Sport Horse Is Your Horse Fit to Compete? Ensure that your horse is physically prepped to handle the demands of dressage. First of two parts.
he concept of “fit to compete” embraces many aspects of equine management, from nutrition to farriery to training. As a dressage rider, you know that to be successful your horse needs to be competent in the movements of the level—but how much thought do you give to other aspects of managing his fitness? Fitness has many benefits. A fit horse: • Performs the movements with better quality and enthusiasm (impulsion) • Is at lower risk of fatigue and injury • Has an expectation of greater longevity as an athlete.
and correct neck posture. Part 2 will address strengthening the “dressage muscles” for the higher levels of competition, with the goals of making the movements easier and addressing specific performance problems.
Fitness Requirements for Dressage Horses Every equestrian sport requires the horse to perform a set of skills that have specific requirements for cardiovascular fitness, strength, agility, and balance. If you were training an event horse, for example, the focus would be on cardiovascular fitness, with the objective of being able to gallop at high speed continuously
FITNESS TRAINING: Dressage trainer Nancy Later rides over cavalletti. Trotting over a grid of poles is an excellent way of strengthening the horse’s core muscles.
In this two-part series, I’ll describe exercises to address training issues that are related to insufficient fitness or strength at each competition level. In this issue, I’ll focus on the lower levels (Training through Second): I’ll look at how to develop and maintain the horse’s core strength, cardiovascular fitness,
for several minutes. Galloping for long periods is not in the dressage repertoire, but dressage horses do need sufficient cardiovascular fitness to perform at their level of training without becoming fatigued. However, getting a horse overly fit for lower-level dressage may not be desirable, either, because fit horses
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can get a bit too frisky for our purposes!
Conditioning for Training and First Levels Training and First Level dressage focuses on developing correct basics that will serve as the foundation of future work. The horse’s hind limbs develop more thrust—a prerequisite to achieving better balance and thoroughness—and the horse learns to seek a consistent contact with the bit in a long and rounded neck posture. The types of conditioning that are beneficial at this stage of training are: • Core training, to activate and strengthen the muscles that move and stabilize the neck and back • Cardiovascular conditioning for horses that are easily fatigued or that have trouble tolerating heat in spite of sweating normally (Note: this does not include horses with anhidrosis, meaning that they are unable to sweat) • Neck-posture control, to teach the horse to support his own neck from above in the so-called falling-down neck posture. Let’s look at each of these three types of conditioning in more detail. Core training. The value of core training lies in improving the horse’s ability to round and stabilize its back, which is highly relevant throughout the life of a dressage horse. Core training from the ground should ideally be started in the young horse before ridden exercise begins. When the horse is in ridden work, the best time to do core training is immediately before tacking up, to “wake up” the core muscles in preparation for exercise.
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By Hilary M. Clayton, BVMS, PhD, Dipl. ACVSMR, FRCVS
