Steps vs striding

[Lyndz & Siners]

ok, so when your doing a measuring strides and like walking coarses for shows, i never really was told how to count my strides with steps, like isnt it like 4 steps equal a stride or something? and then your have to measure the landing... how many steps is that? All this is if your measure for about a 15.2hh tb, just in case yu need to know, so can someone please help me with this? thx

[KRAZYHORSES]

walk 2 steps from the jump, then every 4 steps is a stride....other people do it differently. You can also count the steps minus 3 and divide by 4. but I like the 1st way much better!!

[DavidH]

Krazyhorses has described the standard striding. However, to be of any use you need to know what the normal canter stride is for your horse.
To do this, set up a line of 5 canter poles at standard 4 human stride spacing.
Canter your horse through and feel whether it is having to shorten or lenghten to get through them. Then get a friend to adjust the spacing until the horse can canter through at its normal rythm.
Now stride the distance between poles on foot and you will have your own horses standard stride.
So when you walk a course you will know whether a distance is long short or just right. Armed with this info you can make a much better decision on how you approach combinations and related distances. Standard striding is pretty useless when walking courses.
If you want to take it further then go back to the canter poles and adjust them to the shortest canter your horse can comfortably jump from and the longest. The difference will surprise you.
Now when walking related distances you can make a really informed decision on number of strides based on length of canter.
As an example Ed's standard for SJ is 4.5 human strides so all standard spaced doubles get a bit tight. Therefore I have to apporach these with a slightly shorter canter.
His range goes from just under 3 human strides to almost 6. You can see why it is so easy to get a horse wrong at a fence and why rythm on approach is so important.

[Harleyhorse]

I have always been told that the "normal" horse strid is 12'. And ti give 3' for landing/take off. Around here the people "learn" to walk a 3' strid (3' x 4' =12' then add in another 6' for landing/take off) That mean that a two strid line would be 12' +12' +6' =30' That is how I learned it many years ago, sorry is I confussed you more!
HH

[Ross]

Don't forget that different people have different stride lengths! I'm 5'10" amd I used to go to competitions with someone who is 4'11", so you can imagine we tend to take slightly (!?) different strides... Davids method should work for anyone.

Ross

[Skib]

davidH - Once again thank you for teaching something so clearly. And which makes sense.