Riding For Your Life

It is a two-sided question with but one answer. How can one best insure one's ability to ride deep into our life span? How can we make riding part of something that extends that life span? The answer is to do everything that we can to take care of our health span. 

Riding can be a very important part of extending one's health span. It builds strength, power, endurance and balance. Equally important is the understanding that activities that build strength, power, endurance, and balance make riding easier, more comfortable and much more enjoyable.

 Of course, it is much easier for a horse to carry a fit rider than one whose body is but the wreckage of a sedentary lifestyle. And I am not talking about weight. Regardless of the amount of weight on the horse's back, the ease in which the horse carries the rider depends on the rider's skill, endurance, power, strength and balance.

 Over the past year we have conducted a wide range of free educational programs that are open to the public. In October we will host a session on exercise programs for horse and human designed to extend the years of riding together for both horse and rider. Keep your eyes open for the date.

A Fall And Winter Of Teaching, Learning , and Practicing Natural Horsemanship

There has never been a more exciting time to join our program. We will be training several spectacular horses to saddle, including the stunning Corolla stallion, The Black Drink and Quannah Parker, the son of Croatoan, and a modern Appaloosa mare. Bow season starts in three weeks and during hunting season we will spend a great deal of time learning riding basics and learning to gently and humanely train horses to saddle.

We have room for several more riding students. Our rate is only $160.00 per month per family. There are few experiences more meaningful than learning to communicate with a horse on the horse's terms. Some of these horses will be more challenging to teach than will the others. I hope to have our you tube channel filled with video of people and horses learning together.

We will also be training a donkey to help us remove trees from the woods and we will be expanding our livestock for 2022-2023. We will be teaching and practicing soil and water conservation and will be working on wildlife habitat development. Our music program will be performing more now that the virus is breaking. We have just completed a very successful summer of endurance riding conditioning and conducted an in house endurance event in which many of our riders rode over forty miles and two of our riders came in for the 50th mile. One of those horses was a nearly extinct Caspian and his rider, Kate Patterson, rode him exquisitely.

There are very few educational opportunities like this available to young people.  And we have been doing this for over 15 years. And we have been doing this with no paid staff. Everything that we do is done by volunteers.We are a non-profit breed conservation program located outside Smithfield, Virginia. 

If you would like to join us please send me an email at msindianhorses@aol.com
 

Tweaking Your Riding Experience By Closely Monitoring Speed

When hunting season is not in several of us condition horses with five mile trot rides two mornings a week and we recently added in a 10 mile trot/canter ride on Wednesday mornings .My Garmin watch is worth more to me than are my boots for these training sessions. 

As the horse and rider become better conditioned both should become more relaxed and comfortable with the sessions. I find that the horses that I ride generally begin to move slightly faster at any gait. The Garmin tells me the slight changes that are occurring. the changes are often so subtle that, without an objective measure I would not be able to pick them up. The most significant difference that I found was that while cantering on Janie, a wonderful Colonial Spanish horse of Grand Canyon lineage, at a speed of 9.9 miles per hour my lower abdominals were barely engaged and certainly were not becoming fatigued. However, at a speed of 10.1 miles per hour my lower abdominal muscles were strongly engaged and that gait at that speed was significantly more taxing on my body than when the speed was ever so slightly reduced

. Of course, the watch lets you know exactly how far you have been and at exactly what speeds. These things matter to me not because I regularly complete in endurance events, but because I want to maximize my fitness levels and those of my horses. Few people despise technology as do I, but this is a piece of technology that can actually improve your riding experience.

Strength and Endurance to Stay in the Saddle--Power and Balance to Say Out of The Hospital

Physical training and sports physiology is a field in which more information comes in weekly. It is hard to stay on top of the latest science. Of course, the single best exercise for riders is to ride, and ride, and ride. But there are other things that can be done depending on the difficulty of one's riding goals. My goal is simple. When I am in my seventies, I still want to ride 800-1000 miles each year. The two main things that can keep me from achieving that goal are becoming turned off from riding because of chronic pain and weakness or succumbing to a riding injury that makes riding much more difficult.

 There is no way to completely control either unfortunate outcome, but I can increase my odds of still being in the saddle in my eighth decade by working hard to build a body that can do so. Planks and other forms of isometric exercises help build endurance in the muscles of the core that make riding a pleasant experience. Without muscular endurance rides become painful for me after about the 50th mile. Conventional weightlifting with several compound movements adds strength to that endurance. These exercises make me strong enough to better remain in the saddle. 

 However, it takes more than strength and endurance to stay on a horse that spooks sideways at full speed or stops and reverses direction in the blink of an eye. Power, (which is not the same thing as strength) allows my body to respond to such movements with a lightning-fast counter move that usually keeps me in the saddle. Kettle bells, and backwards weighted sled drags have given my riding muscles strength, power, and a great deal of endurance. 

 But power from those fast twitch muscles, by itself, often is not enough to keep from being slammed into the trail. One also needs balance. there are scores of exercises designed to increase one's balance but too many of them are very difficult for an older rider to master. I found, (from studying the practices of an exercise innovator who operates under the logo of, "Knees Over Toes Guy") a simple, progressive practice that has greatly increased my balance in the saddle. I walk backwards a few miles each week in the dark. I walk a few hours before the sun comes up in my driveway. I started very slowly and very carefully. I have not yet fallen down. I now move much faster with deep, long backwards strides. I balance the movement with my arms. These practices have made riding easier than it has been since I was a kid. 

Of course, don't try any exercise routing without your doctor's approval. I am not a doctor. I am just an old man who has trained his body to ride longer and harder than I could when I was a high school athlete.

Wendell's Best Idea

Our pastures used to produce two products--dust and mud. I knew as much about pasture management as the average owner of a few acres--soil test, lime the soil, apply 10-10-10 fertilizer and hope it rains. 

That is not a formula for success. 

Wendell was the first person that I knew that had knowledge of organic fertilizer. I was skeptical. It certainly never occurred to me that we could drill an artesian well and get sprinklers on our pastures. 

We raised the money for the well and Wendell made and purchased sprinklers. Before the virus we were rather religious in making sure that the sprinklers were moved so that we produced optimum forage, regardless of the rainfall. 

The end result is that in one of our pastures in particular, which is only a bit over an acres we can maintain up to five horses with minimal hay expenditures throughout the summer. Our soil is so biologically active, especially with earthworms and dung beetles,  the manure disappears into the soil very quickly. Instead of mud and runoff, we have nutritious grass for the horses.

Now that we are climbing out of the virus we need to get back into using the sprinklers to maintain as much healthy forage as our land can produce. 

Happy Birthday Wendell.