 So today we have Erica Berg. Erica is actually one of the associate professors in the equine science department at NDSU and she is also the program director for bison strides equine assisted activities and therapies so that's one of her big pet projects that she has going or a big project she has going at NDSU but she also does quite a bit or has done quite a bit with equine conditioning and and knowing knowing all the physiology of that horse so she has joined us today to talk about conditioning the equine athlete and I'd like to turn it over to someone who was my mentor at college also as well Erica Berg. Thank you Rachel. All right so I'm seeing a couple of things in the chat looking at some things for getting horses fit so they're not over stressed. Young horse exercises here okay so all right we'll go ahead and get started and then I'll let I will let Paige and Rachel you guys feel free to jump in if there's other things that pop up as we're going through our presentation today okay first thanks everybody for joining joining us on this last Wednesday of May which is a little bit crazy that the month of May is already kind of flown by but here we are so this is just our non-discrimination statement that has to be posted for all of the extension presentations and publications that are done. All right so without any further ado I guess we'll go ahead and jump right in that we think about the horse's primary job and the United States today okay the horse's job is to be an athlete and so what that degree of athleticism looks like is going to be very different depending on the discipline that you ride what level you ride at and with my students I like to compare this with my sister and I my sister is a world champion Ironman triathlete so a few years ago she swam a mile on the ocean in Hawaii and then ran a marathon and rode a bike for a hundred miles and I'm like more of a couch to 5k person so there's some athleticism that's required do a couch to 5k right but nothing like it would be to do like a world Ironman championship and so on this slide we've got some some different images right we have a jumper in the upper right hand corner we've got somebody doing ranch work out like on a working ranch you've got a Western pleasure in the center a bale racing quarter horse racing and then we have a therapy horse down in the middle and then trail riding and so all of those animals need to be fit and sound but the degree at which they fit and sound are different right and so it's just important to remember that anytime we're working a horse you're doing something with them they are being an athlete and so what degree that is is kind of what differentiates some of the different things and so our primary goal of conditioning then if we're just gonna look at some really basic things are to improve both psychological or mental responses to exercise as well as the physical and physiological responses to exercise and before we even do that there are some basic conditioning considerations and these are actually going to be both for the horse and the human right because for instance if you are just starting out in Western pleasure like you've never done that before that's going to look different than somebody who's been doing it for 20 years right and so your knowledge of the discipline is going to impact the ability of you to condition and train your horse for that particular event and so that is important also what level of competition are you looking at competing at rate is it a couple of weekends in the summer for a horse show or are you planning to be on the road for the entire summer or fall traveling to horses because that transport is also going to be an issue potentially for horses what is the animal's current fitness level right what is your current fitness level as we all know if anybody I'm assuming everybody in here is probably ridden a horse it takes muscles and it takes fitness to be able to do that well and to do that effectively and so considering your current fitness level as well as the horses is super important to figure out where you're going to be starting from any past injuries horse and human is going to dictate a little bit what where you're starting from and then again prior experience in the discipline we talked about that a little bit and then how much time do you have right if you have a full time job and three little kiddos at home it's going to be hard right you're going to have to carve out some time to do this and so time is is an issue that's a realistic real world type of thing and then age so not only the horses age but the humans age so I am 49 today actually and there are horses when I was 20 I would get on anything that somebody put in front of me and today I will not do that because I have a little bit more self preservation as I'm aging and I've got three kids and a family right and so I'm not going to get on the crazy race horses like I did in grad school and right around when they're not really that broke not doing that anymore and so and those are things to consider and things to think about because I think as we get older kind of I don't know if our mortality sort of sinks in a little bit but just thinking about what is worth the risk is a real consideration so consider that and if you have a horse that makes you nervous or makes you scared then maybe that is a bad match okay and so and that's okay to say tap and out and I need to look for something different and then before you begin of course the horse has to be sound right they have to be sound and wind and limb that old age old adage so their breathing has to be sound right if they have any type of any type of recurrent obstructive airway disease that's gonna significantly impact right their ability to exercise because oxygen is required for exercise and then their legs they have to be sound their feet right if they're not sound an exercise program is or a conditioning program for competition right conditioning for rehab that's gonna look a lot different than conditioning for a competition is the animal healthy overall are they up to date in their shops are they up to date on their deworming are they up to date on all that stuff that we need to make sure that they're they're healthy and ready to go on they shot and trim properly for what their needs are and if you're unsure of any of this you should always of course talk to your veterinarian or failure right to make sure that your horse is ready to go because we want to set them up for success and reduce the chance of injury or illness for sure so the two conditioning components are the psychological adaptations and the physiological adaptations and so the psychological adaptations I do like to mention to folks it's important to understand training principles you don't have to be a psychologist or an animal behaviorist but it is important I think to understand the reasons behind what you're doing when we're asking a horse to do something so when they when we apply pressure and they give to the