03/09/2025
*** Prepare; don’t scare ***
We get one chance to produce young horses correctly; if we rush and scare young horses in their first year or two of their ridden careers, we are setting them up for failure for the rest of their lives. A young horse must be produced so that they always feel like they are succeeding. This doesn’t mean patting a horse after manically charging him at a jump when he can barely canter, and managing to scramble to the other side. It means producing a young horse in a way that he feels confident in everything he is asked to do. It also means ensuring a horse is strong enough, physically, to do what you are asking him to do. A horse must be produced so that he always believes in himself.
Some young horses mature a lot faster than others, and it’s important that we understand which ones are capable of jumping a few small courses as a 4 year old, and which ones won’t be mature enough in body, brain, or both, to jump a 1m track until they are 7.
The main thing to understand with young horses, is that you can never go too slowly. By rushing a young horse, you may ruin his entire future career. I am absolutely not against young horses being out and about competing, but I am against a young horse being taken out to fail. Smashing a young horse around a course of fences is not ok; not only are you not achieving anything at all, but you are being extremely unfair to the horse, possibly even cruel. A green young horse trotting around a small course of fences, being given time to see the fence and pop, is very different to a green young horse smashing through/into fences.
The equestrian world is a tough world, and there are still plenty of purchasers who won’t buy a 4 or 5 year unless it’s jumping around a 1m or bigger track, and so I can absolutely understand why some good professionals are pushed into rushing youngsters through. But these will likely be the ones I described as popping easily around small courses, and not the ones smashing through fences. They will have been prepared properly. If a horse is knocking rail after rail, they are not prepared/ready for what they are being asked to do.
Building the correct muscle to carry a rider and be strong enough to hold a balanced canter, let alone jump, always takes months, and in some horses can take years. The key is to recognise which horses only need several months of ridden work to be strong enough to start jumping (no horse is ready after a few weeks with a rider on board) and which need much longer. A horse constantly knocking down fences is not ready to jump.
The take home message from this is not about at what age a horse should start his jumping career, but to ensure your horse is set up to succeed; taking a horse out and crashing through fence after fence is very likely going to ruin the horse’s entire career, and is not achieving anything. Ensure a young horse is established in body and mind before racing to get out and about jumping courses. And make sure young horses don’t have to carry riders that are too heavy for them. But that’s another post 😉
