Conditioning Your Horse

Training a horse and conditioning it should be regarded as separate activities. Training is teaching a horse how to do whatever sport event you, the rider, want to compete in. Conditioning is making sure you and your horse are fit enough to participate without incurring injury.

Conditioning is not the same thing as training. If you are trying to get a horse fit for an event, say a competitive trail ride or endurance race, only twenty percent of your time should be spent in actually training for the event itself. This is roughly a ratio of twenty minutes training for every one hundred minutes of activity.

I offer the following plan for getting you and your horse ready to compete in your chosen event. I use distance riding as the model, but the overall model is sound for conditioning for any physical activity.

A conditioning session for most equine activities should be divided into four minutes of walking for every minute of trotting, and four minutes of trotting for every minute of cantering. A workout of an hour would break down to approximately forty-eight minutes of walking, twelve minutes of trotting and three minutes of cantering. This will help a horse become fit and stay sound. Something I've noticed over the years is the more experienced the horseman the more time is spent walking.

You goal should be three sessions a week that are one-third the length of the activity. For example, if you are planning on entering a twenty-five mile trail ride, you should have a goal of reaching a work level of seven to eight miles three times a week. An LSD, or long slow work, of half the distance should be your goal for a couple of weeks before your event.

Notice I say these should be your goals. If you have a horse that has been lounging around the pasture or stall munching feed you should not begin at these levels. If the horse is stalled I recommend a twenty to thirty minute turn out before you being your training and conditioning sessions. Once the kinks are ran, trotted or bucked out then you can get on with the real workout.

It is a good idea to learn the average pulse and respiration rates for your horse. You do this by observing it when it is at complete rest and writing down the results. Create a spread sheet and add the information you obtain by taking the pulse and counting breaths after walking, trotting and cantering. You want to know what they are immediately after the activity, ten minutes later and how long it takes to get back down to resting rates. Keep in mind these will vary not only from breed to breed, an Arabian is going to have very different rates from a Quarter Horse for example, but from horse to horse. Good records will help you see how your training and conditioning is progressing. They will also alert you to changes that may indicate problems.

One error many people make on training for their first distance trail ride is to over condition. If you do this that ride is going to be a lot more exciting and difficult than you want it to be. Remember a horse, or human can do three times the distance it normally works (at a slower pace of course) without any serious repercussions.