Are you getting the best out of your training time? Leading Australian trainer (and competitor) Michael Baker suggests that by applying the principles of human sports training, we can greatly increase the level of fitness - and improve skill levels - in our horses.

I think we should take a look at training the horse, from a slightly different point of view, and break the process up, and examine the three sections of training, and see how each acts upon the horse.

The sections I've broken the training into are: strength training, aerobic fitness and skill training. Along with these three areas, the other really important factor is suppleness.

If we look at the training of human athletes, those are the four aspects of fitness. If we look at any sport there are different levels of fitness, and different emphasis on the aspects of fitness.

In some sports the emphasis is on the strength training - like the weight lifters - then there are sports that require some of each, and then sports that are almost entirely endurance, like your endurance runner. A footballer needs both, he needs short spurts of intense activity, where he has to leap or sprint, but he also needs the endurance to keep going throughout the game. The endurance runner just has to sustain a level of work over a long time.

Now if we take those three models, and look at our horses, what do we find? The showjumper, for instance, is a little more like a weight lifter. The horses aren't expected to work on the course for a long time, they canter along between the fences for a short period, then they need lots of instant strength to negotiate the fence. There is not a lot of endurance involved. If we look at dressage then we find an activity that is more to the middle but still leaning toward strength, where you've got horses that are required to perform piaffe, pirouette, passage and flying changes, where they require a lot of strength over a short period, then they might have a period of collected trot, then some more piaffe or they might have to jump in the air for a flying change, another short burst of strength.

Then we have the eventers, and we are really getting towards a horse that needs a lot more endurance, but we've also still got the dressage and showjumping where the horse is going to need the strength training. The interesting thing is that horses are just like the humans in terms of shape. The physique of the eventing horse is a little bit like the physique of a footballer or even getting towards the look of an endurance runner - while the physical type of the showjumper is starting to get more like that of the weight lifter, they are big strong horses, and the same with a dressage horse.

If we can compare the horses with the humans that way, then it makes sense in our training to think about how we can help our horses in those particular sports - how we can use the types of exercises we do to build up the specific muscle shapes the horses need.

With a showjumper, then we should be thinking about that sort of strength, weight training, and that is where we use our grid - you can look at the grid and think of each fence as a repetition. When a human does a weight training session, then there are a certain amount of 'reps' which make up a number of 'sets'. You might do eight reps, then have a break, and those eight reps make up a set. You might end up doing three sets, with a minute's break between each set.

At the moment we tend to jump our horse until it is tired, and that is not all that scientific, but if we start to compare with humans, and think about how many fences we've actually jumped, and not concentrate so much on the skill factor, and go go go until we get it right. Think instead about the fitness factor and jump the horse three or four times down the line, then have a look at your watch and think about how that has affected the horse, give him a break and let him recover before you start again.

If you look at the racing industry, it's very scientific how they train their horses, and I think there is a lot of improvement we could make inthe fitness of our performance horses, whether it be for dressage or eventing or showjumping.

With a dressage horses we can also look at the concepts of repetitions. With a novice horse, then transitions might be one of those strength rep exercises, in a downwards transition the horse has to bear more weight behind, engage a little more. Something as simple as a trot-to-walk transition might be quite demanding enough for a young horse, and every 'rep' of that transition is going to be tiring. Count the number of reps, give your horse a break, don't keep practising it until you get it 'right' because if the horse gets tired it might just keep getting worse and worse.

For a more advanced, then look at exercises like piaffe and passage, think not just how well the movement is going skill-wise, but for how long you have been doing it. I'm sure all experienced riders have felt how towards the end of a session, the horse does start to tire and you do feel things fall apart. You'll feel somewhere in the middle of the session where the horse peaks, where it is warmed up and feeling strong physically and mentally, before it has gone so far that it is tired and struggling with the movements. It's at that peak when you try to compete the horse.

So there is a definite period that is just warmup, stretching and loosening, then a peak work time, and you can actually prolong that by cutting it into sections, and refreshing the horse in between the sets.

With the eventer, it is very tricky to organize a working program that incorporates all the skills and attributes you need for the competition.

Talk to other event riders, and you'll find that they have had to compromise their program - you could improve certain areas, but for the fact that today is an endurance day, and you can't leave that part out, that is essential to the fitness level. So you have to cut back that day on skill training for the dressage or strength training for the showjumping.

Once you get serious about three day eventing, then you cannot compromise your endurance part of their fitness. It is just not fair to take the horse to a three day event if he is not ready for that endurance phase - you have to protect his soundness.

