Fitness through Groundwork
Most often its prescription comes as a result of age, injury, or poor weather. And depending on riders’ perspectives, groundwork can become a repetitive and dull endeavor, especially when circumstances lead to its duration for several weeks. With a plan, however, groundwork can improve your horse’s fitness. Here is how I approach it along with some worthwhile exercises.
Let’s first clarify that the type of fitness we’re influencing here is neuromuscular— strength and stability, body balance, muscular endurance. We are not trying to meet high end cardio needs. Groundwork can greatly improve movement patterns and develop good full range of joint motion. It is a wonderfully pure, direct way to ask your horse to coordinate, flex, and engage his body.
To keep your horse mentally alert, aim to keep sessions no longer than about 25 minutes. Spend the first 10 minutes walking. This is a good time to perform what I call “close in” work, or exercises where you are close to your horse’s head before the more active/brisk part of your session which follows. Guide him through a variety of Corrective Exercises in a rhythmic walk. Some of my favorites include (from my book 55 Corrective Exercises for Horses):
Backing up variations; Exercises #5 through #8
Turns on Forehand
Serpentine In-Hand; Exercise #35
Uneven Ground Poles; Exercise #45
If you’re adept at leg-yield of shoulder-in, you might add a few relaxed steps of each of these as well. Some quick walk-stop-walk transitions are always useful. I should note here that weaving these exercises together does require you to move around quite a bit as well. So, if you find yourself covering a lot of ground on foot, you are doing things right! I regularly log over a half-mile of walking during a 25-minute groundwork session.
After your 10 minutes of Corrective Exercises and walking, move on to one of the following longe line workouts. For simplicity, I have included four mini workouts below with references to my books where relevant. I suggest using a different one of these routines daily for a total of 3 days per week. For instance, choose a different routine for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. On the days in between— Tuesday, Thursday, and the weekend— replace the longe workouts with lots of exercise on straight lines. This might include handwalking or ponying, a trail hike, or ground driving. This helps balance our the demands of repetitive circling from longeing.
A quick note: for groundwork my personal preference is to use a longe cavesson. If you are interested in getting one, my colleague Patrick King sells them. Be sure to use code “Jec” in checkout and Patrick will send you a complimentary copy of his DVD “Talking about Transitions.”
Mini Longe Line Workouts
1.) Exercise on a Slope (Exercise #13, page 59 Equine Fitness). Practice this exercise for 10 to 15 minutes, depending on quality of footing surface and steepness of terrain.
2.) Longe Circles with In-Hand Lateral Exercises. Perform 3 to 5 longe circles trotting, then bring the horse in to you and perform 30 seconds of lateral exercises— leg yield, shoulder-in, turns on haunches. Then immediately resume longeing for 3-5 circles, changing direction of travel. You can find a brief description of in-hand shoulder-in on page 45, Exercise #8 in Equine Fitness. Practice this sequence of alternating between longe circles and lateral exercises, for 15 minutes.
Exercise #43, Longeing Therapy
3.) Longeing Therapy (Exercise #43, page 111 55 Corrective Exercises for Horses). Perform this awesome athletic routine for 10 minutes as described. If you own a fewer number of ground poles then what is illustrated, you can adapt the setup.
4.) Two-Tone Circles. Begin by longeing your horse in a slow jog around a small circle approximately 10 meters diameter. After completing 3 circles, allow the horse to enlarge his circle until he is at the end of your line and on a large circle approximately 20 meters. Now ask him to extend his trot strides around this bigger circle for 3 revolutions. Ask him to really move out and cover ground. Then, gather up your longe line and bring the horse in to your original smaller circle and ask him to slowly jog again. Keep repeating the sequence above for 5 minutes in each direction of travel.
In summary, use the formula in this blog post (10 minutes of Corrective Exercises + 15 minutes of a longe line workout) three times weekly to create simple but purposeful plans for your groundwork. If you enjoy building these little workouts, consider checking out my on-line 30 Day Core Conditioning course for horses. Most of that course can be modified for groundwork.