“Where do you normally ride?” asked Sonja Johnson of the group of students gathered around her. In general the answer was the same throughout the different sessions of Sonja’s clinic; many of today’s riders ride most of the time in an arena.
For Sonja, who grew up and still lives on a sheep farm in Western Australia where space to gallop is not a problem, this is something she is encountering more and more as she teaches at clinics around Australia.
“If you look at the Australian team members in the past you’ll find that they generally grew up on farming properties and tended to ride everywhere. We probably learned to ride a lot more by the seat of our pants and spent most of our time riding across a lot of wide open paddocks before we ever rode in an arena”
The lack of experience across different terrain at different speeds is something that worries Sonja.
“I know of young riders that keep their horses at agistment properties where they are not even allowed to get on their horses to ride them from the stable to the arena and it terrifies me that riders with that sort of experience are heading out on cross country courses”
Cross country riding involves jumping fixed obstacles and, obviously, riding across the countryside. Most riders tend to focus on jumping the cross country fences and therefore spend time practicing this and, as Sonja pointed out, there are really only five types of cross country fences; uprights, spreads, ditches, drops and water. Uprights and spreads can be practiced on an arena while ditches, drops and water are best practised on a cross country course when riders have access but can, if necessary, be simulated for practice.
Young horses need to learn to balance themselves when cantering downhill
“The thing that is becoming more and more necessary nowadays and that we really need to train is how to gallop across the ground and cope with the terrain. It’s not just the riders who need to learn it, it’s the horses too” says Sonja
“If you only ever ride on an arena, you never think about the footing because you know it is always going to be the same. On cross country you need to think about the going and what type of ground your horse will be travelling over”
“I asked the first group to warm up and, despite there being plenty of room to warm up elsewhere, they were all cantering in an area with old hay strewn on the ground. Under that hay it’s going to be slippery and personally I’d no more canter through that if I could avoid it than fly to the moon. But I had to learn that from coming a cropper on the farm when I did a fast turn on ground that had hay on it”
Sonja then pointed out areas of the ground around the riders that she would try to avoid for various reasons such as the hay, slippery clay patches and areas without grass cover and suggested to the riders that they need to learn to recognise such hazards instinctively. This is one of the things that riders should also look for when they are walking courses and not just focus on the fence, especially as conditions can change throughout the day
“Be aware of the line and the ground between the fences – you need to read the terrain, read the dirt”
In addition to some riders’ lack of experience in galloping on unlevel ground there is also the added complexity of having to gallop up and down hills.
“When we ride downhill it has to be the same as when we come up the hill. We want the feeling that the horse’s centre of gravity is a little behind us and when we come up the hill we want the feeling that the horse is pushing, not pulling. If you get the feeling that they are pulling themselves up the hill, their centre of gravity is too far forward and we haven’t got the power coming through, which is not a great feeling if you’re galloping up the hill to jump a fence at the top”
Riders may think that speed is the best way to get up the hill but Sonja pointed out your horse can be going flat chat and still be pulling up the hill, rather than pushing himself up the hill. Therefore the rider needs to create and contain the energy with the leg and make sure that the horse is stepping underneath himself and pushing the hind quarters underneath themselves. Then when you go down the hill it’s important to do the same thing to keep the balance and keep the power underneath your horse.
“This comes partly from the rider engaging their core stability and keeping their leg on but you must also keep your horse very straight going downhill. Think about the horse’s legs being one at each corner and giving you a wide base of support; if you imagine walking on a tight rope where your legs are close together, it’s much more difficult to balance than if you are walking with your legs wide apart. Also think about the head coming straight out of the horse’s chest – not a bit one way or a bit the other, but absolutely straight”
Have someone watch you canter down the hill and tell you which way you are leaning or if you are using a dominant hand which wil turn the horse's head
“Riders tend to slow down if they think that their horse is unbalanced going downhill and, because we all have one dominant hand (until we train ourselves out of it), we tend to go down the hill with one hand still and the other one pulling to slow the horse down. In response of course the horse turns, you suddenly have a crooked horse and a crooked horse is much more likely to fall over”
The answer of course is to practise, practise, practise for both horse and rider. Sonja set a simple exercise to start at the bottom of the hill, canter up the hill, canter a curve across the top and canter down the hill suggesting to always start by working uphill to give your horse some confidence in the exercise
Of course some riders found this more difficult than others and it also became clear that some horses too needed to learn to canter downhill. As many horses now don’t get to live in or gallop across large open paddocks often they too need to establish their balance and build their confidence. As they continued to canter up and down the hill, with short breaks as needed, it started to click for some horses how to do it most comfortably which in turn increased the rider’s confidence and balance. The combinations that had the most difficulty at first were encouraged to take shorter or less steep lines and gradually build up from there until ‘it’s so easy that you’re bored with it’.
And eventually they were, which meant they could move on to the next step of jumping uphill and downhill covered in our next article
During the clinic Sonja mentioned that the Sydney International Horse Trials CCI3* course had some tricky downhill gallops leading to fences - check out how Sonja rides them in our cross country video here
Read our training article Gallop Ahead With a Better Position here
