Fitness programs

I had a couple of comments on my “horses are not sports equipment” post asking for a guide on how to get your horse fit and unfortunately I can’t give you one. Let me explain why.

There are far too many factors to consider to even give a vague fitness plan. Their cardiovascular fitness is the least complicated part of it. For each individual horse we need to consider their bodies and any pain/discomfort/limitations they are carrying around with them. We need to think of their emotional health and their capacity to cope with the training scenarios we want to put them in. We need to think about their current musculature, hoof health and posture and whether its appropriate to ride them in their current state at all.

Here are some things to think about.

Emotional fitness. If your horse isn’t in a place emotionally to cope with the training you want to do his body isn’t going to be able to develop properly. If your horse is spending most of his time during a training session feeling anxious or bracing against you, you are simply going to be strengthening those unhelpful postures. Leaving your horse feeling more tense and negative about training which turns into an endless loop of nothing good.

We really love to feel like we’re “doing” stuff. We love our pole work, hill work or lateral work. Surely just walking in hand isn’t enough? I think about it like this. If your horse isn’t able to maintain a relaxed, healthy posture without bracing and compensating on flat ground at a walk, he definitely isn’t going to be able to maintain it with added difficulty like hills or poles.

It simply takes the time it takes and for some horses who have been carrying around their compensatory movement patterns for years and years, we are talking months not days and weeks to unravel this.

Now only when we have developed appropriate musculature over the back do I even think about adding a rider. And when we do, I’m talking 10 minutes at a time every other day and build from there. Not a 45 minute hack.

We (hopefully) wouldn’t add weight to an exercise when we couldn’t keep proper form just with our own body weight, so we can’t expect horses to be able to carry a rider healthily if they aren’t able to move well without one yet.

Then when we are riding we have to move away from riding in ways which damage our horses. The constant elephant in the room is that it’s still the industry norm to ride horses over bent with constant pressure down the reins and this is damaging horses. If you continue to ride and train under people who tell you to do this your horse is not going to last.

The best advice I can give you is to learn how to read behaviour and get a basic understanding of what healthy musculature and posture looks like. Then you’ll be able to make more informed choices on who you take advice from and also recognise when an exercise is inappropriate for your horse in his current state.

If you just want a horse to do what you want then I guess you can follow a 12 week program of cardiovascular fitness and it will get your horse fitter for sure. But if you care about his body, his emotional state, his comfort, his longevity and your relationship together we’ve got to go way deeper.

Most of my work with clients is heavily focused on improving their horse’s emotional state through management, learning about behaviour, learning about their bodies and changing how we train. Time and time again when we improve the horse’s emotional state we start to watch their bodies slowly unravel from all of that brace and tension they’ve been carrying around for years. Only then can we build them up to something strong and healthy. 🐴