Spring Conditioning Your Horse
When spring finally arrives the sunny riding season ahead can greet riders with both excitement and anxiety. Where do I start you might wonder as you calculate how unfit your horse has become from a winter of being off work. How long will it take to ease him back to fitness? What sorts of exercises and timelines should I use? In this article Ill answer these questions plus offer a simple schedule in addition to some rules you never want to break.
As a starting point lets consider when a horse loses the fitness he might have acquired the previous season. Any time a horses exercise routine drops below three 45minute work sessions per week for a period longer than four weeks we consider him to have lost a majority of fitness. If he reaches 12 weeks working less than three times per week his fitness has zeroed out including any baseline or foundation. For our purposes in this article we will assume most readers are starting from this point.
Keep in mind that you do not need to work your horse at a gasping rate of effort in order to achieve gains. In fact this would be counterproductive. Muscle enzymes capillaries and plasma volumes are not yet properly developed in order to benefit from these kinds of workloads. Instead you would raise stress hormones and fail to improve how the body utilizes oxygen which should be the focus. If you monitor your horses heart rate it should hover between 120 and 140 beats per minute for the middle portion of your ride between the warmup and cooldown.
