Webinar – Rider Fitness, Not a sitting down sport – Emma Davies

Rider Fitness – Why It Matters and How to Improve It

Emma Davies, Senior Lecturer and Equestrian Sports Science Researcher, tackles the big question: is riding really enough? Drawing on the latest research and her extensive work with equestrian athletes, Emma breaks down what rider fitness really means, why it’s often overlooked, and how it directly impacts both rider performance and horse welfare.

From injury risks and muscle imbalances to the surprising cognitive load of hacking, this session offers a deep dive into why equestrians of all levels should prioritise their own physical conditioning. With relatable examples and evidence-based recommendations, Emma outlines six key reasons to work on your fitness and shares practical, accessible exercises to get you started.

What you’ll learn:

• Why riding alone often doesn’t build enough fitness
• How poor rider fitness affects your horse’s movement and well-being
• The most common physical issues seen in riders – and what to do about them
• Core exercises every equestrian should include in their routine
• Tips for overcoming time, motivation, and cost barriers

Perfect for anyone who wants to ride better, feel stronger, and support their horse more effectively.

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Transcription
Here is a transcription of the webinar. (Please note this is an automated transcription, so we apologise for any errors.)

Hi everyone, welcome to my webinar on Rider Fitness. So my name is Emma Davies. I am a senior lecturer and a researcher and I predominantly teach Equestria in Sports Science and everything to do with rider performance. The Animal Web team have asked me to record this webinar all about everything to do with rider fitness. So before we begin, I would just like to clarify I am an academic.

I specialise in rider performance, but I’m not a qualified fitness trainer. I’m not a physio. I’m not a medical professional. So the information that I’m sharing today is really intended to be for educational purposes and general guidance. But if you’re considering making any changes to your fitness routine, particularly if you have any health concerns, injuries or pre-existing conditions, then I would strongly encourage you to seek medical advice.

and consult with qualified fitness or healthcare professionals so that you can get appropriate personalised support. So I really wanted to start today by showing you this fantastic campaign image, the Not a Sitting Down Sport. And this came from early 2010s. This was a campaign by This Girl Can and a company called Hoof. And I really think this is a great slogan for our sport. We are a sitting down sport.

but it’s not as easy as that and we certainly make it look easier than it is. And I think for me this really highlights the importance of looking at the rider as an athlete. So when we talk about equestrian sport, we say that the aim is to showcase this harmonious partnership between horse and rider, to showcase the excellence of training. And when we think about the rider,

The rider is communicating with the horse through these non-verbal cues, through our seat, our hands, our legs. And the idea behind that communication is that we’re supposed to appear effortless. Our actions should be really subtle. We should look like we’re not really interfering. But that takes a lot of work. And if we think about equestrianism, we’re still one of the only sports where some of our even top level athletes are

telling us they don’t really do any additional training. If we go into other sports, we certainly would see that absolutely not being the case. Now, whilst the general perception of rider fitness is certainly improving in the industry, there’s still more we can learn. I think there’s more we can do to improve our performance, to improve our fitness levels, and actually make our own lives and the horse’s lives a little bit easier. And hopefully that’s what I’m going to show you a little bit about today. So based on that prior quote,

thought it would be really useful for us to start by looking at the research around what it means to be a rider. Is it physically difficult for us to ride? Well, I think we’d probably all agree the answer is yes. You know, if you’ve got off your horse, you haven’t ridden in a couple of weeks, there’s that burn feeling, isn’t there? The legs ache, the back aches, you can certainly feel it for the next couple of days. It takes more physical exertion than it looks. But when we actually look at the research, in 2011, the BHS

did some research that identified that horse riding, along with some other associated activities like mucking out and sweeping, can actually be classified as a moderate intensity exercise. What this means is that you’re doing a physical activity that is likely to raise your heart rate and your breathing, probably makes you feel a bit warm and slightly sweaty. In scientific terms, we are working aerobically, so with oxygen, and probably looking at heart rate ranges of about

50 to 70 % of our maximal heart rate. Now in humans, your maximal heart rate can be estimated or worked out from a simple calculation, 220 minus your age. I’m not gonna tell you mine, because I’m not gonna tell you my age, but you can work out yours for yourself. Now, interestingly, the fact that we classified as a moderate intensity exercise is really good news when it comes to NHS guidelines for physical activity.

The NHS have identified that for an adult, a normal healthy adult, so 18 plus, we should be doing a minimum of about 150 minutes, so that’s roughly two and a half hours of moderate intensity activity per week. Now, any of you that own your own horse, that have horse care responsibilities or potentially work in the industry will know that two and a half hours a week is definitely…

way under the expectations of what you’re currently doing. So you are meeting the national minimum guidelines for physical activity, which is great news. So why do we need to do any more? Well, riding has been shown in research to be aerobically demanding. And that means that when we ride, we see increases in heart rate and oxygen uptake. And these go up linearly when we increase the speed. So canter and gallop are harder work for the rider than walk and trot.

Similarly, whenever we add in jumping, we make that harder again. In research, we’ve seen heart rates for riders reported anywhere from 50 % heart rate max all the way through to 90%, which would be classified as high intensity exercise. And this is usually coordinated with gallop, racing disciplines, cross country and show jumping. But we don’t just have the heart rate bit for us.

We ride different horses and I don’t know about you, but for myself, I can get on one horse and be like, oh, this is nice. And you get on another horse and it’s hard work to get that horse to engage, to get that horse to be trainable or focus in what it’s doing that day. It becomes hard. And this isn’t just in our heads. Clayton and some colleagues in 2023 actually identified that certain types of horses require riders to exert more energy.

to maintain their position and control, particularly the speed of the horse compared to others. So high energy horses are actually harder for us to ride than more docile horses. Saying that, I’m not sure they rode a cob that didn’t want to move though. So I have ridden many cobs in my life. Sometimes getting those horses that really don’t want to work, that also takes a little bit harder work. So too fast or too slow might be harder than that middle horse that’s happy at a steady space.

