Pole Work

While jumping is fun, I must admit that my very favourite jump lessons are ones where we just do work with poles on the ground. I feel like this is the best combo of jumping and dressage. You must go forward and straight towards an obstacle like in jumping but you can keep your position and aids in place for every stride like in dressage.

Sometimes I think my instructor is a little surprised about how much I love pole work because some of her other students grumble when they don't get to do real jumps. We are a good fit though because she has been reading through new pole exercises and has brought out a few really good ones. Here are a couple we have done in lessons in the last month:

1. Overlap Poles
On this specific week my instructor did this same exercise with ALL of her lessons. She warned me it was a hard one and she was right!

The exercise had the poles set up like this:

The coloured lines are poles, the thin grey lines are the paths you could take over the poles

Three lines of poles were set up where the ends of them overlapped just a little bit. The overlap width was very narrow, barely the width of a horse. Trying to take the 2nd or 4th path where you passed over all 5 poles in one line was an extreme test of straightness as even the tiniest wiggle would allow the horse to swing their foot around the end of the pole instead of over it. You also had to be very careful to not overcorrect or one zig would make you zag off the end of the next pole in the line. Kachina and I really struggled with this exercise, but that's what made it so awesome, it showed us a weakness and a measureable way to work on it. The first time through I think we only made it over one pole (Kachina was being a good trail horse and smoothly sidestepped the obstacles without losing her forward energy). First I had to go down to a walk and convince Kachina that I actually wanted her to step over the poles even though she could weave around them. By the end of the lesson we could go over 4 of them at a trot but we never did successfully hit all 5. I definitely want to do this exercise again!



2. Canter Poles

I have done trot poles quite a few times but until recently I had never done canter poles with Kachina, so one night I asked if we could tackle them in our lesson.

Stretching to make the 12' spacing

My instructor set up one line of poles on the quarter line, and another on a short diagonal. The canter poles were set for a standard 12' canter stride which is a big canter for Kachina's 15.2hh size. She delivered though and stretched out to make the distances. The big bounds to make it over the poles had a tendency to push me out of the tack so I really had to focus to keep my shoulders back and my hands up and forward. After a few times down the quarter line poles in both directions we tried the short diagonal. We don't have flying lead changes so I asked my instructor what to do about leads and she encouraged me to just let Kachina flow through and see what she did. On the very first try Kachina bounded through and switched leads herself over the last pole. She got lots of praise for that and we ended the lesson there. Best of all we got it on video!

I also have screenshots for those of you who don't like video.

I need to work on keeping my butt in the saddle even when she leaps over the poles

In our last lesson we revisited canter poles again. This time we reduced the spacing a little bit. Even though this was only our second time doing canter poles, Kachina was already much more relaxed about it. A couple times Kachina would switch leads with her hind end over the middle pole so I had to keep my seat plugged in and my weight back more to keep her on the correct lead. The lesson led me to have some great trot-canter transitions and forced me to influence her canter more and those things are exactly what we need in our dressage work these days.

My instructor promised that we can do some work with poles for shortening and lengthening soon and I am so excited for that.

Have I mentioned how much I love pole work?