Hollie: I can already see an improvement

All the Honeychop Stars with Tim & his team

Last week I went to Tim’s yard and spent the day there with Tim, his team and the Honeychop team, it was great to be able to watch Tim ride and gain some valuable tips from him to work on with my own horses and to have a bit of an insight as to how a professional year works.

It’s been a really busy month with the horses, Hilarius has had a well deserved holiday and a new ride called Emma has joined the team. Emma is a very sweet  10 year old mare and looks very promising, and I will be starting to take her out to shows this month.

Hollie & new horse Emma

Pene Grimsters – Ryan’s Hollie has had an amazing month she’s picked a Blue Chip Star ticket for the championships in April and we also won our NSEA qualifiers for Show jumping in the Novice and Intermediate Classes and 2nd in JWS qualifier. So off we went to the NSEA Schools Championships held at Addington Manor in October. Ryan’s Hollie was a super star all weekend where she finished 3rd in the ShowJumping Championships.

Hollie & Delina

6yr old Delina has also been on top form as she’s also picked up a Blue Chip ticket in the Discovery and has also got her Discovery and Newcomer double clears for the 2016 2nd rounds.

I also received my first exercise from Tim which was to place 4 small uprights in a small circle, one at every quarter point three strides apart, I then had to continuously keep going round jumping the jumps. I had to do this on both the left rein and the right rein.

Hollie & Delina doing Tim’s exercise

The circle exercise was really hard at first as Delina is not very balanced in the canter and finds it hard to keep the same rhythm, she found it hard to turn and keep the same strides between each fence, and to turn and keep straight and found the exercise much harder on the right rein. But after a couple of tries she then got the hang of what she had to do and was more focused and was ready for the next fence. I need to be able to shorten her canter between the fences on the circle so after each time she jumps she doesn’t get any faster and can stay at a constant rhythm.

This is a really good exercise and one that we will put into our weekly routine to try and perfect it. check out my YouTube video below

Tim has given me another exercise “The Serpentine over fences” to work on so I’ve been busy practicing it at home on my horses. So check back next month to see how I’ve got on with this.

The top tips from Tim are really useful and I’d encourage any rider to give them a go, they are certainly helping me with my horses and I can already see an improvement from having a more structured routine.

This weekend we are off in search of more Blue Chip tickets in the 1.10 Power and the 1.20 Karma – next month I’ll let you know how we’ve got on.

Hollie ☺️