Lesson with John Twomey

With Jaime going overseas for the winter the hunt has been on to find a new jumping instructor. I heard that John was going to be teaching up at Jaimes so asked Vanessa if she would mind doing a shared lesson to see what he was like & if we both enjoyed it could mean we could afford regular lessons from him rather than paying for a private.

Well....pretty much stoked with the lesson! John is a great instructor & really explains things so well. VERY encouraging and I learnt a hell of a lot.

He had many helpful tips of which I am now struggling to remember: think about opening your knees rather than putting your heels down, if you knees are open then your legs will be tight against the horses side & your heels will come down; think about opening your chest which will make your body straighter over the fence (I tend to dive so this was a good thing for me); if things do go wrong just forget about them & concentrate on the next job at hand.

So yeah pretty awesome lesson. Cobs wasn't anywhere near as bad as I thought he would be as we haven't really jumped since Woodhill HT.

We started with a small cross so John could see what was happening etc then moved onto cantering in with a pole either side. The moved onto the barrels which Cobs jumped.....lively a few times LOL! It was more me though driving him the last few strides so John talked me through what I was doing etc so I concentrated on that. Then moved onto a two stride double - first time we went through Cobs backed off a bit so again my bad habits set in but the second time after John had put them up we did it really nicely. Was super happy & it felt like our jump had slowed down which was good.

Then we went onto related lines....my favourite...not. We had to go over the wall then six/seven strides over a vertical. The first few times we did seven as I was holding him back a bit as he normally jumps the wall stupidly. The last few lines we did we pushed & got the six which was great.

So all in all a great lesson. Was actually really good having a shared one as you can listen & learn on what the other person is doing etc. Hopefully we can keep getting lessons together :)