Basic Conditioning (was: Conditioning Tips/Schedules for The Full Time Worker)

["guest@endurance.net" <guest@endurance.net>]

K S SWIGART   katswig@earthlink.net

I must confess to being of the opinion that cardiovascular
conditioning is totally unimportant to the endurance horse.

Here is my maxim:

"School the mind, condition the legs."

In my experience, if your horse is doing work properly to achieve 
these two things, then all the other things, including sufficient
cardiovascular conditioning, will automatically follow.

When I decide the appropriate pace at an endurance ride, I
am much more concerned about running my horses legs off than I 
am about running his heart out.  

In the thousands of miles I have done of endurance competition, I have but once been pulled for metabolic reasons on a horse 
that I have conditioned--and in that instance, I pulled my horse
because she wasn't eating, and the one of the ways that I knew 
there was something wrong with the horse was that her heart 
rate "recoveries" were way too fast (I have a horse that the 
more tired she gets, the more quickly she meets HR criteria).  The metabolic pull had absolutely nothing to do with 
cardiovascular conditioning.

What I have found is that if I ride my horse to maximize its
cardiovascular conditioning, it is very easy to "over ride" its
musculoskeletal system, but if I ride my horse to maximize
it musculoskeltal conditioning, the cardiovascular system will
perform just fine.  And if I never "over ride" the horse's
musculoskeletal system, I will never even come close to taxing
the cardiovascular system.

So, I cannot agree with Truman that cardiovascular conditioning
is "basic conditioning" for an endurance horse.  In my experience
if I condition a horse's legs for the effort, cardiovascular 
conditioning can safely be ignored; while the reverse most 
definitely cannot be said.  If I condition my horse to maximize
its cardiovascular fitness, I will run its legs off.

However, on a separate note, I cannot agree with the statement
that 40 minutes of arena work is worth 2 hours on the trail. 
As one of my other maxims is:

"My horse will learn more in a day out on the trail, than it 
will in a month in an arena."

As I have, on many occasions, had the opportunity to watch dressage
trainers attempt to engange their horses hind ends with month's of
incessant arena work; and I can achieve the same thing in a
week's (3-4 days a week) worth of walking the horse up and down a 
really steep hill for about 15 minutes a day.  And I suspect
that the reason for this is I have yet to find an arena that
has a 13% (the flattest trail I have) grade.  So if my trails
didn't have any more slope to them than an arena does, maybe I
would feel differently.

But maybe the difference is that when I take my horses out
on the trail I make them WORK (includes both schooling the mind
and conditioning the legs)--we don't go out for light hacks.

I reserve hacking for endurance rides :).

kat
Orange County, Calif.

p.s.  I am also of the opinion that it is possible to school the
mind in an arena, and it is possible to condition the legs in
an arena too...except for the part of conditioning that has to
be done on hard ground...and some hard ground conditioning is
fairly important if the ride is going to include any going
on hard ground (some may not).  So if, as Susan suggests, you 
have access to an arena and a stretch of hardish road; you can
adequately condition your horse for endurance (assuming that it
doesn't bore both you and the horse silly).