We’ve also got this element of muscle activity. We don’t do anything. We sit there, right? We all know that’s not true. So when we’re talking about muscle recruitment, we’re talking about a type of muscle recruitment called isometric muscle activity. This means that we are engaging our muscles. We are contracting the muscle, but the muscle isn’t changing length. So there’s no movement around particular joints. This is about stabilization. It’s about maintaining a posture and position rather than

generating substantial movement. Now we do have some levels of movement. We might think about rising trot, we might think about the leg aids or going into a light seat position, but these are less. The overall approach is to maintain that balance and stability. Now this is really important because isometric muscle activity looks easy because it looks like you’re not moving, but actually it does generate quite high heart rates and it does require both muscle strength

and muscle endurance to be able to maintain that position for longer periods of time. The next one will probably come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever been anywhere near a horse. We have high rates of injury and unfortunately fairly high rates of reported pain. So research suggests that riders are at risk of both acute injuries. So that might be a break or a fracture from a fall or being kicked.

but we’re also at risk of chronic injuries. And this is things like overuse injuries, sprains and strains, general ache and pain. Now, when it comes to the research, there’s a really amazing piece of research by Kraft, and these guys identified that 88 % of dressage riders in their study had lower back pain. And some of the work by my colleague, Vicki Lewis, over the last couple of years have identified that all

riders across stress-loss, show-jumping and eventing disciplines reported having pain or taking ibuprofen or paracetamol at some stage to be able to manage their rates of pain. And it might be no surprise to you. Now, the last reason why I think riders need to be fit, why we are physically active is actually slightly different. So perhaps a little bit more forgotten about, riding isn’t just a hard task physically.

It actually comes with quite a high cognitive demand as well. So if you think about riding, if you think about going for a hack, something that’s fairly low level intensity potentially, we’re toodling along in the forest on a lovely day like today. We are constantly making decisions for ourselves and our horses. Am I at the right speed? Am I the right distance from the horse in front of me? What’s the ground condition like? Where am I steering?

I might be watching for other people on that walk or on that ride. I might be looking out for cyclists or the deer that pops out and scares your pony. All of those things are constant decisions that we are making. Am I too fast? Am I too slow? Should I catch up? Should I slow down? Should I correct my horse’s head position? Should I move myself so I’m a little bit more balanced in the saddle? And in addition to that, we also then have a whole bunch of data

that we’re getting from our horses that is telling us about how they’re coping with this exercise. We might be looking for their ear prick. We might be looking for the head and neck position. We might be looking at whether or not their nostrils are flared, all of which, you know, head up, nostrils, fairs, ears pricked. There is something in the distance I should be aware of because as a rider, if I’m not, the chances are that in a minute my horse might spook or it might stop, or we might be going high, you know.

high dash to the right. All of these things, all of these bits of information we’re constantly aware of, we’re constantly having to do something about, because if we don’t, we might miss out on that key bit of information and we might end up with one of those accidental emergency dismounts that we really don’t want to be happening. So this all requires effort, requires cognitive effort, and cognitive effort and physical effort are actually interlinked.

So we have to be really aware not just of the physical demands but also of the mental demands in the sport.

So riding is harder than we make it look. I think we can all agree on that. So surely based on what we’ve just said about moderate intensity exercise, riding alone should be enough, right? It should be fine. Well, there’s a little bit of research out there that would suggest it’s not. So mayors in 2006 identified that a 14 week equitation program wasn’t enough to improve baseline fitness compared to a non-riding group.

Now this was done in college level riders and it was only equitation so they were only riding once or twice a week but this would suggest that riding alone is not enough. Now lots of people will say to me at this point it’s fine I ride six horses a day I am definitely riding fit but is riding fit the same as actual fit? Well research would suggest no.

So when we compare riders to non-athletic counterparts, these are individuals of similar ages and genders who do not do physical activity, who are not playing sport, these are non-athletic, they’re everyday people. It would suggest that riders aren’t doing so well. Riders likely to have lower muscle strength, lower muscle endurance, lower functional movement screen scores. Now functional movement screening is a set of tests of screening exercises

that look at your mobility and that look at your risk of injury. And a lower score means you are more at risk of injury. So not so good for us. We also tend to have lower aerobic capacities. Not looking so hot. But when we do see some of the positives, we do have better grip strength than non-athletic counterparts. So our rain tension and our hand control really contribute to that. And we do have better quad and hamstring strength. So yes, your legs are doing better. Now,

Based on this, it would suggest that even riding alone, we probably need to look at addressing some aspects of off-horse training that might not be supported by just riding. Now, there’s a lovely study that was out there in 2018. So this is a piece of research by Byron Chadwick. And Byron Chadwick went out and asked nearly 300 riders from dressage, showjumping, and eventing whether they think fitness is important.

And I love this statistic because 98 % said they believe that fitness impacts performance. Rider fitness impacts equestrian performance. That’s great news. That means everybody is on board with getting fit. Everybody in the industry that these guys spoke to was on board with doing fitness, right? Wrong. Unfortunately, when you go a little bit deeper in this piece of research, they identified that the riders suggested only 57 % of them

basically said they would consider themselves fit. So despite knowing that it’s important, they weren’t really that fit and actually only 64 % did any training. So we’ve got this gap, we’ve got this little bubble of people who know that training is important, who know that fitness is important, but aren’t doing it. So what we’re gonna focus on today is maybe why they should be and some of the things that you might wanna do to help improve

or develop your fitness if you’re starting out or if you’re wanting to kind of modify anything you’re doing at the moment. So there are six broad reasons why I would encourage riders to consider off-horse training in their programs. These align to pretty much everybody. So whether or not you ride once a week or even once a month, or whether you ride six horses a day and you’re competing internationally, I think these six reasons apply to all of us.

