Does your horse benefit as best it could from the fittening practices that you implement?
When I first started eventing in 1999 getting your horse fit was far from an exact science.
The first time I wanted to fitten for a 2-day event I was told just start at 3 3 minute canters with 2 minutes walking in between. Next time increase one of the canters to 4 minutes, then 2, then 3 – then up to 5 minutes and so on and so forth.
At the time, I just went with it and did that until 2002 when I started studying Sports & Exercise Science and learning about how people fitten for their selected sport. That was when I started to change things up.
I found that Polar, the company that make the heart rate monitors had made one for horses and immediately invested in it to start fittening my horses according to what science says is correct. Runners were doing it, so why should I do it with the horses?
I started doing my cantering with the monitor on – I would trot for ten minutes to warm them up, then walk for a minute to allow a small recovery. I would then canter as fast as I had to to lift the horse’s heart rate up above 180bpm.
I would keep it there for 2 minutes then walk until the heart rate dropped below 100bpm, upon which I would re-commence the cantering until we had 2 minutes above bpm again.
I started to see over the course of the training that the time it took to reach 180bpm that I wanted started to take longer, and the time it took to return to below 100bpm when we walked started to be quicker. Our canter times increased and walk times decreased – but not quite with the consistency of the programmes that we would follow before heart rate monitors.
This was also when I noticed how the horses of different breeds and ages varied in the canter and walk times and highlighted how a general rule will not benefit a good deal of the population.
My fittening evolved one more level when I was stabled with Nicola Wilson in 2012. Nicola famously uses the banks of the river near her base to fitten her horses. I was astounded when I found out that only the horses going to the 3-days did fast work in the weeks preceeding the event and the rest was done at a walk.
I duly strapped on the heart rate monitor and started doing it as instructed and right enough this was fantastic work for getting the heart rate up. It was kept at a really nice level and because the work is slow, it was far less damaging to the horse’s legs. It also got the horses fantastically fit – I did a 2* (current 3*), had a stop and a 20 second out of control run away and STILL almost hit the optimum time! He was ready to go again by the time I had got off him AND he jumped a cracking clear the following morning.
The one difference I noticed between the fast and slow work was that I felt that I lacked the fine tuned communication that we had had doing the canter work. I remember when we won Auchinleck Intermediate (canter work) Leo (G West Goldrush) felt like he knew what I wanted before I asked for it.
He knew that the shift in body weight meant ‘slow’ from the amount of times I had done it during our canter work. I felt like we were truly a team and working together – it was the most harmonic cross country round we ever had – and then he was off for a year with a fracture to his pastern.
We never quite achieved this level of harmony again - on hind sight, for Nicola with her vast levels of experience not doing much canter-work works great. For me and quirky Leo, however, I found that the cantering fittening was more beneficial to our partnership and gave us better results than the walk fittening.
No way is correct for every horse and every rider and I feel that having the confidence to experiment with what is right for you and your horse is key to having a successful partnership and this transferring to your results.
Some ways may foster more confidence and develop your skill more than others, likewise some training methods can very quickly and permanently zap confidence and really become a set back.
I feel too many people are given unstructured and advice not suitable for them individually, that they blindly follow to the nth degree without considering if that advice is suitable for them and their horse.
When working with P-DTR I often find that people and horses have dysfunctions around their aerobic and anaerobic systems that are trauma or nutrition based.
When the body is not capable of producing energy in the physiologically correct way, whether rider or horse, performance is going to suffer until steps are taken to remedy this.
The signs and symptoms of the anaerobic or aerobic systems being involved in a neurological dysfunction are:
Fatigue – struggling to reach optimum time
Recurrent exercise related injuries – those never ending niggles that stop your training
Excess storage of fat – Possibly involved in cushings?
Abnormal low blood sugar and/or excess insulin – possibly involved in cushings?
PMS and menopausal symptoms in women - mares hormone related behaviour changes.
Circulatory problems
Fatiguing throughout the day
Cannot repeat the activity many times – on asking to repeat the exercise the horse starts misbehaving
Cramping
Recurrent sport lesions especially in small muscles – those niggles once again
It is important to realise that these symptoms showing in a horse would be misinterpreted by vets and physiotherapists as other ailments and that the action recommended to heal, if not helping symptoms that you are experiencing, is possibly not the right action to change the neurology and stop the brain producing the output it is.
If you experience these symptoms with your horse and would like to chat about whether a previous trauma or nutrition may be responsible for what you are experiencing, please get in touch.
Comments