. However, the logistics of going away to the dressage arena which was a considerable distance from all other horses and in a massive open field, was not ideal. Shabby’s mental preparation is the key here and his calm is incredibly volatile. In the sport of dressage where ability to train relaxation and focus into athletic performance is paramount, Shabby will always struggle to contain himself. However, through working on his confidence and trust in the routine of warm up, performance, cool down, I think we can improve the results for sure.
I will want to work with them on the grass more and continue to develop strategies to keep the horse’s and rider’s mind on the job in hand. Canter work needs much more attention, his trot work was within my expectations considering the way he warmed up, I will want to focus more on his suppleness in the next few weeks before the next event on the 17th May.
He will not team chase at all now until October so I am hoping this will help manage his nerves too.
Now, show-jumping…It was the first time I saw him jumping a course and let’s just say, there is a lot to be done in that department. I was surprised how incredibly spent he was following the round which means he is way too anxious and stressed about this phase than he needs be (considering he was dry and fresh post his XC round before he even got back to the lorry park…!!).
I want Emma to be much more confident in her jumping abilities too as I know she can ride much better to single jumps at home so that’s another area to work on. She dislikes pole work but that’s what awaits them in the next few weeks 😉
The erratic canter Shabby is in during the round makes it near impossible for Emma to see her distances well so there is definitely some mental preparation work to be done – she needs to keep her calm so Shabby can learn to find his.
He is very careless about the rails. I don’t believe this can be fully trained out of a horse but with better approaches and more fluid riding as well as better quality canter they should be able to meet the jumps at more optimal take off points and perhaps leave more rails up!
Onwards and upwards now to the 17th and in the meantime, keep all crossed we can improve Shabby’s Zen state of mind and Emma’s confidence in her jumping!
Official Blog by Aspire Equestrian Riding Academy 
Having owned a horse that comes tight and short in the neck and therefore didn’t push from behind , the contact and getting him to work over his back more would be the first thing I would address. He comes up and back at her through tension. He would be loosing marks as when he does this he also opens his mouth. Firstly, what bit is he ridden in? Every horse I have trained that does this improved vastly by riding my horse in a nathe straight bar snaffle.
You then have to ride with a decent contact at all times, if he comes short in the neck and drops behind the bit don’t give the reins forward until he re connects, then push his nose out.
Do lots of work on a long rein trying to get him to stretch down.
Hi hailey, thanks for the suggestions, will look into the bit situation. He is ridden in a hanging cheek double jointed snaffle which he is most trusting in but don’t think Emma tried straight nathe bit. He backs off most bits and have various racing and body stiffness related mouth evasions.
We want to find a different way of helping him get there rather than holding him on contact but he does go long and low in warm up so will try to do more of that and see how he copes 🙂
Fab blog, really like hearing the coaching perspective! Have you seen Andrew Nicholsons jumping exercises? He put four very small uprights (60cm max) around a 20m circle and just maintained the canter and let the horse back itself off and sort out its feet, it worked really well for my young TB, didn’t matter if they knocked it down or trotted, may just help with relaxation and rythmn.
Hi Alison – thank you for stopping by and sharing the exercise. Unfortunately, what works for 99% of horses doesn’t work so well with Shabby
He becomes very stressed when working on circles in canter not to mention jumping and for the moment we do similar exercise but just with poles instead of jumps.
It is potentially due to his way of going (very downhill and speed oriented), post-injury weakness, some odd alignment in his body mentioned and work on by a chiropractor as well as his anxious nature. I do love that exercise though and I think that with patience we will build up to it 🙂