The first one is about coping with demands. Can you cope with all of those physical aspects that we discussed a few slides ago? If you’re riding around badminton, can you cope with the 11, was it 11 and a half minutes this year? 11 and a half minutes at a fast pace with heart rates for the rider of likely 180 beats per minute in that light seat position, maintaining your balance, supporting your horse and dealing with those extra large cross country fences.

those crazy drops that we see and some of the real complicated techniques that we see in that jumping phase. If you’re competing at a local event, perhaps it’s B80 or 90, can you ride for that speed, at that position, at that distance, for that length of time without feeling tired? If you reach the end of the cross country course or the end of your show jumping around or even just the end of your hack and you get off and you are leaning over and you’re going…

then perhaps your fitness needs some work. And you’d be surprised how many riders I see mostly at the end of cross-country courses that look a little bit like they could do with a slight fitness boost just to help them so you don’t feel quite so tired at the end. The other aspect is about offsetting injury. So if we can improve overall rider performance, overall rider fitness, we could actually reduce the risk of injury for riders. And we could do that in several potential ways.

So for example, if you’re fitter, you’re more likely to be more balanced, you’re more likely to be more stable. Therefore actually, in situations where your horse may be planning for a dismount that you hadn’t thought about yet, you may be able to stay mounted for slightly longer or stay mounted in those situations where perhaps a slightly less fit rider might topple off the side door. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not gonna save you in every circumstance. If you are falling, and I don’t know about you,

I tend to fall on the worst possible place on my body, my head. I always seem to fall head first. I have no proprioceptive control when it comes to falling. But the stronger we are and the fitter we are, the better we are able to control our body. So if we’re falling, we might be able to work on developing that beautiful tuck and roll that everybody tells us we should be doing when we first for the ground. And then finally thinking about that chronic pain. Again, if we’re using our body better,

and we’re stabilizing better and we’re using our muscles better, that’s going to help reduce that influence of chronic pain and injury.

third one is about skills. We communicate with our horse through our body, through our seat, our hands and our legs, which means that better muscle function, better strength, better endurance is going to ultimately improve motor control, fine motor movement. It’s going to allow us to maintain that more upright trunk angle. So that upright position, it’s going to help us develop our posture, our independent seat. All of these things are going to improve how we communicate with the horses.

One of the things I think that’s also in a part of this is we also see improved reaction time in fitter individuals. And this is both a coordination element, but it also helps with the injury side. If we have improved reaction time, we can respond faster to the situations where our horse does get scared by a flower pot, for example, in the middle of our dressage test at the Olympics. ⁓

That was a 2016 reference for those of you that aren’t familiar, Team GB had a slight flower pot spook in one of the dressage tests at the 2016 Olympic Games. So when it comes to decision-making and cognitive effort, riding takes a lot of cognitive effort. Now what happens is when we have a lot of brain ache, when we have loads of things in our mind, we feel physically more tired. Think about like the most stressful day you’ve had, your brain is on overload,

You have so many things to remember. You’re, I don’t know, revising for an exam or work is really stressful. You’re trying to remember a dress slash test. You feel more tired. You’re not, you haven’t done anything different, but you feel physically more tired. And as a result, because we feel tired, we’re more likely to drop out of activities earlier. We’re less likely to go to the gym. We are more likely to go slower on a hack. We might reduce our horse’s training because we feel tired.

Or in a more scary situation, if we’re in the last half of the cross country course, we might slow down without realising it because we feel tired. And that might cause problems either with performance or potentially more from an injury risk perspective for the horse. Now, if we are physically fitter, we can help counterbalance that feeling because actually we won’t feel as tired because we know we’re physically able to keep up with the competition. Now, in addition,

cognitive fatigue, brain tired, mental fatigue, that actually affects a particular part of the brain. It’s called the anterior singular cortex or the ACC. Now this part of the brain is responsible for decision making, mood control and emotional regulation. Now if you think about when you feel tired, when you feel stressed, you are more likely to get irritable. You are likely to get emotional. You probably make bad decisions. And all three of those things, when you are on top of a horse,

is not the best situation because if you’re getting emotional, you are not gonna make good judgments. You are not gonna react well to situations. If you’re making bad decisions, you are putting yourself and your horse at risk. If you are moody and stressed, chances are your horse has probably figured that out. And if it’s a lovely horse, might be nice to you, but let’s be honest, probably not. So all of these situations create for bad riding. Why is that important when it comes to physical fitness? Well,

If we’re more physically fit, we can counteract some of the effects of mental fatigue.

Career Longevity. Now, I’ll tell you a slight story. When I was a kid, my mum and my granddad were both obsessed with John Wayne films. Now, if you’re too young to know who John Wayne is, he was a cowboy. These were old cowboy and western films. Don’t even ask me from when, 50s, 60s, maybe 70s. These films are really old, okay? Sorry if these are your era films, but they are older, shall we say.

If you’ve ever seen an old cowboy in Western film, you’ll often see these cowboys walking to and from places, to and from getting off their horses. And the way they walk, it’s ⁓ a look, it’s a vibe, because what we’re seeing is we’re seeing this position of their legs, rather than this position of their legs. So they’re basically bow-legged. It’s a really interesting walking look. And a lot of that is to come for us. If we don’t treat our body properly, we won’t last for the length of time.

time of our career. Now, whether you say career as in you’re a competitive rider or whether you’re talking about career as in you just want to ride horses for the rest of your life as a hobby, we span three to 93 years old. It’s a massive sport. We’re a huge age range. And if you want to keep doing what you love, think about your body as a tool. If you don’t treat it right, if you don’t look after it, it will break. And we see the same thing in every other walk of life. Don’t treat the tool right. It won’t last.

And we’re the same. And unfortunately in my day-to-day job, in some of the work that I do with Pony Club, I see too many 16 to 25 year old riders who have limited mobility, are not very efficient or effective in their movement patterns, are in pain or discomfort and are really asymmetrical. And I’m concerned for them, not just now, but potentially what they’re going to look like in 20, 30 or 40 years. And that doesn’t just come

Impact on riding, that’s an impact on your everyday life as well. So think about looking after your body so that it lasts for as long as you need it. Now the last one for me is the most important. If we expect horses to be fit and capable for the tasks that we’re asking them to do, we owe it to them to be equally as prepared, both physically and mentally. Our horses quite literally carry our weight. They carry our movement on their backs.

