Straighten Your Horse for a Safer Ride over Fences

hind legs through your body keeping the horses hind legs directly behind the shoulders with even use of both legs.
You can increase the difficulty of the exercise by riding a figure8 across the width of the arena over the jump and making a rollback turn off the rail to the jump red dotted line
Another favourite tool of Sarahs for encouraging straightness is the skinny jump. The face of a skinny jump typically measures only four to six feet across requiring horse to really stick to the line chosen by the rider. Heres how Sarah recommends introducing your horse to skinny jumps using large plastic barrels.
Start by laying two plastic barrels on their sides placed end to end and prop up two guide poles to form a Vshape inviting to the horse. Guide poles are used with green horses or riders to funnel them over the barrel Sarah explains.
Next set up just one barrel again with the Vrails propped up. Once you and your horse are confidently jumping this you can move the ground poles to the ground and eventually remove them entirely.
Once horse and rider are jumping 33 courses they can progress to jumping two upright barrels says Sarah cautioning that Vrails should always be used when jumping upright barrels to make the line clear to the horse and rider.
Finally you can progress to jumping one upright barrel with Vrails.