pressure doing what we want okay that's an example of negative reinforcement in psychological speak right so negative doesn't mean bad in that instance it means taking away but you're taking away the pressure to reinforce the behavior of them doing what you wanted them to okay and so there's a group called the international society for equitation science it's got some really good information on this training principles psychological principles not just for horses but like for dogs and I suppose cats people right anything so it's a good a good website to visit and so it's important then that you understand those print those training principles as well as understanding horse behavior so hopefully everybody that sees this gray this daffodil gray on the right hand side with the red halter with his eyes bugged out in his head up that horse is clearly like in a little bit of distress right maybe doesn't want to do what you asked it to do but he is not calm and willing compared to the horses under saddle in the middle right we want the horse in the middle we don't want to have the horse on the right and it's also important to think about the human impact on behavior there was a study that was done a few years ago that I love to talk about and in this particular study they had horses that they schooled around a ring in front of somebody that was standing at one end with it with a umbrella they didn't open the umbrella but they schooled the horses around they had heart rate monitors on them and until the horses heart rate didn't change they kept schooling them once the heart the horse was fine with a human they brought people in and said okay we'd like you to ride this horse around the ring when you get to that lady with the umbrella she's gonna open it and they had heart rate monitors on the humans and they had heart rate monitors on the horses now the horses had been fine right with that umbrella lady standing there but as soon as we added the rider and we said they are going to open that umbrella when the horses started to come around that turn the riders heart rate went up the horses heart rate went up in anticipation because the rider was communicating to the horse something bad is gonna happen that laid with the umbrella is gonna open it and you're gonna spook and it's gonna be a train wreck right in their head and so and they did the same thing with people just horse handling leading on the ground and that same response was seen but even just through the lead rope so it's really important that we are mindful of our issues that we might have or fears or distresses when we're working with the horses because that definitely turns to them okay and so making sure that you're being mindful and that you recognize and sort of figure out any issues that you might have or things that are distrustful to you. Some other things that are good for psychologically for the horses are to vary their routine okay so I kind of like to ride in an arena I don't really like to trail ride I like to ride in the arena which my dad totally doesn't understand but that's not necessarily great for my horse right like it's good to go outside first of all to get them used to different things and so they don't get bored and so on the lower left here there's a guy that's longlining the horse okay that is an awesome thing with a little caveat of making sure you know what you're doing with this and you have somebody that can assist you because horses can get pretty freaked out if those lines get tangled around their legs and they can kick and they can hurt you so just make sure that you take time if you don't know how to do that that you learn how to do that and I've got some resources at the end. Hill work if you have hills here in Eastern North Dakota we don't necessarily have a lot of those but just going outside and riding in a field if you have access to that and then the bottom is just showing rates and different things that we can kind of do there's some really cool extreme trail courses that are out there and those are just interesting because they keep the horses mind engaged a little bit and so ultimately our goal is for a confident and willing partner right we want this horse on the lower right hand corner we don't necessarily want to be on the gray horse or the thorough horse right so those horses are telling us something so maybe they're saying I'm painful maybe they're saying my saddle doesn't fit maybe they're saying my teeth need to be floated the bit is hurting my mouth and so it's important if the horse is responding in a negative in a bad way and in a angry way to your a's or to your cues that you figure out what that is and maybe it's just that they don't feel like working it that day and they need to work through that but it's important to make sure there's no physical pain that's going on because most of the time there is I would say more times than not there's a physical issue for what we would consider bad horse behavior okay so tactics really important making sure their teeth are in good shape is really important as well okay so then moving on to physiological adaptations we're just gonna kind of touch on the respiratory cardiovascular musculoskeletal and then thermal regulation so the respiratory system obviously important because that's how the horse is getting oxygen into their body at arresting a horse an average adult horse just standing breathing is taking in a little over a gallon of air per breath if we average 12 breaths per minute that's 16 gallons per minute that they're breathing in and then if we look at exercise okay hard exercise that's gonna increase okay by four and then they're taking in 150 breaths per minute at least and that's gonna equal over 600 gallons of air but they're breathing in and out of their body per minute and this picture down here is a photo of horse lungs that have been inflated they're huge and it's totally cool so if you ever have an opportunity to be present when during a necropsy if that's something that you feel okay being present at or watching this is totally cool to see how huge the horse lungs are it's really kind of mind-blowing and the respiratory rate so here's the thing with respiratory rate if you type in horse respiratory rate you'll be a bunch of different different answers right but essentially we can safely pretty safely say 8 to 20 breaths per minute for a horse adult horse at rest okay and this is where it's important that you know your horse that you are going to take your horse's respiration rate at rest and so you know what's normal for your horse okay and then during heavy exercise that can increase as well and then this is just a real quick little science I had to throw a little science in here graph looking at the maximum so VO2 max is basically the maximum amount of oxygen that a horse can take in and they got fancy equipment that measures all this with exercise physiology and what you see the pink line is the VO2 max in an untrained horse the blue line is the VO2 max in a trained horse