Winter can be a tough time for horses and their owners. The cold weather, seemingly endless mud, and rain can make it difficult to keep them fit and healthy, especially if you have limited turnout, or don’t have the luxury of a floodlit arena. However there are still ways that you can maintain your bond with your horse, help them to stay in good condition, and build on your training all winter long.
Here are a few tips for keeping you and your horse in tune through the winter:
- Do groundwork. Many people automatically think of using lunging and long reining for groundwork, which is absolutely a good idea if you have access to a good working area. If you have poles, too, so much the better as you can mix things up with a variety of exercises over the weeks. However, even just leading your horse in their bridle or halter is good for maintaining the connection and ensuring the communication stays clear between you. Leading up, halting square, backing up, and lateral exercises can all be done in-hand and will help your horse to maintain self-carriage and flexibility.
- Working in walk. Walking is fantastic for horses, and a purposeful, rhythmical walk will enhance their endurance, stamina and coordination. Especially if you can maintain it for 30 minutes or more. The advantage of walk work is that the horse is less likely to work up a sweat and risk getting a chill, while you can still work on responsiveness, correctness and effectiveness of exercises such as lateral work, bending, and halt transitions. If you’re hacking out, please do always be mindful of the conditions, and make sure you and your horse are both wearing high vis items so you’re visible to other road users, or people on byways and bridle paths such as dog walkers.
- Core work. Horses need to maintain their own core strength for self-carriage and to ensure they have the condition they need to work properly under saddle. To help with this, you can incorporate carrot stretches, tail pulls and backing the horse up. If you haven’t done these exercises with your horse before, do watch some of the videos available online and gradually build up what you’re working on, watching your horse’s body language and always positioning yourself safely.
- Work on your own fitness. It isn’t true that only riding can help you to stay riding fit; cross-training is hugely beneficial for riding fitness and effectiveness. The more cardiovascular fitness we have, combined with strength, balance and flexibility, the better. Being healthy and fit in this way helps ensure that we can not only carry ourselves better in the saddle, but can also make better use of our aids, providing clearer communication to our horses under saddle.
- Vary your training. Once you’re underway, don’t fall into the same routine every time you work with your horse. Keep it varied for their interest, as well as your own.
- Take advantage of clinics. There are a number of indoor and outdoor arena-based clinics offering a huge variety of training options. From show jumping or dressage, through to desensitisation clinics and TREC sessions. These can be great to get you and your horse safely out, with the opportunity to learn (or develop) skills with the company of other riders. If you’d prefer to go it alone, there are also arenas and all-weather gallops available for hire, often by the hour.
Even with the best of intentions, there may still be times when it isn’t possible for you and your horse to train as you’d like to. In those situations, try not to become despondent, and instead focus on visualising the riding you will be doing in the warmer, brighter days; science has proven that visualisation fires the same neurons in our brain as actually doing what we’re thinking about!
And don’t forget to have fun with your horse. A nice grooming session is always a great way to enjoy each other’s company.
I hope this blog post has been helpful. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment below.
Happy riding!