Several people I have asked recently to recommend a good equestrian book have suggested one called Celebrity Jumping Exercises compiled by Caroline Orme It is filled with SJ and XC jumping exercises submitted by professionals such as Pat Burgess, Matt Ryan, and Leslie Law. With the help of a few well timed hints I ended up unwraping this on Christmas day! (How on earth did Santa guess!?!) Today we attempted an exercise submitted by Yogi Breisner. To begin with you place 5 poles at bounce distances (10-12ft between each pole) in a straight line, and trot through them. These are not paced for trot so trotting through them is aimed at getting your horse thinking about where to put his feet to not hit the poles. Soap trotted through cleanly on both reins, and tried hard to work out how to get to the opposite end without touching the poles. Next you start to canter through them, and this really makes them stretch for the stride in order to make the distance. I did this on both reins a few times and he quickly got the hang of it, grunting as he made the effort to stretch. The next phase is to build each pole into a x-pole one by one, making sure you jump the exercise equally on both reins. Finally you will have a line of 5 bounces (I could only comfortably fit 4 bounces in our 20×40 arena). I finished here as Soap had really made an effort to understand the exercise and do his best, but if you want to progress further you can remove fence 2 and 4 and turn fence 3 into an upright. This book looks to have some really constructive exercises in it and I plan to try most of them, and will be blogging as and when on how they go. Video of exercise below