after two months okay of conditioning and what we notice is that the horse that's untrained essentially runs out of air so the plateau on both of those graphs is the horse is maxed out and no longer to keep up speed so these would have been done on a treadmill and so the horse is maxed out okay it's hit fatigue and so the fastest right the horse could go was 11 meters per second and the VO2 max was 120 okay we don't it's necessarily need to worry about the units there but after two months of conditioning the horse is able to go a meter per second faster as well as increase the amount of oxygen that they're taking into their body which is giving more oxygen to the body be available for use for exercise okay so that's an example of that the cardiovascular system we're gonna break down into just four parts the heart rate part size vascular vascularity and then red blood cell volume whoops so for the heart rate here's another another thing where you'll find a wide range of heart rate ranges if you look online but I typically teach 28 to 44 beats per minute and in my classes and again this is where you need to go and take your horses heart rate and know what's normal for your horses resting heart rate okay if your horses resting heart rate is typically 28 and then you go to take it and it's 46 44 even though that's in the range that's a little abnormal for your horse so understanding what your horses actual heart rate is and then the maximum heart rate for horses 220 to 260 beats per minute so something that's a little bit interesting if we look at human response cardiac response to training versus horses response to training if we have any human athletes out there we oftentimes will look at resting heart rate as an indicator of improving fitness right in humans for horses that doesn't really change so their resting heart rate is going to be the resting heart rate whether they are unfit and obese or if they're super fit okay so the resting heart rate for a horse and the max heart rate for a horse are not good indicators of fitness what is a good indicator of fitness in horses is the recovery heart rate so how quickly do they go from exercising whatever their exercise heart rate as their max heart rate down to back to their resting heart rate okay and then their heart rate during exercise all right and so we're gonna talk about those those types of things but in order to use this as a measure of fitness you have to write it down you have to track that okay so tracking the recovery heart rate of your horse tracking your horse's heart rate during exercise is useful and simple pretty simple indicator of being able to determine fitness levels of your horses okay this is another graph so this is looking at heart rate on the y-axis and then running speed on the x-axis and so the blue line is the untrained horse the red line is the trained horse and so what we can see here is at 160 beats per minute the blue line the untrained horse was only able to get to about 390 meters per second versus the horse after two months of training at that same heart rate of 160 beats per minute was able to run at a speed of 450 meters per minute okay and so that improvement in heart rate that's the example of the during exercise piece that is demonstrating an increase in fitness after two months of training the heart of the horse is about nine pounds okay and the size and weight of the horse's heart do increase in response to exercise and so typically we would see an increase in the size of the chambers of the heart and then hypertrophy or increase in size of the left ventricle which is the ventricle of the heart that pumps blood to the entire body okay so that's always going to be the thickest thickest chamber okay your thickest ventricle of the heart is that right ventricle as again it's pumping to the body the right excuse me the the right ventricle I'm is just pumping to the lungs so doesn't have as far to go so that left ventricular hypertrophy we call that is what you're going to see an increase in we also see the vascularity changing and so what will happen after consistent conditioning in some months some weeks after the horse has been fed you will see an increase in capillarization so basically an increase in capillary size and number to the muscle fibers and the reason that's happening is because now it's able to deliver more oxygen take away carbon dioxide and waste from the muscle and help improve the horses fitness in that way and then finally the last thing with horses is a red blood cell volume so red blood cells carry oxygen the hemoglobin on the red blood cells carry oxygen right throughout the horse's body for me for use during exercise metabolism the horses spleen so that's what is pictured here in the the top picture and then it's in situ or what it looks like in the horse's body down below and so the head it would be facing the left and then the tail okay to the right and so the screen of the horse stores up to one-third of the red blood cells that's produced in the horses body and so during an exercise event when we have or a stress okay that happens the horses autonomic or their automatic nervous system kicks in we have contractions of smooth muscles and the spleen contracts and then it releases additional red blood cells into the horses bloodstream so it's kind of got its own built-in like blood doping mechanism horses who are elite athletes or competing at quite a high level who have to have their spleen removed have a splenectomy for some reason for use of injury or disease are never going to be able to be that elite athlete like if you have a racehorse that has to have it spleen out its career is going to be over because you they no longer have that reserve of red blood cells and oxygen to get to their body they just run out of air they would just run out of air too quickly okay so onto the muscles so the musculoskeletal system so essentially we're talking about muscles tendons and ligaments and bone and so muscles the muscle size and strength and then the also the muscle fiber type can be impacted by conditioning tendons and ligaments so tendons are going to connect muscle to bone and ligaments are connect connecting bone to bone and then obviously the bone is just an important part of this whole thing I like this picture on the left-hand side with the saddle and the skeleton the super old saddle because this is a good demonstration of where the saddle sits right it's good to visualize this because the saddle is sitting in the middle of the horse's back should be sitting in the middle of the horse's back and the weakest part of the horse's back right is the lumbar vertebrae here okay where there's nothing underneath there's no ribs supporting it there's no hind legs supporting that part and that's oftentimes where like riding double or you know doing fun things with our horse maybe your kids doing that kind of stuff and so be mindful because that's the weakest part of the horse's back okay the lumbar vertebrae has really nothing to