So if we are asymmetrical, that may cause muscle pain or different strains to the horse’s back. If we’re struggling to maintain balance and we are relying on ⁓ leaning on the reins, on holding too tight to the reins or gripping with our knees to maintain balance, that’s gonna put pressure on the horse’s mouth, on the horse’s neck. That’s gonna put pressure on the horse’s shoulders from a balance and gripping at the knee perspective.

all of which is going to affect the way the horse moves. The horse is going to have to compensate for us, which means that not only are we asking them to do the exercise that we’re doing, we’re also asking them to carry a load that can’t carry itself. Imagine carrying a squirming toddler. I can’t say this is something I do in my day-to-day life. I don’t have any children, but those of you that do, have younger brothers and sisters, don’t go around just randomly picking up a kid right now, by the way, guys, that would be slightly strange, but

My goddaughter for example, if I pick her up and she’s got nice hold of herself and she moves with me, she’s easy to carry. If she’s kicking and screaming and squirming or trying to lean back and wobbling all over the place, it’s a nightmare and mums and dads, you will 100 % know what I’m talking about. Grandparents, anyone with children in their lives. Think about us as the same type of thing. If we are moving with the horse, we are far less of a burden, we are far less of an impact than if we’re not.

And for me, this is probably the most important reason why I think riders should train off horse, to help the horse. So if fitness can potentially improve all these aspects, do we actually have any evidence that it works? Well, yes. So research in equestrian populations would actually suggest that we do see improvements from fitness programs. The two papers that are on the board, Hampson and Randall and Lee,

Both did 8 week fitness programs with pre and post testing. They found improved muscle strength and muscle endurance pre and post intervention. They found improvements in symmetry, but also reductions in left and right pressure differences on either side of the saddle. So effectively the saddle symmetry of the rider is becoming more symmetrical rather than maybe a wonky seat or leaning down one side of your seat bone. However,

These are only two quite small studies. They are typically done in females with smaller sample sizes and the interventions are only eight weeks with certain types of exercises. So we need to do a lot more work in this area to be able to develop what we know, but the information that we have to start with is quite helpful. Now do remember that in addition to equestrian sport, we do have a whole bunch of other sports and physical activities that would suggest that fitness can improve

performance, reduce injury and improve coordination. Now you might say, yeah, okay, but equestrianism is really different. It’s a very unique sport and I don’t disagree, but there are some sports that are quite like us. So for example, we would classify them as travel sports. Travel sports, including equestrianism is where the athlete, in our case, the rider, is trying to maintain their balance and stability and keep a still posture against a moving object.

Cycling, snowboarding, skiing, surfing, sailing, motorbikes, all of these are travel sports. The only difference is that our moving object happens to be alive and kicking, sometimes literally. So in this case, we can look at the demands. They have similar heart rates, they use similar muscles, they have similar postures. And actually we can identify that if fitness programs are beneficial to them, they’re probably gonna be beneficial to us as well.

So whilst I do think we massively need more research in this area, and I’m aware of some amazing researchers who are doing work in this field at the moment, and hopefully we’ll see that coming out soon, we can use other sports to help us too. And there should be enough evidence out there, there is enough evidence out there, that training riders could be beneficial to both us and the horse.

So if we know that fitness is important and we know that riding is hard work, let’s think about the practicalities of how we actually do this. So there are lot of components of fitness that we can train for. Okay, loads of different components of fitness. And several of these, research suggests, would be more valuable to riders than others. So for example, strength and endurance, balance, reaction time, these are things based on what we know about riding, both anecdotally from riders and coaches,

that are safe from research would be useful to us. And there’s others that perhaps are less useful, especially to mainstream riders. Things like maximal strength, speed, explosive power. These are things that most riders won’t necessarily use. Saying that, if you are in mounted games or you’re a Volta, the chances are that those elements would become more important based on the demands of your sport. Now, when I see a lot of riders,

The main areas that generally need improvement for a lot of people, especially if you don’t do any off-horse exercise at the moment, are these. Aerobic fitness, your general level of cardiovascular fitness, your aerobic capacity. Now, when I talk about improving aerobic fitness, I don’t mean you have to go for a run. Walking is fine. Taking the stairs, doing things that you love like dance or swimming or classes.

We can even develop aerobic fitness using some of the exercises I’m going to talk about in a moment. Doesn’t mean you have to go for a run. I am not a runner. Pre-COVID, I actually did manage to get myself into running. I ran in one year. This was quite a big deal. I went from not running at all to running a 10K and two 5Ks. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t win any medals. I wasn’t fantastic, but I did do them and I did run. And then COVID hit.

And I told myself that I’d give myself a three week break from running. Can’t say I’ve run since, but you don’t have to run to improve your fitness. That is not a requirement. If you hate running, don’t run. The second one is muscle endurance. And the third is muscular strength. So strength, endurance, and general aerobic fitness. Now, if you train quite a lot, if you are someone who does do off-course training, maybe you do go running, maybe you do go to the gym.

You may also want to develop more specific elements like grip strength, for example, or reaction time. And these can be done through specialized training. But to start off with, I would say that everyone would benefit from overall improvements in these three things. Now you might wonder here why I don’t have balance on the list because ultimately balance is probably the most important thing for riders. But when it comes to balance itself, balance as a skill is largely associated with

good muscle control, good postural control, muscle strength, muscle endurance and coordination. And a lot of that can come from developing these areas. So some of the exercises I’m gonna show you do have elements of balance and can be adapted for balance, but for most riders, overall improvements in muscle function would actually massively help their balance anyway. The other aspect that we can think about when we think about rider fitness is targeting particular areas that riders have

problems with. So what areas hurt? What doesn’t move right? What’s difficult? And chances are in your head you’re saying, well, everything. Yeah, ankles, knees, hips, backs, go up the list and pick a point because riders have experienced almost all of these areas being problematic. However, there are a couple that I tend to find drop up time and time again in the people that I see. Shoulder and neck pain.

