Warming up your horse before riding is essential for optimizing their performance and preventing injury.
By Sarah Welk Baynum, BS
As Canada’s leader in equine nutrition, Mad Barn thanks The Rider for featuring this story. To read the full version of the article, visit https://madbarn.ca/horse-warm-up-guide/.
Warming up your horse before riding is essential for optimizing their performance and preventing injury. A thoughtful warm-up routine improves circulation, enhances flexibility, and primes the horse’s muscles and joints for the work ahead.
Benefits of Warming Up
Warming up helps horses use oxygen more efficiently and improves metabolic readiness for exercise. In addition, cardiovascular function increases during warm-up, which is reflected in your horse’s heart rate.
Warming up also supports joint lubrication and coordination. Overall, warm-ups prepare your horse’s body to work more efficiently and safely.
The ideal warm-up depends on the horse’s training level and the demands of their discipline. Research shows the effects of warming up vary depending on the horse’s level of fitness.
Methods & Exercises
Warm-up techniques for horses fall into two main categories: passive and active.
Passive warm-ups, like heat application, massage, or exposure to warm environments, use external methods to raise muscle temperature and prepare the horse’s body for activity. While passive methods may help with short bursts of strength, they don’t significantly boost endurance.
Active warm-up strategies are more common and focus on intensity, duration, and transition time. This method can be tailored for different equestrian disciplines like racing, dressage, show jumping, and eventing.
Stretching
Stretching enhances flexibility, coordination, and joint mobility. When used correctly, it helps prevent injuries and supports better performance in equine athletes.
You can improve your horse’s proprioception — the body’s ability to sense its position, movement, and coordination in space — by incorporating light stretching that stimulates the central nervous system.
Planning Your Horse’s Warm-Up Routine
Before you design your warm-up, keep in mind the four main factors that should guide your approach: intensity, discipline, environment, and context.
It is common across most disciplines for riders to spend 10 – 20 minutes warming up while incorporating technical skills like lateral work and quick transitions.
Intensity
Research shows that warm-ups provide similar benefits across all intensities.
Examples of differing warm-up intensities include:
• Low intensity: 5 min walk, 400-meter canter, 5 min walk
• Low intensity: 10 min walk, or 8 min walk and 1 min trot
• High intensity: 5 min trot, canter until venous temperature exceeds 39.5°C, then 5 min trot
ª High intensity: 15 min warm-up of pacing, trotting, galloping, and six jumps at 1.00 m or higher
Riders may choose to vary the intensity of the warm-up depending on the specific workout or discipline that follows.
Discipline
Design your horse’s warm-up routine based on their discipline, competition level, and response to aids.
As competition level increases, the duration and intensity of your horse’s warm-up might also increase, but longer or more intense warm-ups may not have more impact on performance during competition than lower intensity warm-ups.Research is still needed to establish the most effective warm-up methods for each equestrian discipline and level. As this work is ongoing, researchers are looking at factors like intensity, duration, specific movements, and how the transition between warm-up and competition affects performance.
Context
Your horse’s warm-up may differ at home compared to the show arena. Factors like age, temperament, and weather can influence your approach on show day.
In competition, timing a warm-up can be tricky due to waiting periods or delays. During long transition periods at competitions, using passive heat maintenance methods or light movements like intermittent walking and trotting could help maintain the beneficial effects of the warm-up.
Environment
Both cold- and hot-weather warm-ups follow a basic progression from walking to trotting to cantering. However, the intensity and duration of each phase varies depending on temperature.
In cold weather, warm-ups are best focused on a slow build-up to raise core temperature and blood flow. A 10 to 20-minute warm-up is crucial in the winter to improve circulation in the muscles before starting work, and a light exercise sheet can be used during the warm-up as well.
In hot weather, minimize warm-up duration and limit your horse to light exercise to avoid overheating. Prioritize cooling strategies, such as water misting or providing shade after the warm-up, to prevent a dangerous rise in body temperature.
About the Author:
Sarah Welk Baynum is a freelance equestrian writer who holds a degree in Equine Business and Facility management. She competes in show jumping and eventing with her two mares.
Source: MadBarn