By Jec Ballou

Establishing a routine fitness evaluation every six to eight weeks is essential for tracking your horse’s conditioning and refining your cross-training regimen. This serves as a structured check-in to determine which exercises will be most beneficial in the upcoming weeks. The objective is to prevent stagnation in training—without consistent assessments, it’s difficult to measure progress or identify setbacks effectively. A structured fitness test ensures you stay on course with your training plan, leading to steady improvements over time.

To ensure accurate results, conduct a fitness evaluation under the same environmental conditions and on consistent footing. Key factors to observe include sweating response, respiration rate, coordination and movement, and overall energy levels. Fitness assessments should align with your horse’s discipline, incorporating exercises specific to their sport. However, the following general fitness test applies to most arena horses.

Testing Protocol

• Use a stopwatch rather than estimating time.
• If available, utilize an equine heart rate monitor for precise measurements.
• Throughout the test, your horse’s heart rate should remain below 130 beats per minute (bpm).
• After completing the test and allowing your horse to rest, their heart rate should return to 60 bpm.
• If the heart rate remains elevated, this indicates the workout was too strenuous, and your regular training sessions should be adjusted accordingly.

Reassessing every few weeks will help gauge your horse’s fitness improvements. With each test, your horse should experience less exertion, providing valuable insight into their conditioning level.

This fitness test is designed for horses that have been in consistent training (at least three to four days per week for a minimum of three months). If your horse is not at this level, consider modifying the test to match their current fitness capacity.

• Execute a warm-up as follows: Five minutes of loosening up, riding the horse at a walk on a long rein all over the arena. Then, warm up his body by executing equal amounts of working trot and canter on 20-meter circles and straight lines for 10 minutes.
• After the warm up, go immediately to the workout (do NOT pause or take a walk break): ride two minutes of trotting serpentines. This should be done with a lively trot and asking the horse to bend his body on the curved lines.
• Now, immediately canter for two minutes. While cantering, ask your horse to get a bit more collected in the corners and short ends of arena, and then extend his gait down the long side. Do this in both directions until your two minutes is completed.
• Next, perform five minutes of trotting over ground poles*. *Note re ground pole arrangement: Set up five ground poles in a row, spaced approximately three-and-one-half feet apart or the distance of your horse’s trot stride. Arrange them in an arc or fan shape on the perimeter of a 15-meter circle. Be sure to ride an equal duration of time in each direction of the circle.
• Next, ride two sets of trot-canter-trot transitions in EACH direction.
• Now walk and observe your horse. After walking for three minutes, dismount and take the horse’s heart rate. His resting heart rate should be at or below 60 beats per minute. Compare to previous executions of this fitness test. Each time you do your fitness test, the horse’s heart rate should drop more quickly after exercise. It may also begin to drop lower (which is what you hope for!) than his former “resting rate” after exercise.

For successful assessment of fitness, you’ll want to monitor other feedback besides the horse’s heart rate, although that is perhaps the most important bit of data you’ll want to collect. You also want to assess his energy levels start to finish; his respiratory rate (which should be around 20 breaths per minute after three minutes of walking/cooling down after exercise; his coordination (did he trip or stumble? Did his gaits stay springy or did his strides get flat and unanimated?). Also make note of where and how much he sweat. Monitor if this is any different than the last time you did the fitness test. Lastly, observe how he seems. Following this test, he should — if he is in moderate fitness — be perky and plenty eager to do lots more riding that day!

More by Jec Ballou

Main photo: Canstock/Edu1971