I mentioned last entry that summer is in full force in Central Texas, which means that every ride ends with us both being pretty drenched in sweat, even if I ride before 8am because in the mornings here the humidity is roughly 4,000%. I keep our rides short because I am very conscious of the fact that I am asking him to carry a lot of weight in a lot of heat and I definitely don’t want him to be miserable (or worse, get injured.) It occurred to me on our last ride, however, that now is the perfect time to start doing some horseback riding focused exercises.

When I first switched to my current dressage instructor, my previous one told her that I tended to get fatigued and need breaks, which I took as a veiled weight criticism (and I know that seems like a stretch but just trust me when I tell you the horse world is VERY judge-y about weight) so of course now I nearly kill myself in every lesson to keep going without needing a break. Because of that I was hesitant to do much outside training specific to horseback riding – I tend to get very sore in my lower body when I train a lot, and I didn’t want my actual time on the horse to suffer as result of overtraining. That was several months ago, though – not only has my stamina in the saddle increased a lot, but I’m in better shape than I was since I’ve been training very hard for the past few weeks. So now that our rides have been shortened a bit due to the temperature, I figure now is a good time to start doing some muscle building outside of the saddle.

I have read quite a few things that say you can’t really train the same muscles for horseback riding in the gym, which I think is incorrect. Now, to be fair, I do think cross training is way overhyped and the way you get better at a sport is to do more of that sport. On the flip side, though, to suggest that there is something magical about a particular sport that trains muscles that are otherwise untouchable is pretty stupid (this attitude is very prevalent in archery too, which is just…like do you really think you can’t train your back muscles? Do you really think pulling a bow is such a magical motion that nothing else can replicate it? WTF. But I digress.) Of course you can improve performance with targeted training in any sport, but you have to create a balance where the extra training is not so taxing your sport performance suffers.

I read a post on Facebook that talked about what we ask of our horses; one of the items was “We ask them to be athletic but we never go to the gym ourselves.” I certainly don’t intend to be that kind of horse owner -I’m going to be in the best shape I possibly can be for my little Gryphon, not just for him to have to carry less weight but so that we are equal partners in our relationship. I can’t ask him to work hard if I don’t!

So now I have to plan out some rider fitness exercises for myself, I am going to start with these

https://equestrianwriter.com/blog/2018/02/11/rider-fitness/

I have some other ideas as well that I will be working in.