Equestrians will spend a lot of money to help their horse feel good and move just right.
We call on our farriers, dentists and saddle fitters to ensure the horse is comfortable and balanced in his work. We get our horse’s backs checked at the first sign of trouble, and spend hours scrolling through polework exercises online in search of a magic spell for improving his topline.
But at the end of the day, a horse is only as good as its rider
If the rider in question is tilting, collapsing, slouching, or bouncing, that horse isn’t going to get any better!
As riding instructors, we think a LOT about rider fitness.
- Many of our students ride just one day a week, due to financial or time constraints. While some are fully aware and satisfied with their status as recreational rider, others want to jump/show/advance, expecting you to work a weekly miracle.
- No matter how careful we are, our students will eventually fall off. We know that unfit students are less likely to ride out a sticky situation, and more likely to get hurt when they fall. (Which also increases our liability.)
- Our school horses already work hard. Asking them to compensate for severely crooked, stiff or weak riders while also enduring typical beginner mistakes feels unfair.
We count ourselves lucky we we can work with students who cheerfully embrace the importance of fitness and practice several complimentary forms of exercise. Sadly, this tends to be the exception rather than the norm.
We riding instructors need to help our students understand that they are athletes — and help them form the habits of an athlete, one small step at a time.
Communication is key
If you want your students to take fitness seriously, you’ll need to emphasize its importance from the very first lesson. Conclude your first ride with a conversation about how becoming riding fit decreases risk, accelerates progress, and prevents the horse from suffering — and make sure parents hear it, too!
Discuss off-horse exercises your students can practice between lessons, and provide them with a log or habit tracker to record at-home activities.
Frequently share short exercise videos and routines on your social media pages and student newsletter. There are many excellent sources available online; for example, the YouTube channel for Horse Learner Fitness, which has almost 200 short, easy-to-follow workouts for equestrians.
Teach the five-minute rule
Most students genuinely want to become fit, harmonious riders, but they struggle with adding yet another routine to their overscheduled lives.
We see this frequently in teenagers, who are often overwhelmed by schoolwork or figuring out how to balance studying/jobs/social life.
Just like in horse training, the secret to success when training riders is to strive for "little and often"
We know our students probably won’t stick with an exercise routine that takes thirty minutes out of their day, but five minutes?
It’s hard to argue that you can’t find five minutes in a day to practice.
Five minutes may not seem like enough time to make a difference, but it’s enough time for a few hip opening stretches and a wall sit, or a stair stretch to help those heels sink down.
Every little bit of practice helps!
We encourage our students to start by choosing a workout song, and picking one exercise they can practice each day just for the duration of that song.
Get them started by sharing this fun little Reel from our HorseSense Learning Levels Instagram account – in which we demonstrate things you can do at home while improving your jumping position!
Make the most of mounted warm-ups
Walking a horse for a minimum of ten minutes is a hard and fast rule for the warm-up period of our lessons. Even if the horse has been warmed up already, we want a long, thorough warm up to become a habit for our students.
This time is a valuable opportunity to work on rider flexibility, so students begin the “real” work loose and balanced in the saddle. Students can drop their stirrups and practice gentle hip opening stretches, breathwork and mobility exercises.
Even just practicing an active, forward walk without stirrups makes a big difference in a rider’s seat — our students are always astonished by how much shorter their stirrups feel after a no-stirrup warm-up!
Our Blue Horsemanship Study Guide also has several pages of seat-building stretches that you can share with your students.
Build it up
Becoming riding fit is a long-term project. You can help your students gradually increase strength and stamina — as well as confidence — by implementing a Minute Per Month fitness program.
Students practice maintaining a two-point position for just one minute, and spend an additional minute riding without stirrups, for the first month of the program.
Beginners can practice entirely at the walk; intermediate students might include trot, transitions or brief intervals of two-point without stirrups, while advanced riders can ride a minute at each gait.
In the second month, start bumping up the time, so students finish the month able to maintain two-point or ride actively without stirrups for two full minutes.
In the third month, inch up to three minutes, and so on.
Within a few short months, your students will be strong, balanced, and physically fit for all kinds of adventures!
Of course, the rules of the fitness program are flexible. If a student misses two months due to injury, they won’t be required to ride four consecutive minutes of posting trot when they return! The time can always be broken up into intervals, or spent entirely in the walk.
However you structure it, the goal here is to encourage students to continue practicing their fitness progressively.
Hold a barn-wide fitness challenge
Most of us need a little accountability to turn our exercise goals into habits. You can provide this and strengthen your barn community at the same time by hosting a public fitness challenge.
Rather than having students compete against each other, we recommend creating fair, measurable assessments of each student’s fitness at the beginning and end of the challenge.
You might record the amount of time each student can hold a plank, or a wall sit, or a horseless two-point position, and award a prize to the student who demonstrates the most improvement or achieves a stated goal.
Teach simple yoga poses and ask students to take before and after photos so they can see progress in their flexibility. Or provide suggested exercise routines and publicly cheer on participants in your barn social media and newsletter.
Encourage students to work toward individualized goals emphasizing increased strength, stamina and flexibility — not bodyweight. Fit riders can come in all sizes and shapes!
Start a conditioning club
If you want the effects of your fitness challenge to last all through the year, consider starting a conditioning club.
Students can meet on a weekly, biweekly or monthly schedule for a group workout session, and compare notes on their horse’s fitness routine as well.
You can even make regular attendance mandatory for students who aspire to Teal Level riding or want to join your show team.
The hardest part of any fitness program is getting started
By emphasizing the importance of flexibility and tone in every lesson — and turning dreaded exercises into fun challenges with plenty of camaraderie — you can help your students become more harmonious, balanced riders. You may even inspire them to create positive new habits that improve their lives away from the barn.
And if your students don’t thank you, your school horses definitely will!
If your students own or lease, they NEED our Equine Fitness Planner to create conditioning plans… and to track how many of those workouts actually happen.
