The Teenage Girls Who Jump Like Horses
Going from two legs to four, all for the love of horses.
By Lexi Pandell
Credit: Ava Vogel
For the last three years, 16-year-old Ava Vogel has posted Instagram videos of herself jumping like a horse.
At first, she filmed herself clearing obstacles on two legs like a hurdler. Donning athletic clothes, she left her blonde hair loose, flying in her face and covering it almost like a mask. Her initial obstacles were crude. Chairs. Piled boxes. A kiddie pool.
But, in April 2017, her videos changed: She began jumping on all fours.
In her first video demonstrating her new skill, she comes up to a makeshift fence, coils back on her legs, and then launches herself in a smooth arc, tucking her hands up in front like a horse lifting its knees. It wasn’t a huge jump, but Vogel still cleared it easily.
“Maybe I should just stick to 2’s lol,” she wrote in that post, referring to leaping on two legs.
But she didn’t. Today, Vogel’s videos almost exclusively feature her jumping on all fours, a skill which has earned her more than 33,000 followers.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that humans are bipedal creatures, destined through evolutionary design to walk upright on our two legs. Yet it’s a truth that not all people accept, especially horse fans.
For many of them, their equine obsession is so enduring and all-encompassing that merely being near a horse, even being bestride a horse, is not enough. No, they must also learn to jump like a horse, some of them even forsaking their body’s natural design to do so on all fours.
Last June, a video of a Norwegian woman named Ayla Kirstine imitating a horse went viral. In the clip, which now has nearly 8 million views, she takes to her hands and feet to mimic a horse’s natural movement.
She demonstrates every gait and then, with such fluidity that it looks as if she were born to defy physics, she leaps over a picnic table. Next, a pole suspended between cinder blocks. Then lawn chairs.
On and on it goes, for more than a minute, with Kirstine jumping obstacles looking, if not exactly horse-like, then like a person doing a solid horse impression.
Eighteen-year-old Hanna Kouba lives in Minnesota and has been jumping like a horse since the age of 5. (Credit: Hanna Kouba)
Though it astonished some and horrified others, such feats are not new. A number of videos of people impersonating horses have gone viral in recent years, most of them featuring pre-teen or teenage girls performing these strange athletic feats. In 2017, the Australian version of the TV show Little Big Shots featured a young girl who executed a full course for the cameras.
Some dedicate entire YouTube channels to showing off their jumping efforts, such as one pair of girls who call themselves The Starburst Jumpers. In recent years, the country of Finland has hosted annual hobbyhorse competitions, and some horse shows include human-jumping competitions as a fun interlude between the “real” equestrian classes.
Humans jumping like horses is not unheard of
As a horse-crazy girl growing up in the 1990s, I fired up my VHS of National Velvet and set up a course of chairs in my living room. During the scene at the titular Grand National steeplechase competition, I raced around, jumping the chairs in time with the horses on screen. (I didn’t jump on all fours but, rather, on two legs like a track-and-field hurdler. Was this truly jumping like a horse? Or merely jumping like a human, inspired by horses? Perhaps it’s most accurate to say that I jumped in the spirit of jumping like a horse.)
I prized myself on my ability, thinking it my own secret pastime. Later, as a slightly older horse-crazy girl, my barn friends and I faced off in impromptu contests over real jumps in the riding arena. I discovered that, in fact, most of them had engaged in this style of horse mimicry and, devastatingly, some of them were far better at it than I.
Credit: Hanna Kouba
An informal poll of the 11 people in my current horseback training program — ranging from teens to adults — revealed that every single one of them had jumped over obstacles pretending to be horses at some point in their lives. As a counselor for a horseback riding camp, one even had her young charges mimic horse movements to better understand the animal’s center of balance.
At a horse show I attended recently, the show organizers set out a series of obstacles, fashioned just like high-level horse fences, for youngsters to jump for fun. The kids used them all day long.
Young people — especially girls — dominate this world
Vogel first began jumping like a horse around the age of 10, around the same time she started horseback riding lessons. She and her barn friends tested out how to leap on four legs, watching jumping accounts for tips.
“A lot of it was trial and error,” she told OK Whatever.
With some exceptions, young women tend to be the most serious about learning how to jump like a horse. Chalk it up to some serious “horse girl energy” or to the flexibility required to do it. Though any relatively spry person can learn basic four-legged movements, Vogel said it helps to have an athletic body, longer arms (so you don’t have to bend down too much), and limberness in the back and shoulders.
As with gymnastics, kids and teens who are muscular with small physiques are best suited for this activity, as they have the strength and agility necessary for the explosive movement of jumping and, of course, absorbing the impact upon landing. Adults without gymnastic, acrobatic, or other similar experience may find that they’re past their prime for four-legged jumping.
