The three ‘S’s

Every individual sport demands its own specific type of fitness, and ou use different muscles for different sports. The type of fitness you need for riding and how fit you need to be, varies according to how strenuous the activity - for example, hacking and show jumping require far less in rider fitness than hunting and eventing.

• Strength: Fitness for riding involves muscular strength to a certain extent. This doesn’t mean ‘brute force’ but rather, the ability to use your muscles to the full, so enabling you to control the pony.

• Stamina: which allows you to use the necessary muscles repeatedly and over a long period of time, is of much greater importance for the horse rider. It is achieved by a steady build up of fitness targeted at your particular activity.

• Suppleness: As you become fitter, your suppleness improves, meaning you can use your muscles to their utmost. If your muscles are unfit, they ache and go into cramp which makes them stiff. By working the muscles, suppleness improves which in turn prevents stiffness occurring.

Weight & Diet

A fit person carries little excess weight. Any visible fat on either a person or a horse indicates that there is an equal number of fatty deposits hidden from sight - around the heart and other internal organs. This puts a strain on these organs when they are asked to work hard.

Every sportsman needs a balanced diet with the correct vitamin and mineral intake. However, a rider’s diet is probably not as crucial in its content as that of top athletes. In riding, it is the horse who is put to the most severe test. The rider must be fit enouth to help his horse, but the same effort is not demanded from him as from his horse.

The Best Exercise

The only way to develop proper fitness for riding, is to ride. There is no real substitute, because no other activity replaces the effort required to remain in balance with control a moving horse. You can do exercises to stretch and work some of the muscles necessary for riding, but these can’t do more than ‘tone’ them up.

How much riding is necessary depends entirely on what the rider and horse combination is aiming to do. Normally it is enough if the rider does all the work involved in preparing for the competition on his horse. By producing a fit hORse, the rider is automatically making himself fit as well.

The problem of fitness arises when the rider is otherwise occupied (at work or school) and someone else is building up the horse or pony’s fitness. If you only ride occasionally, you can’t expect to become fit enough without taking some other form of exercise.

Alternative Exercise