Training Your Horse for a Long Ride

Right from the start, I want to be clear that I am not a trainer. I am simply sharing with you what we do and consider as we train our horses for long riding. Let me introduce you to a couple of training tools that we use to document, monitor, and track our horse’s improvement.

This article is written by Luisa on the road and not edited by Pete so please excuse any mistakes in gramma and structure of a sentence.

Horse Tracking App – We currently use Equilab for tracking and documenting the distance, speed, and gaits during a ride.

Heart Rate Monitor – We currently use Polar Equine for tracking the horse's heart rate during and after training. You should know the basic heart rate of your horse. As a rule, horses' heart rates generally fall into the following ranges:

• Resting: 20-40 bpm (beats per minute)

• Walking: 50 - 70 bpm

• Trotting: 70 - 120 bpm

• Cantering: 120 - 185 bpm

• Gallop: 185 – 240 bpm

Your Current State

First of all, we need to figure out where our horse is at. Since this is a blog about how to train your horse for a long ride, I assume your horse knows groundwork, is used to a rider, has been vet-cleared, is in a good state of mind, and has tack that fits him.

Let’s start with a test and some questions to make it a bit easier to figure out where your horse stands and to have data to measure your improvement.

1. Fitness Test: Choose a specific route that you will take your horse on for a trail ride, documenting his speed, distance, and heart rate after your stop. Write down how long it takes your horse to return to a resting heart rate. You will need this later to check your improvement in training.

2. Mental Strength Questions: How does your horse react in unfamiliar and stressful situations, such as busy roads, towns, and around other animals? Can you manage your horse, and how long does it take for your horse to relax again when it gets stressed out?

Your Goals

A long ride can vary in time, distance, and style, but here I am talking about one person on one horse, carrying all their own gear. It is very hard to say when your horse is truly ready for the adventure, but we have put together something that we feel is a pretty good indication that your horse is in good shape and ready for the ride.

1. Fitness and Gear Test: 7 x 25 km rides in no more than 4 hours over 14 days, with good sessions of canter and trot, preferably over dynamic and hilly terrain. Check for rubs, damage, and other gear failures as well as heart rates and recovery.

o Recovery: We are looking for the pulse to drop under 60 bpm within 5 minutes after we stop the training/ride.

2. Mental Strength Goals: It is impossible to prepare the horse for every potential situation that could happen on the road, so we focus on the ability of the horse to release stress and always stay in communication with us. That said, there are a few situations you can train with your horse very easily, such as crowds, loud noises, flags, bridges, busy roads, and small cities.

The Training

As you have already noticed, I talk about two aspects here: the body and the mind. They are connected at all times, but I do focus some days more on the mental challenges and other days I focus on the body.

Training the Body

We highly recommend not only getting vet clearance but also consulting a physiotherapist or body worker for your horse.

When I talk about physical training, I divide it into three categories:

1. Condition/Endurance

2. Strength

3. Coordination/Posture

The training should consider all three aspects, and we feel it is best started from the ground, face-to-face with your horse. We prefer to do most of our training out on the trail but find it very important not to go on the same trail every time. We look for different surfaces and off-road sections because we do not want the horse to predict the next step but rather concentrate and be with us in the moment.

Most of the time during a long ride, you will ride at a walk. It’s also a great gait to start building muscles with. As we progress in the training, we increase the trot, starting with shorter intervals and gradually increasing them. Later, we include some canter. We love hilly terrain to build more strength, but it’s most important to mix it up and build it up slowly.

Tracking the Progress: To check how much you and your horse have improved, go back to the fitness test you did at the beginning. You should see an improvement in the heart rate, and the speed should be smoother and more consistent. If you don’t see improvement within a month, check in with a professional.

Timeframe: If your horse is well-muscled and conditioned, as little as 4 weeks should be enough to get him ready for a long ride. If we are talking about a horse that was out of work, plan at least 3 months before heading off. For a horse coming back from an injury or never having been in full work, we don’t recommend working towards a long ride until it is in good condition first.

Training the Mind

We want a horse that can think for itself, has the ability to release stress, and trusts both itself and you.

First of all, we must start by engaging the horse’s brain, and that starts with listening to what your horse has to say. That also means, rather than telling your horse what you want, you ask a question and let him figure out the answer himself. Of course, you are still helping the horse towards the right answer, and it doesn’t matter if the horse takes a while to understand what you want. In our case, it’s not so much about the exercise itself but the fact that we encourage the horse to think for itself. Another thing we do is let the horses choose their own trail through the woods; that is another very easy way to get the horse thinking.

Being on the road, you will face stressful situations, so the goal is not to try to train the horse for every possible scenario but to work on your connection and communication in stressful situations. Our horses are allowed to look and often even spook, but they don’t bolt! We call it de-sensitization, and we train with flags, loud noises, and other spooky things. It’s not about them getting used to a flag but learning not to run away in panic but rather to check it out, encouraged by you while doing so.

To help your horse release stress, you can, for example, build up energy while working in the round pen from the ground and then switch back to a relaxed mode. An easy tool that will help you here is to control your own breathing. The safer the horse feels with you, the easier it will be for him to trust you and therefore relax when you tell him that it’s okay.

Tracking the Progress: Go back to the questions from the beginning and answer them honestly to see if what you are doing is improving your horse's mental strength. I believe clear boundaries, consistency, and love are the three keys to success here.

Training with Gear

This is the last step and should only be trained when the horse is in good physical shape and has learned to manage his emotions. The gear must fit the horse, but we will not go into details here since we will cover that in another article.

Again, we start from the ground, slowly introducing one bit at a time. For example, start with the rear saddlebags, then move on to the front saddlebags, and so on. If the horse is comfortable in all gaits, you can move on and start riding again. From here, we add up until we are fully loaded on our training trails.

As we train, our gear is all over the place. When things go bad, it’s very helpful when the horse is used to gear not being perfect. Be very careful here; the gear still needs to sit in a manner where it doesn’t harm the horse. We also push off the saddle, let it fall under the horse, and even have it hanging under his belly (you will have to build up to this and be able to drop the saddle in seconds).

Some Final Words

Having said all of this, it’s a perfect world scenario, and as life happens, we might not be able to go through it step by step. If you take only one thing out of this article, it should be listening to your horse, because he will tell you when he’s tired. Then you can just adapt on the road, such as taking a break day, shortening the daily kilometres, or even just getting off your horse and walking next to them.

A long ride should be fun for both you and the horse; the better you prepare, the easier it’s going to be.