You're reading this article because, either you want to lose weight, improve your health or be a better rider-maybe all three. The thing is that working your horses already makes you so damned tired. You don't have the time or energy to fit in daily exercise in addition to riding. Hmmm, maybe you do? Some riders working with the same twenty four hours you do, are able to maintain their slim fitness by fitting in an exercise regime despite; commuting, coping with horses, a career, family, girlfriend, boyfriend or whatever. Maybe you just think riding itself is enough fitness for anybody. Anyway, how do you go about it?

I spoke with some of our elite riders to find out what they are actually doing: Colleen Brook a veteran show jumping rider, reminded me that riding itself is an athletic activity-especially riding 8-12 rounds at a show in an afternoon. Colleen rides six or seven horses daily and does chores around the stable which she feels keeps her in shape, though she admitted that she probably could be a bit fitter. Colleen added, "Most horse-people are used to focussing on the horse and tend to forget about themselves and their own fitness."

I also spoke to Olivia Bunn the young rider who rode Braveheart in the individual three-day event at the World Equestrian Games in Rome. Olivia finished eighth in a truly great performance. She finished on her dressage score with clear cross-country and show jumping rounds. Olivia tells me she rides six or seven horses daily and tries to find the time to run three times a week. When I ask, "How far?" she laughs good naturedly and says "Hmmm, better not quote me on that." Olivia likes to gallop her horses about every fourth day when she's preparing for a major event. She feels that is good fitness work for the rider.

Dale Cooper from Scone is an endurance rider and rode for Australia in Dubai. Dale says it took her a full two years to get into shape for endurance riding. When competing she often dismounts and runs the downhills to spare her horse. She doesn't ride six horses a day but Dale does cover 20-40 km in training when she saddles up. In an equestrian sport where personal fitness is crucial Dale jogs up to 10 km daily with her teenaged son, probably more fitness work than most riders.

Given that many of our top riders are doing a lot of riding- six or seven horses daily-that is probably fitness enough. Though who's to say they couldn't be better? Certainly for the 2000 Olympics our opposition will have the best trainers, coaches and advice their countries can offer. Everyone who's there will be fit to compete.

It is obvious that some of our elite riders do make an effort to be fit, while others rely on their riding to keep them in shape. What does it mean for you? Well, the first thing that's relevant is that fitness is harder to maintain as you age. Youth is fitness. Your body is designed to be at its peak in your prime reproductive years- teens and early twenties. From then on everyone ages with an accompanying loss of endurance, loss of muscle tone and loss of youthful strength. It's true, you have it all in your teens and it goes down hill from then on! Despite this Heather Turland had four children before she even took up running; then won the Commonwealth Games marathon last year at the age of 38! It can be done, but like everything that's worthwhile, you gotta work at it.

If you're a slim, trim nineteen and bursting with good health and energy then riding daily is probably enough exercise to keep you in tip-top form. The rest of us need something extra to get into shape and to be athletic enough to ride well. I'm over fifty and sure that if I wasn't swimming regularly, I wouldn't be riding at all-let alone competing in Horse Trials. I wouldn't be riding because my back would be too painful. One of our national endurance riders is a hardy 64 and there are many horsemen in their eighties like Bill Roycroft who still ride. To keep riding you have to be fit enough to do so.

Doesn't riding get you fit enough? You ask. If you're not already young and fit then the short answer is no. Well, not unless you are riding a lot of horses. Riding does work your legs, and a horse that pulls works your arms and back too. The thing is, riding is not very effective as an aerobic exercise compared with running and swimming, so you would have to ride a heck of a lot on a daily basis to get fit from it. You'd need to be galloping every other day, so you'd need something like six or more horses in hard training to remain fit yourself. Even then riding is an unbalanced exercise-it only works certain muscles and the legs far more than the arms and back. You still need some upper body exercise even if you had six eventers in work.

I knew a young woman in the Canadian Olympic eventing team who rode trackwork on racehorses. In that case galloping several race horses every day plus her own horses and farm chores got her extremely fit for riding. She'd jog the cross-country course herself a couple of times before she rode it. Here in Australia I don't recommend riding race work. A lot of trackwork is ridden here in the dark because the grounds- maintenance crew start at 8 am and horses have to be off the track then.

Now anyone who has ridden flat chat in the pitch dark on an unschooled two-year-old, with other barely-controlled horses on the same track, will understand what I mean. It's thrilling alright! I'm sure the rest can imagine what it's like. There are accidents every morning on the city tracks-you'd be unlikely to make it unscathed. Besides the pay for risking your neck is the pits.

