Creating an Equine Fitness Program

It’s spring and that means more time spent riding. Is your horse ready? Regardless of whether you want to trail ride, compete at a certain level, jump, do endurance or dressage, your horse needs to be fit for the job.

“Many riders are battling training problems which often stem from some sort of weakness in the body,” says Jec Aristotle Ballou, a trainer based in California, USA who has written four books on fitness and conditioning horses. “I think most horses have a revved up cardiovascular engine on a pretty weak chassis.”

It’s not just training that suffers when horses have poor fitness; injuries are more prevalent, too.

“Ninety percent of injuries are repetitive strain injuries,” says Dr. Bri Henderson, a veterinarian who works with Canada’s endurance riders and operates Rivendell Equine Veterinary Services in Grand Valley, Ontario. “Riders must cross-train on different surfaces so that the horse becomes stronger, plus the body is loaded differently to prevent damage from repetition.” 

Injury prevention is key and that’s where a fitness plan comes in.

What is Fitness?

“Fitness is being able to achieve your goals with your horse happy and uninjured,” says Kim Woolley, who represented Canada in endurance at the 2018 World Equestrian Games and is Canada’s first High Performance 1 Coach for endurance. “If a horse isn’t happy because they don’t feel fit enough to do what you ask, then they’re not going to want to do the job

Cross-training incorporates different components of fitness such as postural control, strength, and aerobic and anaerobic endurance. Each of these components produce significant changes in the horse’s body that, as a whole, create the fitness needed to achieve the rider’s goals. 

“I break fitness into three categories,” says Ballou. “There’s cardiovascular fitness — the heart and lungs — which includes aerobic and anaerobic fitness. Then there’s musculoskeletal fitness. I think that’s where the majority of horses need more work. Then there’s a third category, which applies to horses who are rehabilitating after an injury or who have been out of work for six months or more. That’s neurosensory fitness, which means recruiting the motor and sensory nerves for muscle activation.”

Neurosensory Fitness

The postural muscles — slow moving, slow-twitch muscle fibre activities — are one of the keys to neurosensory fitness. 

Research by biomechanics expert Dr. Hilary Clayton found that dynamic back exercises, such as carrot stretches, improved the size and strength of horses’ epaxial muscles. They’re the muscles along the horse’s back which we often refer to as the “topline.” 

The American College of Sports Medicine and Injury Rehabilitation notes that doing three to five repetitions of dynamic back stretches daily for 12 weeks was found to increase a horse’s multifidus muscle, reduce asymmetry from left to right, reduce back pain, and improve core strength. Atrophy of the multifidus muscle creates instability within the intervertebral joints (between the vertebrae), creating pain and osteoarthritis. This is often observed as tension or spasm of the longissimus dorsi muscle.

It may not seem like you’re doing much, but exercising the postural muscles of the horse is incredibly valuable.

Other exercises that increase neurosensory fitness include encouraging proprioception by walking the horse over different surfaces in short distances. For example, walking on a grass verge then across a gravel driveway, down a paved alley and into a sand arena. That will build proprioception — the horse’s ability to sense and control its body movements — which in turn increases stability and fine motor skills.

Building Musculoskeletal Strength 

Musculoskeletal strength involves the muscles and skeleton. This type of strength training is akin to humans going to the gym and lifting weights. It increases muscle mass, and strengthens muscles, tendons, ligaments, and bones — all of which reduces the potential for injury.

“Greater strength increases oxygen uptake at the cellular level and increases blood flowing to the muscles by 40 times, from rest to maximum exertion,” says Henderson. “It also increases the horse’s ability to use fat as fuel, so it can perform longer before getting tired.”

Bones and ligaments take much longer to develop fitness as horses aren’t designed to travel faster than a walk for miles and miles, or to jump lots of jumps. Hence, it’s imperative when creating a fitness program that activities take into account these slower-developing tissues.

“Bone responds best to short bursts of high-impact loading, three times per week,” says Henderson. “So, if you’re road riding, you should ride mostly at the walk with a maximum of five to ten minutes of trot to achieve the maximum bone response without damaging cartilage and soft tissue.”

Exercises that build musculoskeletal strength include basic dressage and lateral movements (leg yield, shoulder-in), transitions, lengthening and shortening gaits, hills, trotting poles, and grids.

Henderson says dressage and endurance horses should focus on low intensity with a high number of repetitions, while jumping and Western performance horses should focus on a low number of repetitions with high intensity.

Aerobic Training

“Low intensity long slow distance work is aerobic — which means it uses oxygen — and is powered by fat and sugar stores,” says Henderson. 

“Aerobic fitness develops the fastest in horses because they’re prey animals, built to run really quickly for short periods of time,” says Woolley.

Henderson says cardiovascular training improves how fast tissues can use oxygen during exercise (also known as VO2 max) and the amount of air moved in and out of the lungs. Horses typically inhale 50 to 60 litres of air per minute at rest and up to 1,800 litres per minute at a gallop. Cardiovascular fitness increases heart mass, allows the horse to work at a higher level with a lower heart rate, increases plasma/blood volume, increases total red blood cells, and improves the amount of blood vessels in tissues.

“It takes three weeks of low intensity training to establish an aerobic base,” says Henderson. “Then long slow distance and moderate intensity training will start producing cellular changes in the muscles in weeks four through six. In weeks six through twelve, the types of muscle fibres start changing and adapting, to better perform the job required.”

Exercises that increase aerobic capacity include interval training, hill work at walk and trot, and anaerobic bursts of speed (see below). Intervals that incorporate up to two minutes of canter followed by two minutes of walk at 130 to 160 beats per minute (bpm) are a good start. The recovery heart rate should be below 100 bpm. Those intervals can then be increased by one minute to 3:3 and 4:4, depending on fitness requirements