Particularly here, so the tops of your shoulders, move my hair out the way, the tops of your shoulders and into your neck, we tend to see a lot of pain associated in this region. We also see riders with forward and rounded shoulders. So actually that shoulder back position that your coach keeps mentioning to you becomes really difficult because your shoulder might be rounded forward in this kind of ⁓ slightly round position here. We also see in addition to that,

problems around the upper back and the scapula. So pain associated with your trapezius muscle, it’s the big triangle diamond shaped muscle on the back of your back, on the back of your back, on your back. And pain in that region, maybe tightness in that region, difficulty moving that upper back, it becomes really blocked and really stick. All right. And those are areas that I tend to see really commonly in riders. Lower back pain. Almost every rider that I speak to has

had or has some level of back pain. Might be upper back, might be lower back, but these are areas that you shouldn’t be 25 years old telling me you have lower back pain. That’s not normal. That’s not okay. We can definitely look at those. Other areas tend to be things like hamstring tightness or maybe weakness associated with the glutes. So difficulty around what we call the posterior chain. The posterior chain is the back muscles. The muscles that run down the back of the body.

So we are looking, if you look at the person on the side, for example, let me see if I’ve got a little laser pointer. Here is my person here. The posterior chain is these muscles that run down the back. ⁓ Solus and gastrocs, your calves, your hamstrings, your glutes, the muscles that run across your back, longissimus dorsi, latissimus dorsi, example, traps, all of these muscles. And the reasons is that we typically

In life, not just in riding, spend a lot of time working on our anterior. We spend a lot of time in a forward facing position. We have our phones here. We’re lent forward. We’re mucking out. We’re lifting things, all of which is working on that anterior focus. Remember how we said riders typically have good quads? They do. They don’t always have good hamstrings. Now, in addition, we’ve also got things like knee pain.

Almost all riders I speak to are like, my knees hurt. I lengthen or shorten my stirrups because my knees hurt or my ankles hurt. One of the areas for me that I’ve become a touch bit obsessed with, shall I say, is ankles. At the moment, I keep really noticing rider ankles and a lot of ankle instability, weakness associated with the ankles. And one of the things that I’ve been noting at the moment, very anecdotally, hoping to do some research on that next year with a student, is that

ankle movement and ankle stability and ankle control seems to be linked to ankle movement and stability and control in the stirrup as well. So this link between actually can we assess somebody stood up and sat down and have a look at them and then think about how that might transfer to their position and posture in the stirrup. I see lots of riders at the moment with really locked down stirrups. So this idea of heels down, toes up is going from here

to kind of here, really, really ramming that heel down to secure the lower leg, probably because that lower leg isn’t stable enough to hold itself in that position. And that’s just some of the things that I see. Go and ask your coach what they see, because I bet they’ll see some of these things too. So we’re gonna have a lot better look at some of these, but firstly, we need to think about how we might put this together. So wanted to start off with the basics. Apologies if I’m teaching you to suck eggs at this point.

but two key terms that I’m gonna use now are rep and set. So when I say rep or repetition, what I mean is one complete motion of an exercise. So for example, for a squat, that would be working from an upright position down into the squat position and back up to straight, back up to standing. That is one rep. When we talk about set, a set is classified as X number of reps before a rest period.

So if I do 10 repetitions of a squat before I take a rest, my set is 10 reps. ⁓ And I might do three sets, for example, across my training. So three times 10 repetitions of that particular movement with rest breaks in between. Now, just to give you an idea, there are some general guidelines and these are very much rule of thumb, guidelines, not rules.

but to give you an idea about how to implement things into your program. So when it comes to cardiovascular training, we could think about cardio or interval training. And there’s some recommendations for things like timings and rest breaks there as well. When it comes to muscle endurance, we are talking about exercises that are very often body weight or very light resistance based. And we’ll talk about some examples in a moment.

With muscle endurance, we typically tend to do higher repetitions, so 10 to 15 reps, but we have lower rest breaks. so high repetitions, low loading, we don’t have load, it’s just body weight or a light resistance, but we have lower rest breaks because we’re trying to build up that endurance focus. When it comes to strength exercises, we’re typically talking about heavier resistance. So usually weighted,

or adding resistance bands with slightly stronger methods at this point. We normally lower the repetitions. We might have a slightly higher number of sets, lower repetitions, but an increased amount of rest. So where you have high load, AKA weight, you would lower the number of repetitions. Where you have high repetitions, you have a lower loading. Okay, and that’s how we differentiate between strength and endurance based exercises.

might be the exact same exercise, it’s just done in a slightly different way. Okay, now a couple of examples to support here. ⁓ My top tips are all riders, especially if you don’t do any exercise would benefit from postural endurance. And especially if you’re starting out training, so this is the first bit, this is your first go, then I would start looking at adding two to three sessions a week.

of postural endurance exercises first. So this is focusing on body weight or light weight resistance exercises with minimal rest between sets and a slightly higher repetition. So 10 to 15 reps. And this is because all riders need that postural and stability. They need that muscle endurance to maintain their position to hold that isometric muscle contraction. So it’s a really foundational part of what we do.

I would then suggest that riders start to layer in strength work. So this might be adding in additional training sessions on strength or parts of your training session into strength work. So, I don’t know, out of a 20 minute training session, you might do mostly endurance and a bit of strength and then gradually transition to strength. And ideally we would do this after that baseline level of endurance has been established. Same as when you’re riding a horse. If you think about training a horse,

You develop the endurance first, long slow distance, then you move to develop that horse’s overall muscle control, its skills, its hill work, its jumping, its schooling, et cetera. Do the same thing for yourself. If you can train a pony, you can train yourself. It’s just a little bit different, but not by much. So when it comes to that strength work, we’re thinking about smaller amounts of repetitions, but greater rest, and then obviously,

starting at a weight point and working upwards based on what you can cope with. When it comes to cardiovascular training, realistically, this depends on what it is you’re doing. If you’re doing high intensity exercise, if you’re an eventer, competing or a show jumper, I probably would recommend you look at interval training once or twice a week. However, if you’re not, realistically, a baseline level of fitness is really important. So it might be that you want to do

one exercise class a week. You want to go for a walk a couple of times a week. This could be your cardiovascular training. It might be that as part of that endurance training you actually do something called supersets. This is where when we’re building up our endurance we can also add in a cardiovascular endurance element by basically doubling or even tripling sets of exercises. So for example

I might say, let’s do a superset. What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna do one set of 10 lunges, so 10 repetitions of lunges. We’re then not gonna have any breast break. We’re gonna go straight into doing a plank. We’re gonna do our plank exercise. Then we’re not gonna have a break and then we’re gonna do another exercise. Perhaps it is a shoulder press or an overhead shoulder press. And in that case, what I’ve done is I’ve taken three endurance exercises.

at body weight or light resistance, but rather than include the breaks, I’ve popped them together. I might do two to start, I might then increase that to three, and then I’d have a longer break at the end. This will actually develop your cardiovascular fitness alongside developing your muscle endurance, but be careful when you pick which things to superset, okay? So what you don’t wanna do is do three exercises that all target the exact same muscle group or muscle groups.

especially at really early levels of fitness. So build up to doing that within your training.