Why do you need to be fit to ride?

Well, you don't need to be fit if you're just riding for fun. If you compete you do have an obligation at the very least to your horse, to ride at your lightest weight and not be the weak link of the athletic partnership-an obligation to be as fit as your horse. You need to maintain your body in good shape to be able to continue to ride as you get older and to be athletic enough to ride well right now.

Certainly one reason for riders to exercise is to control their weight. This is best done through a combination of exercise and diet. The more you exercise the less excess and unhealthy food you are likely to consume. If that's not enough, then consider back problems that are endemic to riders. Almost every veteran rider I know has a bad back as a result of accumulated damage from falls, violent twists on the end of a lead rope and other incidents from working around horses. Back problems are common in the population at large; though they do seem to be more of a problem with horsemen. Riding certainly aggravates a bad back. Medically it is now recognised that the human back needs to be kept supple through all its planes of motion by regular exercise- preferably unloaded exercise like swimming or callisthenics.

The most obvious reason to be fit is to have the strength to ride well, even when you're tired. Fatigue sabotages effort-you can't summon the emotional energy or the strength to perform at your peak. I'm sure we've all had that moment on course when you're near the end, tired as all hell, your courage is fading with fatigue and you just can't focus your effort quick enough to get your horse balanced and set up properly for the next jump. Bang, and over you go! There must be similar telling moments in endurance riding and other horse sports, though I am not personally aware of them.

Fatigue is not just a muscular thing, your mind becomes unfocussed, you make dumb decisions on the fly and your courage wanes. The bottom line is that you certainly do need to be fit to ride endurance, polo or cross-country competitively. Fitness also help to retain the muscle tone, balance and sharp reactions needed in all horse sports.

How fit do you need to be?

There have been metabolic studies of riding to determine the effort involved. Lynn Gunning and Kenneth Graham of the NSW Institute of Sport have published one study of riders competing in Horse Trials [Australian Sports Medicine Conference 1997]. Elite riders during the steeplechase and cross-country had heart rates that reached their personal maximum. This indicates the sport is physically demanding-which is not news to anyone who's ridden in three-day event. What component of heart rate was driven by psychological reactions and what was metabolic though is anybody's guess, since there can be genuinely life-threatening situations on course.

Considering the effort involved, as a rule of thumb for an eventer , you should to be able to jog the cross-country as your second "walk" of the course. Then ride your horse in the competition without finishing unduly fatigued. That is without even once failing to set your horse up properly for a fence. This is a minimum test for eventing.

For endurance riders who dismount and run the tougher sections of the course, I think you'd need to be able to jog regularly about 10 km two or three times a week. This is about right for the fitness needed by polo players too, who play hard, often at the gallop, for a full four chukkas. Perhaps a show jumping rider doesn't need the same aerobic fitness but they certainly do need to be light and to be doing a lot of competitive riding. For other riders; dressage, polocrosse and hacking, light body weight and good muscle tone are probably more important than aerobic fitness- though any serious competitive rider should be fit enough to jog at least 3-5 km.

What's the best exercise for riders?

So far I've mentioned running and riding as suitable exercise-they are the most specific. Though, if you are overweight, or have back or leg strain, then neither are a good option. To decide what exercise suits you, you need to define your main objective; weight loss, rehabilitation or aerobic fitness? Optimum exercise for each purpose is somewhat different, though there is overlap. Your program is going to be more effective if you can figure out your priorities. The other essential ingredient is that your exercise program has to be fun. If you don't like doing it-you won't keep doing it, and then it has no value.

Weight loss. At a most basic level, weight loss is about using more energy in movement than you take in as food- the difference is found from your body stores of fat. That's a simplistic analysis, there is far more to it: Firstly, exercise tends to rev body metabolism, by requiring energy for tissue repair (adaptation) in addition to the energy used in the initial performance. This revving effect can last for days and use as much energy as the original performance. So you can pretty much double any published figures on the energy cost of activities. That's why calorie counters tend to undervalue the real energy cost of exercise.

Another aspect is that your appetite centre of the brain works most effectively, matching food needs to daily energy expenditure, when it is in a rather high range of energy expenditure. It's like the speedometer of your car; at 100 km/hr the device is most accurate, while dribbling around the shopping centre in first gear the speedometer is grossly inaccurate. In our evolution we have expended a lot of energy finding food. A sedentary lifestyle throws the appetite centre right out. Those people who don't exercise tend to have poor control of their eating habits. So this is a powerful effect of exercise-bringing your appetite in line with your real energy requirements.