support underneath of it and so really considering considering that when we are doing things with our horses and so musculoskeletal responses to conditioning are going to take a little bit longer than the cardiovascular respiratory responses to training and so what we see obviously are going to be increased strength and suppleness I have a little asterik next to suppleness because you're not going to see increased in suppleness of the horse if you're not doing any exercises to increase their suppleness and flexibility it might be very fit cardiovascularly and their muscle strength but flexibility and suppleness wise if you're not doing anything to address that then that's not likely to improve drastically okay and then the tendons and ligaments in bone those structures are going to remodel or kind of grow and become stronger in response to the forces that are placed on it and so that's known as wolf's law and this is just a like a picture kind of of this so we want to in order for the horses bones to become stronger and their ligaments and tendons to kind of become stronger they need to have work right there needs to be increased stress and strain on them but there can't be too much stress and strain on them right so we want us to have this we have this curve we don't have to worry about the numbers on this but trying to keep it within that curve before this breaking point right we don't want to get to the point because we obviously can't just keep increasing stress and strain and the animal gets stronger and stronger and stronger there's a breaking point for that and that's when we see both tendons or we see suspense related injuries or we see fractures or we see things happen that are going to take a really long time to heal and so being mindful of that is also super important and with those types of things being mindful of the type of terrain that you are training your horse in and then showing your horse in right so if you are training your horse in like a nice supported sand slash dirt arena but then you go and compete on a much harder surface okay or vice versa there just is potential for impact on the horses horses limbs with that right so if you're training in a harder surface and then you go compete in super deep sand then you might risk an increase have an increased risk for like a bow tendon or something because your horse isn't accustomed or conditioned to that type of terrain so it's just important to be mindful of what your horse is exercising on in the surface that you're using the last thing just super briefly thermoregulation is important particularly in the summertime right there's four types radiation is just the solar energy essentially convection from the wind conduction surface surface and then evaporation the horses and humans are two of the most efficient sweaters and evaporative coolers on the planet and so this is good as long as the vapor pressure gradient or the humidity in the air is low if we have 95% humidity that evaporative cooling for the horse is not going to be super effective and so that's when we need to add things like posing them off okay that's conductive cooling so when you give your horse a bath after it's super hot and then you sweat scrape it off that water now is a lot warmer right that's because heat from the horse's body has transferred to the water also you can add a fan so that helps with convective cooling and getting him out of the sun okay so pretty basic information but I just kind of like to talk about that particularly the humidity even though horses are super awesome sweaters and that evaporative cooling is great it only works if there's a vapor pressure gradient that's high okay or works well okay so when we're thinking about vital signs for exercise the three that we want to track our heart rate respiration rate and temperature and so to measure your horse's heart rate you can do this a number of ways right the way that I like to do it is you count the number of beats and so one like boom boom that's one okay for your horse's heartbeat do 15 seconds and multiply by four to get to six so how many beats per minute there's lots and lots of pulse points on the horse's body and the most common ones are the facial artery so this is on the left hand side okay and those are both pictures of that so if you I usually take like two or three fingers that you put under midway in the horse's jaw and then you can feel that facial artery it's a little bit smaller I would say than my pinky fingers you can kind of roll your fingers over that and find it and then press gently up against the inside of the lower jaw to find that and then be mindful right a horse's heart resting heart rate is going to go boom boom boom boom right so it's not like ours where we feel it and so it can take a minute to make sure that that's what it is and sometimes what I will tell people it's easier exercise them first and then find it because then you can kind of find where it's at and then when they're resting when it's more difficult to find that try it again the transverse facial artery is another one that arteries not as big but again something that you can whoops you can use also a stethoscope the heartbeat actually right is one way to do that and so it you would kind of have to push that stethoscope up underneath the horse's elbow to listen for it there's also the radial artery that goes behind the horse's knee or purpose and then digital arteries as well and no matter where you take the horses pulse on the body it's all the same right if I take it a digital artery versus the facial artery it's all going to be the same because it's the heartbeat that's what we're that's what we're measuring okay there's also heart rate monitor first these are kind of cool this is a polar heart rate monitor it's about a $200 this can go underneath your saddle your tack and then there's apps on your phones you on your watches so you can during exercise kind of track your horses heart rate okay so that's one option for that and these are just some websites for a couple of different different heart rates respiration rates another thing that we need to be able to count okay and again respiration rate sometimes they will have my students will lunge the horses first or we'll turn them out in the arena so they get kind of go in a little bit and then it's easier to see their flank going up and down so if a horse is breathing eight times a minute that's can be kind of hard to see like did they take a breath what's going on some people will say put your hand under the horse's nostril to feel their breath that doesn't really work that well because what happens is they start smelling your hand and then you're getting a miscount of how many breaths per minute they actually are breathing in and so you can use the nostrils after hard exercise and nostrils are flaring but that's also pretty difficult to see a horse at rest breathing counting their nostrils they just aren't going to be flared and moving so the flank is really the the best place