My horse chips in before the jump what can I do?

Chipping in before a jump — that extra short awkward stride that appears in the final one or two strides of the approach and produces a cramped uncomfortable takeoff — is one of the most common and most frustrating jumping problems at every level of riding. The chip is almost never about the jump itself — it is about what happened in the approach that made the horse arrive at the wrong takeoff point and then add a short stride to cope with the distance rather than leaving from where he was and jumping what was in front of him. The most common cause of chipping is a loss of pace and impulsion in the final strides of the approach — the horse slows down, whether from the rider pulling back in response to anxiety about the distance, from the horse backing off the fence in his own uncertainty, or from a combination of both. A horse approaching at a consistent pace arrives at fences consistently. A horse whose pace varies in the final three or four strides will arrive at inconsistent distances, and inconsistent distances produce inconsistent fences. The rider's instinctive response to an uncertain distance — to close the hand and wait — is precisely the response that creates the chip by removing the forward energy that would have carried the horse to the correct takeoff point. Rhythm and pace maintenance through the entire approach is the foundational correction for chipping, and it requires a specific mental reframe for riders who have learned to manage their approach by looking for the distance and adjusting in response to what they see. The correct approach is one in which the rider establishes a consistent forward-thinking rhythm before the fence and maintains that rhythm through the last stride before takeoff without adjustment, trusting that a horse in consistent rhythm will arrive at a good enough distance to jump safely and well. The rider who maintains the rhythm and lets the fence come to the horse eliminates the chip not by finding a better distance but by removing the pace variation that was creating the inconsistent distance. Gridwork is the training tool that most efficiently addresses chipping because it removes the distance judgment variable entirely. A simple trot pole to crossrail exercise, with the pole set at the correct distance for the horse's natural trot stride, requires the horse to arrive at the crossrail on the correct takeoff point as a natural consequence of trotting over the pole in rhythm — the pole regulates the takeoff without any distance judgment from the rider. Working in trot over this basic grid until the horse flows through it confidently and the rider can feel the difference between a maintained rhythmic approach and one where pace varies establishes the feel that the rider needs to carry back to single fence work. The rider's eye — the ability to see and process the distance to a fence in the final strides of the approach — is a skill that develops over thousands of jumping repetitions. For riders whose chipping is specifically related to difficulty seeing distances, counting strides out loud in the approach develops the awareness of stride length and arrival point that makes distance recognition more consistent. But developing the eye should not come at the expense of maintaining the rhythm, because a rider who sees a long distance and kicks desperately or sees a short distance and pulls back has simply traded one inconsistency for another with the addition of tension that makes the fence worse rather than better.