Now, when it comes to rider fitness, one of the hardest things I think is that there are so many exercises out there. Where do we even start? The other thing I find really difficult is that most of these exercises have weird names that make no sense. And also everybody calls them something slightly different. So don’t be afraid if I’m going to say something and you’re like, I know that exercise, but I don’t call it that. That seems to be a thing. In the world of fitness, there are multiple names.

multiple different exercises or variations of exercises. Physios will call them something different, to PTs who call them something different from S &C coaches. And that’s just an unfortunate part of the fitness industry, but I know it can be a barrier for a lot of people. So I completely appreciate if you’re like, whoa, too many. Now, what I’ve done here is I’ve popped up some main areas that I think all riders should be focusing on. So whole body.

back and scapula, shoulders, legs, ankles, and grip strength. Ankles and grip strength might be one of those that we develop as we move through. So they might not be the first thing that I add into training, but they’re usually one of those things that I think are beneficial for almost all the riders that I see. Almost everyone I see could do with some ankle strengthening exercises for sure. Now I don’t have enough time to go through

every single exercise on this board. These are not even an exhaustive list. These are just the ones that I tend to turn to more regularly than others. So I’ve picked out three for each that I tend to go to time and time and time again, both in my own training, when I’m working with Pony Club, when I’m working with riders, linked to our rider performance side of things, but they’re not exhaustive. And what I’d maybe recommend is if you’re looking for somewhere to start, have a Google, go on YouTube,

find some recommendations for some of these, find some videos to help you get started. What I’ve done though is I’ve suggested a couple that I think are easy to integrate for almost everybody, would benefit almost everybody and actually don’t require any gym work, any kit, any expensive equipment at all. So we’re gonna start off with whole body. And I thought I’ve also just popped grip strength in here as well. So with whole body exercise, I’m gonna explain something called a dead bug.

Sounds weird, but I promise you it is probably one of the most useful exercises that I would recommend for riders. And then we’re going to look at a catch and release exercise for grip strength. Now, when it comes to the dead bug, the reason why I think this exercise is so useful is that the dead bug exercise aims to develop a really strong core. So it’s working. I can’t get my words out today.

It’s working on those deep stabilizing muscles that allow us to support trunk stability in riders. Let me show you a little bit about it and then I’ll explain where I’m coming from. So this is just a nice little table. We’ll go through this as we go with some exercises, recommendations for reps and sets. And then there’s also something called regression and progression. When I say regression, what I mean is how to make this exercise easier if you’re struggling. And then progression is how to make it a little bit harder once you find it too easy.

Now this is a lovely example of someone doing a dead bug and I’m really hoping this gif is playing for you right now because I typically have a great fun with videos. What we can see here is somebody lying on their back with their arms extended directly above them, okay, so straight out in front of you, but making sure that your shoulders are pushed back against the floor. So don’t raise that shoulder up, keep it nice and flat. Back, shoulders and bum should all be touching the floor. Knees are bent at a 90 degree angle.

Okay, now in this instance, the example that he’s giving here is actually something that I would progress to. So I would not suggest that riders start with this particular set of movements. What he’s doing here is what I would suggest for a progression. So to start with, I would actually suggest that all the riders just start in that baseline pose. So this one here. Okay, so what we’re to do is we’re going to time ourselves maintaining that pose. And you may think,

Well, that’s easy. I’m just lying on the floor with my arms and legs in the air. But actually what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to engage that tummy. Now, when we talk about engaging the tummy, lots of people say the word brace. I hate brace. Brace suggests grip. It suggests tough. It suggests tight. We don’t want tight. We just want contracted muscle. I want muscle activity. I want engagement. So we’re going to use the word engage. And to kind of explain this, the

way someone’s ever explained this to me this was an S &C coach she said push your belly button into the floor she said lie on your back keep your shoulders your head your neck and your bum touching the floor your back should be touching the floor you don’t want to arch your back I shouldn’t be able to get my hand underneath there and I want to think about pushing my belly button into my spine push my belly button down as hard as I can into the floor and that’s going to activate

and engage those muscles without causing you to brace your entire body or kind of go stiff because we don’t want to be stiff as riders. We want to be fluid and flexible and move with the horse. Now we can do this absolutely anywhere. So if you can hold that position, I always say to riders, what we want to do is we want to work up to about 90 seconds, between 60 and 90 seconds would be great before we start adding in the arms.

And that shouldn’t be 60 seconds of you holding your breath and praying. Yeah, that 60 seconds should be easy. If it’s not, keep working on that exercise two to three times every time you do training. When we then want to make that more difficult, if you can get to about 90 seconds and it doesn’t really feel that difficult and that will come fairly quickly. If you do that exercise, I don’t know, twice, twice a session.

or three times a week in a couple of weeks their exercise will become super easy. It should improve really quickly. They’ll be really fast. At that point you can add in the arms and legs like we’re seeing here. So this is where we’re going to lower the opposite arm and leg down towards the ground, keeping that core engaged, keeping that back flat against the floor, and then come back to start and then do the same on the other side. Okay now the movement of the arms and limbs is great for developing coordination.

and also the independent movement of the limbs whilst maintaining pelvic stability. And if you think about the definition of independent seat in riding, this is a really great exercise for that. Fantastically, this can be done absolutely anywhere. I would recommend you sweep the floor before you lie on a kind of dirty concrete at the yard and you might look a little bit bonkers if you do, but it can be done anywhere and it doesn’t require any form ⁓ of kit or equipment.