to do that and again having the horse exercise and then get an idea of what that looks like will be helpful temperature this is not something I would do like every time I ride my horse before and after right but it is a good idea to take your horse's temperature over a couple different days few different days at different two different ambient temperatures outside to get a good range of what is my horse's actual resting normal temperature so that you know that right that's just good information to have as well and so we typically say between 99 and 101 obviously the younger the animal these are going to be higher for respiration heart rate as well as temperature and so typically we say over 102 is a fever all right and there's people we can disagree on I guess the point whatever afterwards but typically 102 we would say okay when we think about how horses get energy to do the work that they're doing okay it's important to kind of understand us a little bit because it will it can change how you feed your horses right depending on what level you're looking at competing that so energy is ATP essentially denizen tri phosphate and so horses create that ATP by metabolizing or breaking down fuel stores in the body so the three fuel stores that we're talking about are carbohydrates and that stored in the muscle and the liver as glycogen so it's just a bunch of glucose molecules small sugar molecules into a big molecule fats are stored in the adipose or fat tissue as triglycerides and then proteins are stored in the muscles as amino acids and that has a little asterisk bite because we should our horses if horses are using proteins as their primary energy source they are starving like they're not in good shape so we're going to focus on the carbohydrates in the fat for this particular this particular talk and so it's important to just understand a little bit about the carbohydrates and fat because during exercise we're going to break down into aerobic exercise and anaerobic exercise and so during those two types of exercises horses use different or have access to different fuel stores in their body okay so when a horse is in aerobic exercise and that basically means that their heart rate is going to be less than about 150 feet per minute okay so they're aerobically exercising these are slower speed things right slower speed we're not this isn't like race horses or jumpers or barrel races anything like that they're going to be an anaerobic metabolism but for aerobic exercise the heart rate is a little bit lower it's a slower speed and oxygen is required we need oxygen the horse's body needs oxygen to break down those fuel stores and during aerobic exercise the horse can use all three of those energy stores it can use carbohydrates it can use fats and it can use protein okay but again we're focusing on the carbohydrates and fats because in a healthy horse that's what they should be using anaerobic exercise during anaerobic metabolism is when that horse starts to exercise harder and their heart rate is getting up over 150 feet per minute these are higher speeds more intense workouts oxygen is not required okay because it the reason is is it takes too long like this the process that's required for oxygen takes too long and during anaerobic exercise or when that horse's heart rate starts to get up they need energy more quickly and so oxygen is not utilized for this but the only fuel stores the horse can use for this are carbohydrates okay so glycogen's the only thing they can use and so part of what we want to do when we're exercising our horses is to increase their fitness level so they can stay in this aerobic metabolism okay or they're able to use all the sources but they're able to use carbohydrates and fats okay as energy and then they can save or spare that glycogen for that anaerobic work when that's the only thing they have the only option they have for fuel okay and so again when we look at this aerobic versus anaerobic metabolism okay what's happening in the horse's body this will depend on the intensity of the exercise like I said slower work less than 150 beats per minute for their heart rate aerobic metabolism and when we start to get up over that 150 beats per minute the body inside is having to kind of switch over where it's getting its fuel stores okay and so that happens with that heart rate and then the blood lactate level and lactate is a byproduct of anaerobic metabolism okay and so when and we're not I mean most people probably aren't going to be doing blood lactate on the horses but that gives us a good physiologic mark that we know when the horse's blood has a lactate concentration of four millimoles per liter or higher they are in anaerobic metabolism okay and and this is just a graph of what that kind of looks like so you can see it's pretty steady like their heart rate percent heart rate max the green line at the bottom and then when they hit that the rush holes where they're increasing that heart rate that lactate concentration in their blood is increasing significantly because now they're using anaerobic metabolism of that energy okay and so again having both so even if you only do even if you're showing just Western pleasure or if you're trail riding or like our therapy horses are not doing a lot of anaerobic metabolism in their workouts but what we can do during conditioning is if we push them into that anaerobic metabolism anaerobic exercise space they become fitter aerobically okay and then they can use those energy stores the glucose and the fats to metabolize those fuel stores for ATP and then save the glycogen for anaerobic work or really hard work when that's all they have is a choice okay and if we look at so there's many different like if you if you go online in Google conditioning for horses there's lots of different pyramids and theories and ways of doing things I like this one because it's pretty straightforward and so we're just gonna kind of go through this the stages of conditioning so this phase one or preliminary work we would consider as low intensity aerobic exercise and fairly constant so continuous exercise versus interval training and so we're gonna be doing a lot of walking and trotting this can be riding it could be lunging it could be long-lining it could be on a walk or a treadmill if you have access to that but benefits are going to be improving cardiovascular and muscular fitness okay and reducing the risk of injury because you're strengthening those muscles for the walk and trot okay and so depending on what this looks like if you have a younger immature horse right that could be a really long time three to twelve months because we have to be super mindful and young horses that we're not pushing them too far too quickly because then you have injuries pop up okay and then a month in a mature horse right so 45 minutes of walk and trot that they're able to do that consistently in a state where they're not like you know gasping for breath at the end of the at the end of the session right we