Daily doubles offer a uniquely effective way of improving fitness without boredom or fatigue, especially for rehab cases or for horses learning to adopt new postural habits. They allow you to add stimulus without the deleterious outcome of an overwhelmed nervous system or soft tissues maxing out their excitability.

Corrective Exercise #1 can be practiced under saddle or on longe line to activate the horse’s extensor and flexor muscle chains, helping create smooth, comfy movement.

“How do I know if he’s in pain?”

I get asked this question a lot when students are trying to rehab their horse through a particular gait deficiency or movement dysfunction. How do we tell when a conditioning plan is working and, more importantly, that the exercises are not causing further discomfort?

The law of diminishing returns often thwarts the efficacy of really good fitness exercises. If you practice too long, or too many times, a potentially useful fitness exercise surpasses the body’s adaptations and the result becomes a net zero. And yet if you don’t perform the exercise enough, you don’t offer sufficient stimulation to tissue and systems that stand to gain.

Depending on riders’ perspectives, groundwork can become a repetitive and dull endeavor. With a plan, however, groundwork can improve your horse’s fitness. Here is how I approach it along with some worthwhile exercises.

Just because our horses do not complain, it does not mean they are suited for a weekend warrior lifestyle.

When you want to improve your horse’s performance, your own fitness might be your best tool.

What kinds of exercises--and how much-- should you do to prolong the comfort and mobility of your senior horse? Read on to find out.

At some point most of us have considered using stretches from the ground to help our horses move with more ease, but we have also likely wondered which ones to use and for how long. In fact, students frequently email me about this question.

When a horse’s back builds up excess tension, whether from strength or discomfort, it leads to altered muscle activation patterns. Muscles will fire either too early, too late, or too long. Learn how a light seat can help.

Which is harder for the horse: trail riding or arena workouts? Many riders believe a vigorous trail ride requires much more fitness than a training session in the arena. Others, meanwhile, view trail riding as an easy activity to do on a horse’s rest day. So which is it— harder or easier? The answer is that they are each harder— and easier— than the other. Let me clarify.

Horses that live mostly in pasture give many riders the false assumption that they are primed for all kinds of exercise.

Surprisingly, I often find myself prescribing students more calisthenics exercises than gymnastic exercises to improve their horses’ overall fitness. The reason for this is that, without proper activation of postural muscles, the horse’s locomotion muscles are not able to play their role fully. Calisthenics target postural muscles, not movement muscles. But let’s get clear— what are calisthenics? I define them broadly as slow-moving exercises requiring fine motor control and precision of body alignment. Many re-hab and pre-hab maneuvers fall under this definition. The well known “carrot stretches” or walking over ground poles are examples.

Most riders have heard about the need for a good warm-up before schooling each day. But what makes a warm-up good? Is an active one better than a slow, relaxing one? How long—or short—should it be? This article will give you some simple tips to make your training sessions more successful, and your horse stronger day by day.

Once you experience the changes in your training that ground poles can make, you will find yourself using these simple tools more than you imagined. Here are my answers to your common questions about ground poles.

“My horse doesn’t care where his feet are.” I hear this from at least one student in every clinic as a reason to bow out on conditioning exercises involving ground poles. 

Horse training happens most often through non-quantifiable skills, relying instead on an artistic balance of feel, observation, emotional equilibrium, and a dose of intuition. 

I call it the lameness that is not really lameness. Sometimes, a horse develops an unexplainable hitch in his movement that leads to much head scratching from vets who, after an array of diagnostics, find no clear answers.

Somewhere along the path of their learning journeys, many riders including myself became conditioned to constantly observe and correct the horse’s head and neck position.