You can make this even harder than this. You can actually do it with synchronized arms and legs. So moving your arms together and your legs together. So all four at once. That is particularly tricky. ⁓ You can also add resistance bands and other things as well. Now the second one, unfortunately I don’t have a nice little GIF to show you, but it’s quite an easy one to explain. This is a little test called a Catch and Release Test. We can do this with light dumbbells

or we can do it with tennis balls or even like a little beanie baby or a cuddly toy or some sort of soft sponge. Okay? What you’re going to do is basically hold your hands out in front of you and grip the top of the tennis ball or the top of the dumbbell in your hands. So I can do this with my phone to show you like this. Okay? What I’m going to do is I’m going to try and drop and catch it. Now I’m not going to do that with my phone because chances are I will drop it and it smash.

And that will be awkward and uncomfortable for everyone involved. But if you do this with tennis balls or dumbbells, what you want to do is just let go and catch very quickly again afterwards. The reason this kind of little exercise is super easy to do, you could literally do it while you’re watching TV, alternate between the left and right hand, or do them together if you feel comfortable. Gently catch and release, try and keep it in a fairly good rhythm and maintain that level of control.

This is really good for both grip strength but also developing reaction time, proprioception and fine motor movement in your fingers and your hands which is brilliant for that rain contact element. Super easy to do at home. You can use a tennis ball. If you’ve got a dog you’ve probably got a tennis ball somewhere. If you haven’t got dumbbells you could use water bottles, maybe the upside down to the base of the water bottle rather than the little lid at the top. Even grooming brushes. I was thinking earlier

Probably hold onto the top of a dandy brush or a body brush and then just catch and release with that. Anything that you can hold in your hands and get that finger grip aspect to. Really easy, can be done absolutely anywhere. We now come on to back, scapula and shoulder. Now some of these exercises actually cross over. So they do target both sides of the muscles and actually I would say are kind of collectively combined. Really, really valuable for almost any rider.

I’ve chosen the scapula push-up and a banded pull apart. Both of these are brilliant for developing trapezius muscle and developing scapula movement, which is great for riders, and I’ll explain why in a second. They can both be done with very little pieces of equipment, and I’d actually suggest that both of these could be really useful warm-up exercises prior to riding. So let me show you the first one. When it comes to scapula push-ups,

What we’re looking at here is this exercise. So the lovely person demonstrating on my slide. A scapular push-up is starting in kind of hands and knees type position. So your hands underneath your shoulders, arms nice and straight, knees underneath your hips. Keep your elbows fairly locked to keep your arms nice and straight. What you’re gonna do is you’re basically gonna work on lowering the head and the chest, but you’re gonna do this not by dropping through your shoulders,

but by squeezing your shoulder blades together. So you’re really gonna work on focusing that awareness or the movement of your shoulder blades. So the back of your, top of your back of your back. All right, and work on pulling them together. So we’re retracting the shoulder blades, which will basically cause your entire chest to drop down and then to come back up again by separating them. Okay, and we’re gonna do this eight to 10 controlled repetitions, two to three times within the training.

Okay, so two to three times, ideally within a training session. This is a really great warmup activity. And for riders, this actually strengthens a couple of key muscles, including the serratus anterior, which you can see highlighted in red, just on the side of this guy’s chest. And also the trapezius muscle, which is a big diamond muscle at the top of your back. It runs from your neck to your shoulders to effectively mid back. It covers that whole area.

It’s the one that hurts, let’s be honest. All right, now this can help prevent rounded shoulders. It can also help prevent chicken wing elbows. So elbows sticking out helps to pop that elbow into the side of you. If you jump, for example, and you like to ride with your elbows out, great exercise for you. This also allows us to work on the movement of the shoulder blades. Now riders very often seem to struggle with stiffness and lack of mobility in their trapezius.

in their upper back and scapular areas. What this tends to mean, particularly if you ride a strong horse, is that you might struggle to control the horse in the normal way, because the power, the strength for pulling back on the reins, if you can see me pull back on the reins, my reins aren’t normally out here by the way guys, but you need to be able to see my hands, pull back on the reins, the strength is coming from your back, a from your arms, mostly from your back. What we see in really strong riders is that they tend to do this.

They put motorbike hands on. And that’s because when you pull like this, your whole back moves. If you literally practice at home, sit with your hands in a riding position and pop your hands into a motorbike handle position and move your arms back and forth. Like you’re pulling on the reins. You will feel that your bones, everything moves. When you sit with your hands where you should with your thumbs on top and you move your arms back and forth, nothing’s moving.

And that’s because the change in action, that real small change in risk position changes what is working, right? What muscles are activating and what’s actually actioning. And it’s one of the reasons almost every rider I see that gets on that has motorbike hands, I’m like, your horse is really strong and you ride it in X, X type of bit. And they’re like, yeah, how did you know? And I’m like, your hands are giving you away. So if your coach tells you that you drop your hands in, chances are it’s because your back isn’t strong enough. So your body is adapting.

You’re going into that motorbike position to try and give yourself more strength, more power to control a strong horse. Work on developing that back strength and you won’t need to go into motorbike hands. It’s not a proprioceptive thing. It’s not just telling yourself to put your thumbs up. It’s actually about your strength as well. Key thing with this one is make sure that you’re not kind of just moving your entire body. The art of this is really working on focusing on the movement of the scapula.

I always tell my guys if I’ve got my hand on your back between your scapula, push your scapula together to touch my hand. And this might be where having a friend help you with that kind of proprioceptive cue is really important. The next one is a banded pull apart. This is a great exercise for counteracting rounded shoulders and helps anyone who might have pain or tightness in their upper back. What you’re gonna do is you’re gonna stand really tall.

hold a resistance band or some sort of stretchy object. mean, resistance bands are less than 10 pounds on Amazon. They are a great resource for riders. I would actually have one in my tap box, even in my lorry as a great warmup. You’re stand with your arms extended out in front of you about shoulder width apart, and then you’re gonna pull and again, work on squeezing those shoulder blades together and then slowly returning to the start.