want them to be fit and to improve on their fitness I also like to include so not only in the preliminary work but this will help with the the suppleness of the horse I would include this throughout everything that you're doing is the car carrot stretches or whatever you want to call them but just doing different stretches with your horses it's a good idea when you're starting these out if you haven't done these with the horse you have a panel or a wall they're up against because it's hard especially if they're super stiff and their muscles are not real flexible they're gonna want to swing their hind end to the opposite direction if you're asking them to turn their head one way or the other it also can help to have an assistant help hold your horse a little bit and so using the carrot to entice them or treat or whatever however do watch your fingers I my lovely student here Isabel did a little project last summer and she got bit pretty badly because she wasn't paying attention and so we also you can get like a I don't know a plastic jug or something and then like cut a hole in it if you've got a horse that's kind of a monster about treats and then you also do have to consider that because they sometimes can get a little mouthy so that's up to you about not using the treats but sometimes they need that motivation and then doing that repetition so starting slowly like three to five reps per exercise or whatever you have time to do right time is important and then increase the number of days a week that you're that you're and then also gymnastic work and so this is just like it sounds just kind of like gymnastics for horses so using ground poles logs if you have a farmer for access to like fallen trees as long as there's no spiky things sticking out of them okay and I actually like landscape timber so in the lower right hand corner I much prefer landscape timbers to round poles because the poles roll if a horse knocks them they roll and they can trip on them so really don't like a like a straight round pole I like that landscape timbers or there's actually jumping poles that are made that are octagon shaped those are a lot more expensive than the landscape timbers are and so what is important for gymnastic work however is to make sure that you're spacing between the poles is correct because if your spacing is incorrect for your horses gate you're gonna it's not gonna really be helpful okay and so these are just very starter spacings and you're gonna adjust those based on your horses gate and probably your discipline as well okay so we don't want the horses gate to be stifled when they're walking through these okay we want them to be able to walk a natural walk and so those are some suggestions to start with and then you can also I would start in straight lines having them go over the center but then you can increase like you can do it on a circle so that they are having to purposefully shorten or lengthen their stride okay but again just make sure you've got your spacing right and then gradually increase in the number of poles the first time you do this if your horse has never done pole work you're not gonna set up like 10 poles and expect them to go through it right you would set up two or three and then increase the number of poles that you are setting out there if they're successful at it okay and then you do it eight to ten times do something else come back eight to ten times a different way so you're not drilling it into their brain but you're giving them an opportunity to to expand their horizons when it comes to the work okay and then if we look at kind of going up that pyramid the developmental work or phase two you're going to start adding some cantering and suppling exercises okay and I guess I should mention so this is from a horse that wasn't had no fitness right like if your horse is already in pretty good shape you don't have to now go back and walk and chop them only for a month okay so this would be a horse that's kind of coming out of the pasture after winter so phase two with this developmental work adding cantering and suppling exercises and so these are just some examples right of some different things and I've got somebody in a western saddle and someone in dressage saddle and the thing is good horsemanship is good horsemanship and a horse that is supple and is broke can do a reigning pattern like maybe not with the sliding stop right okay but a dressage horse or a whatever really broke trailer ranch horse could do a dressage test they could do a reigning pattern those specific discipline things like a sliding stop or like you know a pirouette maybe they're not going to be able to do but those basic basic maneuvers all horses should be able to do those because that's just a demonstration of like brokenness and flexibility and good control that the horseman has and so again these are also things that you can just vary right your horses your horses routine up so they don't get bored of just going in a circle around the arena okay and so another thing that can be introduced is this interval training so this is what I talked about a little bit earlier we want to push our horses maybe into that anaerobic zone so that they're fitter for their aerobic respiration or their aerobic exercise and so you can have just like in humans right if anybody exercise if you have the the stair step or thing like you can plug it in and you can do a little bit low and then it goes really hard for a minute and then it comes back down again you need the same thing with your horses okay and so something might look like this so this has speed on the other side so you can just kind of ignore the speed because we're probably not most of us don't have a treadmill that we're using but you can have heart rate over there right and so you might walk job your horse for two minutes and then maybe you're gonna long chop them for two minutes and then you're gonna walk jog and then you're gonna long chop you know or whatever are you gonna canter you're gonna you're gonna low if you're gonna do different things in there that are going to increase their heart rate and get different metabolism working okay in there in their body as well and so the last phase then is gonna be like this fast intense work and so some horses maybe don't get here right like our therapy horses horses that are doing Western pleasure maybe Hunter under saddle are not gonna be necessarily doing these huge bursts of energy right for these very intense competitions if that's not something that that you're going to do with them maybe they don't even need to get here okay but if they do then that's something that certainly has to be practiced right and so another thing that we really I just want to sort of drive home is that you have to write the stuff down okay if you really want to track your horse's fitness you need to write it down because if you don't write it down unless you have some sort of an incredible brain and memory I cannot remember yesterday and so I can't remember what