To design an exercise regime for weight loss, the exercise needs to be more frequent and more gentle than one geared for aerobic fitness. This means exercising daily, walking or cycling rather than running, swimming rather than weight training. For women, dance or callisthenics rather than aerobic gym. It means exercising, riding and doing horse chores as often as you can. Walking up stairs instead of taking the elevator, walking instead of taking the car. Squeezing more exercise into your daily routine-being physical.

Unfortunately weight reduction also means curbing your appetite for rich, high-calorie food- particularly fats, salt and sugars. These are all foods that our evolution has programmed us to seek. There is also a powerful psychological component of food, entwined by evolution with sociability, sex, kinship and reciprocal obligation. But that's another story.

Rehabilitation. This is another reason to exercise. For some of us it can be the main reason. To retain body function and flexibility so we can continue to enjoy riding. A painfully stiff, back, neck, shoulders and ankles are a common horseman's curse. Often these injuries are the consequences of falls, sudden wrenches or the repetitive stress and jolting that inevitable accompanies riding horses competitively.

The key to retaining normal function of those components is the easy unloaded flexion of these joints. Stretching exercises are useful especially of the calf and lower back. Swimming is the exercise par excellence for rehabilitation of joint strains and chronic damage. Largely because it is a whole-body exercise with movements of all the joints in many planes. With the support of the water, swimming movements are essentially unloaded; that is the joints are not under compression of your body weight during the movement.

It took me fully one year of serious swimming three days a week, to fully regain the flexibility and strength in my left shoulder after injuring it in a particularly stupid horse fall. To make full use of swimming as an exercise you need to have sufficient skill to swim more than one stroke properly. Use flippers to help your swimming if you don't immediately have the skill and meanwhile get some lessons.

Start off by swimming single laps, with a brief rest between until you build up to twenty (one kilometre). Then reduce the rest between the laps until you are swimming continuously. Once you can do so comfortably, then it's time to get rid of the flippers and do the kilometre au natural. The next progression is to swim fast and slow laps. One freestyle then two slow breaststroke to recover. Eventually you'll manage fast and slow laps alternately.

Breaststroke particularly, works the adductors of the leg which need to be well conditioned for riding. (Adductors are muscles of the inner thigh that draw your legs together.) This is one of the few exercises, other than riding without stirrups, that do isolate and work the adductors.

Breaststroke because of its mechanics is best swum without flippers. A reasonable goal for swimming is one kilometre (20 laps) freestyle in 20 minutes, repeated at least three times a week. In addition you'll need to do some breaststroke, and some kicking with board and flippers to work the abdominals properly. Ten x 50 m on a kickboard done hard, with flippers in both freestyle and butterfly kick, with a brief rest between laps is a great exercise for riders. If you're skinny you'll have a six pack of abs in no time.

Weight training, callisthenics and specific exercises designed by your physiotherapist may also be needed for anyone who has been seriously hurt or has a particular aging problem.

Aerobic fitness. To be fit to ride, riding horses at the gallop is undoubtedly the best exercise. But who among us has enough horses to do that on a daily basis? Riding regularly without stirrups is a good exercise for your riding muscles- as every instructor knows. Most of us need in addition to our riding, need aerobic exercise for at least 30 minutes, three days each week.

I should point out here that aerobic exercise is continuous and prolonged activity like walking, running, swimming, rowing, cycling and so forth.

Squash is good but tennis not so. Golf is far too sedentary to have aerobic value. Bowls? Well, you can put me down when it comes to that. You need steady exercise, even hard exercise, enough to make you sweat, but certainly not exercise to exhaustion.

The choice of aerobic activity is personal, but it must be fun. Many eventers already have a bike to do the roads & tracks course and get around when they park the truck at an event. So for them cycling is an easy and cheap alternative. However, cycling is an efficient use of energy, so to get the full aerobic benefit you need to ride a bicycle 15-20 km at high speed. Use the gears to make it harder-the highest you can manage, not easier as you normally would. Cycling isolates the quadriceps muscles on the front and outside of the thigh so it is best combined with distance running which works the muscles of the calf the hardest.

If you are walking, running or cycling do so outdoors in a nice environment if you can- learn to enjoy it. Try a walk and run regime doing it easy, building up to 30 minutes or so three times each week. Then persist so you're running the full distance and not walking. When you can do that, use the Swedish Fartlek system of fast and slow pace, in a go-as-you-feel mode, pitting yourself against the terrain- rather than setting a time and running your guts out to achieve it.

Aerobic classes at the gym can also be very effective. That's if you can stand that dreadful music they play at a thousand decibels above comfortable hearing level. Hmmm, maybe that's a sign of getting old? Aerobic gym is probably the more expensive way to getting fit but it does have the advantage of being a more or less social activity, this seems to attract women to this method.