Still, though most people grow out of it by their late teens, plenty of folks carry on impersonating horses long after that, whether on four legs or two. Joanna Rohrback, inventor of Prancercise, was 60 when a video of her jigging around like a horse went viral. Even grown men have been known to take a stab at it.
Humans can jump pretty high on all fours
Vogel has jumped up to 3’10” on all fours, which is far higher than the heights she can achieve even when riding her own horse. “My trainer says it’s embarrassing,” she joked.
She says most human jumpers max out at 2’6” or 2’9”, “where there’s more stress on the joints and a force when landing.” While most horse-jumping Instagrammers and YouTubers tend to use improvisational materials to construct obstacles — pool noodles, laundry baskets, brooms, and the like — Vogel’s leveled up over the years.
She now constructs her obstacles using tripods and curtain rods from Walmart, mimicking the look of real horse jumps.
It’s a difficult skill to master and unsafe if done incorrectly
While two-legged jumping is challenging, those who choose to jump on all fours must fight the human form. Horses also have very specific gaits — walk, trot, canter, gallop — which have set foot patterns. If you’re trying to mimic a horse, you’ve got to get that down. Tutorials on YouTube can prove helpful for four-legged newbies.
“My biggest mistake, and the most common mistake I see is practicing and practicing and then twisting or pulling something,” Vogel said.
As with gymnasts who flip and load their weight onto their hands, wrist injuries are a risk. Safely jumping requires a combination of strength and flexibility. Vogel built up her athletic skills and learned the proper technique in the way that you’d progress with a young horse — first learning to walk, then how to trot, and perfecting her “flatwork” before eventually moving on to jumping.
To jump like a horse, it helps to train like a horse
Not only did Vogel model her learning process after horses, but she also designed her current training schedule after horses, working out most days in some fashion (usually running) but only jumping twice a week and making sure to give herself days off. “It takes a lot of stamina to do it, almost like a long run,” she said.
The only serious injury she’s gotten? A medial collateral ligament (MCL) tear from doing two-legged hurdling for track and field. “On all four legs, I’ve had minor soreness and sprains,” she explained.
Every jumper has their own style
For even the most skilled four-legged jumpers, the result can look a little more like a primate than an equine due, in part, to the fact that humans’ hips rise higher than a horse’s shoulders when we’re on all fours. Some people even call this four-legged movement “Smeagoling” after its resemblance to the ambling gait of Gollum in Lord of the Rings. Others call it quadrobics.
Just as there are many names for it, so too are there many different jumping styles. Vogel said that the “classic” form is almost ballet-like, with “pointed toes, perfectly straight legs, the body at a right angle, and hands all tucked up like a horse’s knees.”
She copied that look for a while, but has since developed her own, more “horse-like” form, tucking up her arms quickly like the front legs of a horse and then kicking out with her legs over the top of the obstacle.
Many jumpers ride horses, too
Though some may think these horse-like jumpers are living out unfulfilled horseback-riding fantasies, many of them do ride and own horses.
Credit: Ava Vogel
But, perhaps surprisingly to non-horse people, equines do not naturally jump in the wild. It’s a trained performance, but one that many horses grow to enjoy or even seem to love.
In a way, the same goes for humans mimicking the movement of a horse’s jump. It’s something learned and that, for some, becomes a unique talent and source of joy. Plus, Vogel said it has improved her horseback riding, not just because of the strength it requires, but because she better understands her horse’s movements.
Going public with this skill can be rough, but also worth it
After Kirstine, the Norwegian jumper, became an internet sensation for her viral horse jumping video, she allegedly deleted her Instagram account because she couldn’t handle the criticism.
This is unsurprising. The top response to the tweet that helped her go viral was someone who wrote “Whoever called this a ‘skill’ needs to be evaluated. Secondly, this isn't a skill it's a mental illness.” Another tweeter wrote, “No I'm sorry. Horses are elegant and beautiful, moving with grace and balance, this is none of those things and entirely abnormal.”
Credit: Ava Vogel
Vogel is used to hearing this kind of stuff from online trolls who say her hobby is weird. But the negative comments don’t affect her. Yes, she knows it’s unusual, but sharing her hobby with the world is part of the fun. As a member of an online community of horse-like jumpers, Vogel makes friends and regularly fields questions from people starting out.
She doesn’t know if she’ll jump like this forever — and, in fact, didn’t even think she’d be doing it for as long as she has. But whenever she’s ready to retire and return to a solely bipedal life, there’ll surely be a new round of horse-crazy girls ready to jump into the spotlight.
Lexi Pandell is a writer from Oakland, California. Read more about her at lexipandell.com and follow along with her updates (and photos of her fluffy dog) on Twitter @lpandell.
(This article was originally published on Nov. 22, 2019)
Similar stuff:
How to make money sexting.