I did with my horse I write down what did we do how long did we ride right what was our our conditioning plan for that day and then heart rate before and heart rate immediately after right when you're done with exercise so writing those things down and then one minute five minute ten minute and I have a sheet on here that you guys can print and have and so it's also important to start slowly like you're not gonna pull your horse out of the pen or faster they've been sitting in for three months and like hop on and go for a six mile trail ride right that's probably not a not a great fair thing to do with that horse so starting slowly because think about you right like if you haven't done anything all winter and then you're like I'm gonna go take a little jog for six miles probably isn't gonna be great the next few days for you and so thinking about that with our horses right we need to consider consider their fitness level as well also understanding that to get fit like it takes work and it's uncomfortable but you're gonna gradually increase distance speed and incline if you have access to hills the little digression the race trainer that I worked for when I was in grad school many years ago we had to build a hill in uh college station Texas because there were no real hills and so Hank built us a hill we had to walk those horses up and down at like 10 times a day that was part of our training for those horses was to build their their quarter their hind muscles right their quarter horse resources and so those inclines can really help to develop that as well if you back to that and so this is just a a progress sheet that I just made okay that we did we do this with our program horses because again like our our therapy horses don't do a lot of intense work but they do have to be safe fit and they do have to stay sound and so it just gives you a little kind of sheet that you can kind of track what you're doing with horses and again the heart rate is the main thing that you want to be writing down and thinking about um as well and then oops also sorry one more thing at the bottom make sure that you're making a note of where you're doing this are you in the indoor um is was there a thunderstorm that day is it 85 degrees outside with 90 percent humidity right or is it like today when I woke up and it was 40 versus yesterday so you might look at your progress and go oh my gosh my horse's heart rate was super high yesterday we did you know the same thing today and it was not as high or vice versa right so that can give you a false sense of fitness when you look at that if the weather is drastically okay so that's important to note and then also a subjective assessment of their performance like did something seem weird or off that day um that's right you know your horses and if something seems funny you should make a note of that and then just kind of be mindful about that for next time this is just a little kind of a chart of recovery of vital signs and what we want to see so by 20 or 30 minutes that horse should definitely be back to normal if at um zero minutes like immediately when you're done exercising one minute five minutes their heart rate has not significantly come down or the respiration rate is still high that's telling you that you probably you push them too hard that day so then you need to go back and look at what you have planned and then revise that for your next okay and so this is just a sample for an unfit horse so just starting again with 30 minutes four or five times a week walking adding trotting so you can see we're adding trotting and then we're adding cantering and we're adding the amount of time that we're riding so it's just super gradual kind of thing that you might do with your horses and then also so that walking doesn't have to just be walking around right that's where we can include some of that gymnastic work at the walk or walking outside or doing different things in the arena with your horse and then signs of fatigue so again we already mentioned an elevated pulse or body temperature that does not decrease and so if you're in a situation and this typically wouldn't happen unless it's super super hot outside but if your horse is not cooling down and that is not dropping it's very important to get them out of the sun get cool water on them and get a fan on them okay get their body cooled down right away that would be pretty rare I think that would happen up here in North Dakota but in the southern states for sure if you're taking your horse someplace that's super hot and they're not used to that to be mindful of that if there's ever an inversion of heart and respiration rate so if your horse's respiration rate is higher than the heart rate you should call the vet like that's that's bad that's not good and again that wouldn't be an expectation from a typical conditioning program at all if they seem weak if there is excessive sweating for the amount of work that you did if they don't want to move their muscles start to cramp up and they're just not able to do something that they usually can do okay so those are all red flags and so then just in summary I would say just to revisit those conditioning consideration slides okay before you begin and then working gradually looking to monitor progress by writing it down and that heart rate is is our most important thing that we want to look at there and then these are just some online resources that are good so Kentucky equine research my horse university is a collection of equine extension agents from around the country that put together really great information so you can check that out and you can search anything probably and that will come up there and then the horse is another is a publication that's got some pretty good information uh stretches again you can find the carrot stretches there's videos online I think that are probably more helpful there is also a very cool pbs video did a pbs did a series with the bbc called inside natures giants where they dissect different animals and so they do a horse dissection on there but of a race horse and so um I know some people don't want to see a dissection or the insides of a horse or look at that but if if you do it's very very interesting they do the lung expansion they look at the legaments the legaments and the tendons the guts so everything so it's a pretty cool thing they also do a sperm whale and um squid so there's lots of animals but it's just really interesting I think to see that anatomy in the horse it helps you understand a little bit more and give you a better appreciation for what what is going on with your horse and then these are again there's so much out there for resources but these are a few that I really like there's a book equine fitness and it even has some like fitness training cards in there and then 101 western dressage exercises for horses and riders you can do just regular dressage too right it's um it it doesn't matter so those are all just really good exercises for your horse on the ground