This is something that I would strongly recommend every rider does as a warm up before they get on their horse.

Finally, we move into legs and ankles. Such an important part for riders in maintaining our position on the horse, but also in controlling that lower leg movement especially. And two exercises I think are important are glute bridges and also calf raises, both of which don’t require any equipment. So when it comes to glute bridges, what we are looking at is lying on our back with our knees bent, feet flat on the floor, feet about hip width apart.

What you’re gonna work to do is keep your feet flat on the floor whilst you squeeze from the glutes and push your hips up until that your shoulders, your hips and your knees form a lovely straight line, like you can see here, and then she goes back down and then here again, okay? So what we’re trying to do is maintain that position. Again, 10 to 12 reps, two to three sets, okay? And this is really good for developing that posterior chain we were talking about earlier, all right?

and works also on things like pelvic control. So really important for riders because we basically control everything with our pelvis and our seat. It’s also a really good exercise if you have left right imbalances in your glutes. So if you don’t have equal seat pressure or you tend to sit a little bit to one side, this is a great exercise for activating both glutes equally. And you can even make it single leg to really target one side or the other.

The last one is a calf raise. I love this exercise. I’m currently doing this for a calf injury that I have at the moment. And all it involves is finding a step. Might be your stairs. It might be a step at the yard. It might even be the mounting block. Great warmup exercise. Do it on the mountain block as you go up to get on the horse. This allows us to target the gastroc and the soleus muscles, so our calves. And this is crucial for lower leg control and lower leg position.

but it also helps with knee stability, ankle stability, and also developing that balance element as well. What you’re gonna do is you’re gonna stand tall with your feet about hip width apart, and you’re gonna stand on a step. So the sort of front half of your foot is on the step, but your heel is going to be off the step, so kind of out into the air if you like. What you’re gonna do is slowly rise up onto the balls of your feet, balls at the top, and then come back down. And you need to go lower.

than the surface that you’re standing on. So you’re going to go above to the middle and then lower than the surface and then back. Now you can hold on to the banister or the wall and we’d strongly recommend you do that if you don’t have great balance at the start. And you can even develop this further by not holding on to something or doing this as single leg raises to really test that calf strength as you improve. Now I know that fitness isn’t easy.

Don’t get me wrong, I tend to have more barriers to doing fitness than I would care to admit. And there are some common barriers that we all experience. So I’ve outlined them here, but also some ways that we can think about getting around them. The first one that I hear particularly from riders is lack of time. Now I get this, I really do. We are busy, we have work, horses, possibly dogs, and fitting in something

often feels really difficult, especially in the winter where we don’t have nice weather. We’re already struggling to ride based on the daylight. But my thing here is that you really don’t need hours to do fitness. You just need 10 minutes. You just need a few times across a day where you are waiting. Okay? Now, by this I mean, do you boil the kettle? How many cups of tea or coffee do you drink a day? Boiling a kettle can take a couple of minutes. That’s one set of exercises each.

How many times do you fill up your field water bucket? Probably once a day. If you’re anything like me, those field water buckets are huge. The hose pipe is usually rubbish and they take forever. So rather than sitting on your phone and scrolling, or kind of half grooming your horse and half staring off into space, split your time. Half grooming, half fitness. That would probably give you 10 minutes or so to be able to do a squat set or some press ups against a fence.

You might be able to do a plank, for example, or some of the exercises we’ve just shown you. If you’re walking to your field to get your horse or you’re walking back, can you do some high knee exercises? These are great for stretching and mobility around pelvic control. It can be done. You just have to be a little bit creative with these weird gaps in time that we so often have when it comes to riding. We fill up water buckets, we make feeds, we wait for sugar beets.

All of these things can be used as time slots for fitness. Binances. Now I get it, gyms aren’t cheap. Personally, I’m not a massive fan of a gym environment. I don’t find them motivating. And the one closest to me still requires me to drive fairly far. So what I’ve tried to do here is offer you exercises that you don’t need to do at a gym. They can be done at home. They can be done at the yards with some cheap resistance bands on Amazon. For weights, we can use water bottles.

500 millilitres, a litre, two litres, there’s your first set of weights. So I don’t believe that you need to spend money in order to start getting fit. At some stage in your journey, you may want to invest, but to start with, we can all do some things that would help us and our horses with very low cost. Lack of motivation. We’re all tired. Fitness and health is very often the bottom of the priorities, especially when we have animals to look after.

their fitness, their health and their care will always come first. My tips for this are try to get yourself into a routine. So schedule the time that you intend to do your exercise and fit that in religiously. Start with a little. Don’t try and fit in five or six exercise sessions a week because chances are you’re not gonna do it, you’re gonna struggle and then you’ll lose motivation. Do one a week, maintain consistency and then increase gradually when you can. Don’t be alarmed by setbacks.

If you have a week where you can’t do as much or you miss a session that does not ruin everything for the rest of your life. Don’t do what I did during Covid and take your three weeks off and turn it into the next three years. Okay? So for us, think about things like take a friend with you, do some stuff together, try something that you enjoy like a class or a session at a gym or even a local village hall because all of these things are going to be better than nothing.

And finally, the lack of knowledge side. I totally get it. There is a lot of information out there and we don’t often know where to start. My advice is start with people that you might trust. Okay, so find people who you trust on social media, on YouTube, online, or even book one-to-one sessions with local PTs, S &C coaches or physios who can give you some advice to get started, even if you don’t continue that as a regular session.

Classes are also great for this because they can impart that knowledge and information and they’re often really good for motivation and enjoyment as well. And the element of social dynamics, you get to go and chat to people and that often motivates us to keep going. Hopefully today has given you some confidence and some baseline knowledge to get started with fitness. But if anyone’s got any questions or queries, do feel free to email the Animal Web team or get in touch with us via that Facebook group.

I’m on there, I can help answer any questions alongside several of the other experts as well. And we can start a discussion that really gets us going. It’s lovely to speak to all of you today and I really hope that you have a good time with your fitness journey. Let’s all get fit and help our horses a little bit. See you later guys, bye.