So endurance is a fixed part of your program, then you have to fit the dressage and showjumping, skills and strength components, around that. Obviously you will help the horse's endurance level with the dressage work. There are a lot of eventers who count their dressage as a very important part of their endurance work, Matthew and Heath Ryan were strongly of this opinion. I don't know Matt's current thinking, but I know Heath's horses now go out and do road work, specifically endurance work, whereas Heath used to do a lot more flatwork as endurance work.

It really is a balancing act, and how you break that up with an eventer, is going to depend on where you think the horse is weakest, whether you concentrate more on the jumping, or the dressage side, you've only got so many days a week when you've got time to devote to skills training.

The suppleness area is going to be much the same for all three disciplines. I think you could design a warmup for an eventer that would be identical for a showjumper or dressage horse. We've talked in the past about making a horse long and low, and that's essential no matter what discipline you are working in.

Suppleness is a very important part of any workout for a human, and there is no reason for it to be any different for a horse. It does have an important role in the shape of the muscles that develop. If you start doing a lot of the strength work without the stretching, then you might lose some of the flexibility, so the warmup is really vital.

The endurance side of eventing varies too. Most of the eventers follow some type of interval training, and at the moment it's probably only during the interval training that the rider actually looks at a watch and starts timing the sessions. If we are going to be a bit more scientific, we should start timing our work on the flat, it would be interesting to know how long we spend on each gait, how long the breaks are, how many breaks in each session.

We did some tests with Liz Owens in her capacity as nutrition adviser to the Australian team, and they had someone watching us, and analysing how much feed we were using in relation to the work we were doing. They timed the session, the exercises, how many fences jumped. It made me a lot more aware. At the end of every session I'd have a chat with the person who was observing, and at the first session, I really had no idea of how much time I'd spent on each effort. I guessed that I'd jumped 20 something fences, and it turned out the real figure was in the mid 70's, three times as many jumps as I thought I had jumped. If I'd been a human hurdler, I bet I would have known how many times I had jumped!

I understand they found with the event riders that they all under estimated the number of jumps they have performed, and over-estimated the amount of time they had spent on their dressage.

Now when I get on the horse, I look at my watch and I think about how much time I spend in each gait. If I have been working the horse regularly for 45 minutes, and this day, I feel I have achieved everything there is to achieve in 35 minutes, then I will take it for a ten minute trot down the road; if he still feels fresh, and I've covered everything I wanted to do, I just go and do that extra work so you are thinking not just about his dressage but also his fitness.
It becomes not just a dressage day, it is part of that total training.

And it is the same with the endurance work, I think because of my training with Heath, then the endurance work still has to help the dressage because I never let the horse come off the bit. That for me has always been an instinctive thing - if you are on the horse's back, then he's on the bit. Even when you are working the horse on a longish rein, it still has to be done the right way, never just let the rein go and kick the horse along. One thing we should be trying to discover is, for the horse's way of learning, what is the ideal number of repetitions. When we are introducing something that is new, say we are trying to get a rein back, and we are starting to get those first few steps and the horse is trying to work out in his mind what it is all about, then how many times in that first session is ideal, how many times before the horse stops coping mentally? This will vary from horse to horse, but I'm sure there will be an ideal.

I think we should start finding those ideal numbers. Okay, horsemen have that feel, but we can incorporate a lot more scientific precision into what we do in our training. We've done it with human athletes, now is the time to apply that same knowledge to our horses.

The really tricky thing about dealing with Thoroughbreds is that even when the body might have had enough, the mind and the way the horse reacts, says the opposite. Those 'hotter' horses try to tell you that they are not tired, even when they are. With the human athletes, we huff and puff, our adrenalin levels go down, and we sit down and have a rest. With the Thoroughbred the body can start to get tired, but the mind keeps spinning. It's the nature of the beast. You can get caught working away at something, thinking that the horse has got miles of energy, because of the Thoroughbred's never-say-die temperament, but in actual fact - physically - you have gone way too far. You might not know it when you are working the horse, but that's when he starts to lose weight - that's one of the signs that you have overdone it.

That's the other thing Liz Owens was doing, was weighing the horses. Again, in the Thoroughbred Racing industry, a lot of the trainers find that when the horse is at peak fitness and winning races, that is related to an ideal weight. Lots of the trainers won't start the horse unless his weight is right, it's an integral part of their training regime. I know the eventers are starting to do this with their horses, but why not the showjumpers and the dressage horses too?

In the world of human athletics, training methods and philosophies have changed so much in the past twenty, or even more in the past ten years, but in the horse world you still find riders boasting that they are strictly using training methods that are hundreds of years old.
Does that make sense?

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