training exercises for every horse and handler cherry hill's got some great and these are great like you can keep them by the arena they're spiral bound and that's one page of the next it's when you go to the next one and then there's a core conditioning for horses as well that I have and with that I would be happy to answer any questions I went a couple minutes long sorry so we have like six minutes I think it looks like for questions there are quite a few in the chat box or goals that people mentioned and then a couple have come to me privately so I'll just go down the list and read them to you and and kind of rapid fire weak and handsome okay um how long should you walk or trot before going to a higher speed so again that's going to kind of okay sure so that'll depend on your like the horse's fitness level right and so the the that sample program that I showed you guys was from a veterinarian that recommended for a horse that was like just coming back to work right and so so not to say like you can't can't do your horse for five weeks because they're not fit enough and so that is going to be something where you would know your horse but I would do like a lot of walking a lot of long trotting um and then you certainly can introduce right you know cannery in there but if your horse is coming off of doing nothing all winter long I sort of I mean not to answer for more but I kind of think about like with with humans when you're coming back to to a fitness program right you're not going to like go hard right away because then you're going to increase the chance of injury the reason that we want to start slowly the reason that we want to go gradually is because we want to reduce the risk of injury for our horses okay so again that's not to say don't cannery your horse for a month but just be mindful of how much you're asking them to do based on their fitness level their age and all those things okay another one that came in is on average how long does it typically take to get a horse to peak performance one month two months three months okay so again that's like um totally going to depend right but so we so we start to see those improvements and cardiovascular changes like from those graphs that we noticed like two months right we can see a significant improvement if that horse is being worked like consistently we can't do once a week and then expect that their oxygen consumption is going to improve drastically by two months right they need to have consistent work you know three to five days a week to have that increase in cardiovascular fitness and respiratory fitness and then musculoskeletal fitness so that's going to take longer so seeing you know improvements in strength is going to take a longer period of time so we did a little project last summer with our therapy horses who were they're overweight and very out of shape but we just walk trotted them they're also are older we just walk trotted them on a lunge line from like 20 to 20 to 30 minutes and we saw in over an eight week period so two months a significant improvement in their fitness and their weight that was lost um their flexibility when we did the carrot stretches was a subjective measurement right we didn't like objectively measure that with anything but we definitely there was a difference from the first day of starting those carrot stretches to the end and then just their movement and flexibility so there's eight weeks you know six to eight weeks i would expect um before we saw like real visible types of of changes right so probably a minimum of four but again that depends how often are you working how consistent are you being all that stuff another question was is there a difference between older horses versus younger horses and how quickly they can um get back into shape yes for sure and so with younger horses so depending how young they are right because we have to think about the skeletal system the skeletal maturity of those bones okay and so too much too fast on either a young horse or an old horse is not going to be good pardon the phone um and so taking into consideration you know the actual age of that horse and thinking about like with both of those i would you really want to make sure that you're that you're going at a pace that is not going to increase the risk of injury for them and so for both a younger and an older horse groundwork great depending on how old they are like our older therapy horses we don't ride them like they don't need to be ridden they're 29 and they do the littles but they do need some fitness they need to be long line we long line them or do some lunging with them to try to keep that fitness up and so because the skeletal structure of a three-year-old is much different than a 20-year-old right and so there's a lot of difference there that's not that's like a non-answer sorry no it depends like my answer for everything yes if there's any other questions feel free to put them in the chat box or unmute your microphone and ask them i have one more here on my list and the question is how do you know if you've overdone it okay so how do you know if you've overdone it with your horse so i would say like their behavior right is going to be one thing and that might their willingness to to perform so probably the next day or the day after if they have if their muscles are really sore right um that's not going to show up right away that's going to show up the next day or two days later and so noticing how they are when you ride them the next time can be an indicator if you're doing the heart rate thing and that would be one indicator that the heart rate didn't come down right away like it should okay or it's staying elevated for 10 minutes that's a very good indicator that that was too much but if you don't have access to that or you didn't take their heart rate that day or whatever thinking about like their muscle soreness are they willing to move are they not willing to move what is is kind of going on there and again part of that is going to have to be that they're going to do things that they don't want to do right so you have to kind of know your horse and know are they just being they just being stubborn and don't feel like doing it that day or is something super painful and that's why right and so if something's super painful um you know some horses are real stoic and they're just going to like push through and do it whereas others are like i can't that hurts too much and maybe it's not you know as big of a deal as you think it is so just knowing your horse is really important with that as well all right thank you i think i got through all of them in the chat if i missed any again please feel free free to unmute or to type it in again otherwise i think that's all that was on the list that came to me okay any last minute questions all right seeing none thank you so very much yes thank you and if anybody has other questions you can feel free to email me as well or email any of these women and they can get in touch also so thanks everybody