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Training for three day eventing involves taking a horse cross country over terrain and natural jumps. Conquer the cross country phase of training with the help of this free video presented by an internationally renowned clinician and event rider.
Hi, I'm Cathy Wieschoff, and I'm talking to you about the sport of eventing today. And I do a lot of practice of which show jumps because then you can make the changes that you need to make to make the horse successful or the rider successful. And then, you take it, when you, when you think you got it, you go out and practice a little bit a cross country to show the horse what he's got to do. There are three different types of fences out there that horses do not jump naturally. Going into water, horse would not just canter off and jump off and dock in the water. I mean, that doesn't make any sense. He would walk in carefully and take a drink. And there's a, a really interesting a story I got to tell you; this is funny. I have one horse that would not go into water. And I was like, "Why are you so worried about water 'cause you live out in my gelding field where you drink from the creek all the time"? And then, I was like, "Cathy, you're not being very smart". Why wouldn't he jump into water? Because when he goes into the creek, he's got to be careful about where he's putting his feet in the rocks, so it doesn't make sense to him to jump into that water jump. So, I had to do a little bit of strolling with him, training him to, to, to do that and then he, then he finally got confident with it. But, it was kind of an interesting analogy that he had made in his mind and that took me awhile to get. So, water is the big thing. Ditches are another thing and, and we really, I train a lot using rope work or Parelli, John Lions, Clint Anderson. I, I don't want to acknowledge, put them altogether 'cause each of them are very good and each of them have their different focuses. But, I use that rope work to teach horses to jump on line first and teach them about going over ditches, going into water and the third one was going up and down banks where they have to jump up onto a bank or jump down off a bank. And I teach those to my horses on line first so that they don't have the rider on their back to deal with the different way changes and things like that. They learn to do it by themselves and then, when I get on them, they're like, "Oh, that's no brainer; I got this, I've done this before." And it's another good way also to train horses for the amateurs 'cause the amateur can stand there and watch their horse jump the ditch on line or go into the water on line and then, they get on and feel confident and give the horse confidence. 'Cause every time we get on our horses, we're their leaders. They're looking to us for leadership and if we don't give them that leadership, then we could get into trouble as far as them not understanding the question and then, you know, refusing a jump and having it not be as great a day as you want it to be.
