They are the same skill. Some riders say “see a stride”, others say “see a distance”, and both mean recognising, on the approach, where the horse is going to leave the ground, early enough to keep the canter rather than lunge at the last second. If you were worried you had been training the wrong thing, you have not.
Whichever you call it, Streyed trains it: a game in your browser that scores you on hundreds of real-looking approaches an hour, no horse required.
Try it freeHabit and geography, mostly. Neither phrase is more correct, and instructors on both sides of every ocean use both. What is interesting is what each one emphasises, because together they describe the skill better than either does alone.
“Seeing a distance” points at the gap: the ground between the horse and the fence, and whether the take-off spot the canter is producing will land in the right place. “Seeing a stride” points at the unit of measurement: horses do not cover that gap in feet, they cover it in strides, and the question your eye is really answering is whether the strides that remain divide into that ground cleanly.
Whichever phrase you use, the eye is judging a relationship between three things: the rhythm of the canter, the ground left to the fence, and the take-off spot that rhythm will produce if nothing changes. When they agree the fence arrives out of the stride; when they do not, the horse chips in deep or stands off long. The earlier you recognise which of those is coming, the smoother the jump, and the easier it is on the horse, who cannot even see the fence directly in the final moments and jumps on trust.
No. The exercises are identical: steady the rhythm first, look at the middle of the top pole and nothing else, count the strides down out loud, and see as many approaches with feedback as you can. The full method is in how to see a stride when jumping, and every word of it applies whichever name you grew up with.
The part no arena can give you is volume, and that trains anywhere you can watch approaches and be told whether you were right. Start with a free day of Streyed and put a number on your eye today.