Setting Up Trot & Canter Bounces for Horses

Trot and canter bounce exercises for horses involve placing rails about eight fee in front of the first vertical and about nine and a half feet between the two verticals. Encourage a horse to jump straighter and strengthen its hind end with advice from an experienced trainer in this video on riding and jumping horses.

The bounce exercise is a great exercise to help strengthen your horse's hind end. It will also help you get your horse to jump straighter, jump squarely off of its hind end and have a nice even arc in the middle of its jump. This is a simple trot in vertical. vertical bounce. We've set a trot in rail about eight feet in front of the first vertical, and then about nine and a half feet in between the two verticals. You want to practice trotting in off of both directions, have a nice medium engaged trot and let your horse do the rest of the work. Once the horses get a hang of this, we will actually take that trot rail away, lengthen out the two verticals to about ten and a half, eleven feet and start to canter in from both directions. Now we've set up a little more advanced bounce exercise, it's now a canter and bounce exercise. We've taken away the trot rail. It's approximately ten feet to eleven feet between the vertical and the oxer and the same between the oxer and the vertical. You want to make sure you start out with the more simple exercise but as your horse gets confident you can move to an exercise like this which will encourage them to even build that strength more. You want to make sure as a rider as you canter in with the oxer in the center you keep a little more leg. It's going to take a little more effort on their part to get across that oxer. It's still going to really help them being square off the ground and making sure the arc of their jump is right in the middle of the jump. As a rider you want to make sure you approach this type exercise on a little bit more of a collected engaged canter. This is not an exercise you want to be on a long strung out canter and a big mistake people make with the bounces is going forward or looking for a long distance. You want to make sure your horse is in front of your leg, balanced and on the quieter side.