The final countdown

Cross-country schooling isn’t simply about training and introducing new concepts – it’s also about tuning up and bedding down everything a horse already knows. If your horse is quite experienced, there might not be much left for him to learn in order to excel at the level you’re competing at – but you’ll still need a plan of action to ensure your schooling sessions ahead of a competition are truly productive.

Top tip

Even experienced horses can have a confidence wobble, so go back to basics, make the question as easy as possible and the answer straightforward and fun. Once you’ve re-established confidence, you can build on it.

Flatwork foundations

Every horse, at any level, can benefit from practising over small fences and the foundation of all jumping is flatwork – 95% of the real work is in the approach, the getaway and the rideability between fences. If your pace, your line and your balance are right, the jump is something of a foregone conclusion.

So, while it’s important to know that you and your horse are capable and confident over the dimensions you’ll be competing at, you don’t have to school every exercise at that height. Any horse will benefit from a session over smaller fences occasionally, and it’s a much lower-impact and mentally refreshing way of practising rhythm and balance. Often, just before a competition, it’s exactly what you need.

Pepper and spice

From the moment you get on your horse, you set the tone for the ride to come. Because this cross-country session is all about ticking the boxes of rideability, you need to make sure you’re working towards that right away. Even in walk, your horse must be listening and engaged, so, ask for a halt transition by stopping your seat and hips. Ride plenty of those and pepper it with squares and circles, using your tall, balanced body to differentiate between the two, rather than your hands.

Once you step up to trot and canter, continue with this theme, spicing it up with plenty of changes of rein and transitions. Use leg-yield to shift your horse’s shoulders and hindquarters, and open and close the canter to begin running through the gears you’ll need when it comes to jumping a course.

A truly adjustable canter will mean that when you sit up, your horse will automatically come back to you, and when you put your leg on in that upright position, he’ll step further underneath himself with his hindleg. Then, you can close your hip angle to open the stride again.

Being able to change the canter means you can adapt your horse’s balance to suit whatever obstacle is next. For steeplechase fences, this might be a very minor adjustment on the approach, but for a rail-ditch-rail, for example, there’ll be a much more pronounced difference and a short, bouncy stride.

Discover more of Nicola’s tips for event preparation in December Horse&Rider, out now!