Riding is mainly a lower body activity (except if you have a horse that pulls like crazy). So riders do need upper body exercise to balance their muscular development and keep their whole body toned and reflexes sharp. Aerobic upper body activities that I can think of are swimming, canoeing and rowing. There are several other activities like cross-country skiing that is great fun and works both upper and lower body but it's hardly practical in this country, unless you happen to live at Falls Creek.

There are skiing, rowing and climbing machines on the market that stimulate both upper and lower body exercise-that's if you can stand to workout on machines (most of us can't). I prefer swimming for keeping in shape, though many people don't enjoy it, so it really is a personal decision what activity you choose.

Weight training. Some weight training is beneficial to all riders for developing muscular strength and tone. You will need to go to a gym for this, or you can buy a home machine. Twice a week weight workouts are sufficient for strength development. Weight training is not an aerobic activity nor is it of much help in losing weight, it is solely for strength and power; a valuable attribute in all sports. Use weight training in addition to a regular aerobic activity. Extensor muscles are the ones to focus on, plus the arm flexors, abdominals and leg adductors. Your gym instructor or personal trainer can recommend the exercises to isolate and work these muscle groups.

Heavy superslow repetitions until you can't do any more, is by far the most effective weight training, rather than flinging light weights around. Don't worry about getting huge muscles, a build like Arnold Schwarzenegger is not achieved overnight, nor is it wanted for riding. (It took Arnold many years of hard work and some banned substances to get that way.) Although you don't need huge muscles, you do need to be strong. You can build your strength through weight training more quickly than any other method. In the words of the immortal bard- 'no strain, no gain.'

Fooling yourself. I do occasionally see people at the pool or the gym who are obviously wasting their time. Flexibility exercises like Tai Chi, touching toes, swinging arms and so forth, no matter how often you repeat them, no matter how aesthetic the movement, or how beautiful the accompanying music, have almost no aerobic effect. Dance, aqua-aerobics and running along the bottom of the pool are in the same category. They can help to lose weight, but they have to be extremely vigorous to be effective aerobically. They are usually the most time consuming and gentle of activities and this nicety attracts people to them. They are not a good way to get fit to ride.

Benefits of exercise for riders

There are at least four concrete benefits to exercise, in addition to the more airy fairy stuff about looking better, feeling better and improving your sex life-also true.

More effective riding with better physical use of your legs and upper body-better coordination, strength and endurance. Endurance for competitive riding can make all the difference in Horse Trials or Endurance Trials.

Rehabilitating, and protecting your back. Movement maintains the function of your joints-your flexibility, especially the back. Muscle development helps prevent injury by supporting skeletal tissues. It also makes you look better as a bonus.

Exercise improves your general energy and endurance for riding and daily living. This is a paradox, you would think it would be draining, and it can be on occasions, but generally the more you exercise the more energetic you feel. This is a personal experience that is confirmed by almost every one who works out regularly.

Improved empathy with your horse. Once you're an athlete, especially if you're running, you have far more empathy with your horse's physical effort. More feel for what his effort involves, when to ease up and when you can push him. When you know personally what fatigue does to your own coordination when running, you'll start to pick up those subtle cues of your horses gait and breathing pattern as he tires.

Advice for your personal training

Find a partner or two to workout with. A regular group is ideal. With just two, if one is away or ill you tend not to workout. With a group there's nearly always someone to drag you out of the armchair and get you going. Working out with a group who also ride would be ideal. Exercising with your partner or spouse is nice but not always likely, for we chose our partners for different reasons. Also it's a bit unfair to expect of your wife or husband, often one is much more physical than the other (it is not always the male-it's usually the enthusiastic rider in the family who's more physical).

Exercise at the start of the day. It is usually the easiest way to fit something extra into your life. It depends largely on whether you're a morning person or a night owl. Make it the opposite end of the day to when you're riding horses if you can. Scheduling weekends is not good since you'll mostly be riding then.

Go easy with your new exercise regime especially if you're a tad obsessive: it's not your main objective-riding is.

Make it fun. If it isn't fun, if you don't enjoy being physical, you're not going to keep up your fitness.

Be physical-just do it. Learn to enjoy an early morning run or the water gliding over you in the pool, playing squash with a friend or just walking. Get exercise wherever and however you can is better than not exercising at all.

Keep going. To be fit for riding to be fit for life you need to integrate exercise into your daily life. The trick is to maintain that physical activity for the rest of your life.