Judging their fitness

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Alphamare

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How do you judge your horses fitness? Or unfitness?

Blowing or puffing after fast work? After trot or canter only?

Sweating? Where and how much? My boys are sweaty around the girth and under the saddle after most rides anyway so I don't know if I use this to guage fitness.

Keeness to work? Do they come back still ready to go or do you aim to bring them back tired or having slowed down?

Do you measure work done by distance, time or speed? An hour spent walking isn't the same as an hour of trotting. 10 miles walking vs 3 miles trotting. How do you build and manage your horses fitness?
 
If you truly want to know, heart rate and recovery is the way to go.

Depends on what you are doing and what you need to be fit for.

Interval training and monitoring their heart rate and time to recover is useful especially coming out of the winter before the first ODE
 
Could you explain how to take a horses pulse and how to evaluate their pulse recovery? I don't think this is used by the average rider to gauge fitness but that's why I asked what and how people gauge their horses fitness.
 
Watching this with interest!took my horse to the gallops today and would have thought he was relatively fit,but he's obv only fit for what he's used to if u know what I mean!cos the galloping tired him quicker than I expected!I wasn't going flat out More interval training but even still!I thought it would be similar to me-i can walk about 3 miles briskly and barely notice it but I bought a skipping rope recently and it kills me quickly!
 
Alphamare said:
Could you explain how to take a horses pulse and how to evaluate their pulse recovery? I don't think this is used by the average rider to gauge fitness but that's why I asked what and how people gauge their horses fitness.
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It easier if you have one of the girth monitors but you still can do with a stethoscope. You often you find endurance are the best folks to ask about it as they take it seriously.

http://www.distanceriding.org/php/articles/condition/RandR.pdf
 
Normal everyday riders don't judge fitness with a stethoscope or heart rate monitor that i have ever seen or heard so I would be interested to hear from people who don't use these tools. How do you judge your horses fitness without being able to check their heartrate?
 
I have got my horse fit and before I got into endurance I didn't know anything about heart rates or heart rate monitors.

The way I judged his improving fitness was how he handled the things we were doing and by gradually increasing what I was asking him to do.

So, for example, we have a hill that we have to climb to get to the top of the Downs. We started walking up the hill and had to stop near the top for him to catch his breath. Gradually he didn't need to stop, so we started trotting up part of it, then walk, then trot. As he got fitter, we could trot the whole hill.

I also used things like how many laps of the school we could do at canter without him breaking to trot, how much we could do before he was a bit breathless.

If you are doing quite a bit of hacking, it isn't difficult to use certain parts of the hack to judge if he is able to go faster or if he finds it easier as he gets fitter. Use certain places to compare from week to week.
 
It depends what you are doing, planning to do and on the individual horse.
I have several in work, all are fit enough to do what is required on a daily basis but are all at the stage of increasing their work and fitness levels in order to compete, for various reasons they have been late getting up to full work this year. They are all or will be doing Novice dressage, BE 90 level comps.
One is an older experienced horse who has evented to Int level he hardly ever blows even after fast work, has a very good recovery rate and is easy to get fully fit but he sweats heavily so that is not a real guide with him as to how fit he is.
Next horse is coming back after injury having been in work for 3 months he has not yet started cantering but is able to trot up a very steep hill now without tiring so I know he is building up his overall fitness, he is very well muscled now and feels full of energy.
Third horse has been ticking over with a few short breaks, he has done nearly all the daily fitness work with horse two but is so lazy he does not put in the same effort so despite starting off being fitter and doing some extra work he seems less fit and has to do far more to increase his overall fitness, he puffs and blows after cantering with a longer recovery rate than horse one but less sweating.
I judge how they feel, how they recover, how they look and increase the work as required to try and make sure they are fit enough to do the job required, easy with horse one, proving harder with horse three.
 
Alphamare said:
How do you judge your horses fitness? Or unfitness?

Blowing or puffing after fast work? After trot or canter only?

Sweating? Where and how much? My boys are sweaty around the girth and under the saddle after most rides anyway so I don't know if I use this to guage fitness.

Keeness to work? Do they come back still ready to go or do you aim to bring them back tired or having slowed down?

Do you measure work done by distance, time or speed? An hour spent walking isn't the same as an hour of trotting. 10 miles walking vs 3 miles trotting. How do you build and manage your horses fitness?
Click to expand...

Jnhuk said:
If you truly want to know, heart rate and recovery is the way to go.

Depends on what you are doing and what you need to be fit for.

Interval training and monitoring their heart rate and time to recover is useful especially coming out of the winter before the first ODE
Click to expand...

Alphamare said:
Normal everyday riders don't judge fitness with a stethoscope or heart rate monitor that i have ever seen or heard so I would be interested to hear from people who don't use these tools. How do you judge your horses fitness without being able to check their heartrate?
Click to expand...

I was only answering your post OP and trying to be helpful and I did state in my first reply if you truly wanted to know the details, that was the way to go.

But if you don't want specifics then go with your gut feel and btw I am a normal everyday rider ;)
 
Personally I actually plan on doing some endurance with my youngster next year so will be spending the summer (should we get some) looking into what it entails so will probably be going down the stethoscope route myself. I was thinking of others who may be reading this thread as it could potentially be helpful to many people.
 
I find that you can tell how they recover without heartrate to a certain extent, and I say that as someone who does endurance. In fact, I only bought one after having started doing race rides to aid me through the vet gates.
If you have a very forward going horse, you need to be careful that you don't allow them to push themselves past there fitness levels, which mine all will if you allow them to.
I look at breathing after fast work, and how quickly they come back to normal.
Our old girl has breathing issues, and is an absolute devil for trying to gallop herself into the gound, so she has to come back pulling, as she is often far more tired than she lets on.
I also find that you need to do a mixture of work, mine would often be hacking/galloping fit, but not what I would call schooling/jumping fit, as I do limited jumping and circle work.
 
zaminda said:
I find that you can tell how they recover without heartrate to a certain extent, and I say that as someone who does endurance.
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Yup. And in fact pulse monitors can over-simplify things as they are only part of the picture. How the horse that is underneath you is reacting is far more important than the numbers on the screen...

It's actually better for your own knowledge to get a 'feel' for how they're coping and then the numbers can be backup/context rather than your main focus.
 
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