Workouts for riders: how should I train as a rider?

Workouts for riders: what is important?

Riding is a high level skill sport that requires precision, reaction speed and symmetry from your body, but also riding specific strength from the muscles responsible of helping you have a balanced seat, to sit softly in your horses movements or to have a good balance over the jump.

So when we plan workouts for riders, we need to understand the sport.

But we also need to understand you as a rider, so that we can answer the question: how should you train as a rider to feel a real difference in your riding?

Because riders are different and what you feel in your riding, what you see from your riding videos and what your trainer tells you is probably very different than someone else’s.

So, workouts for riders: what actually matters? Let’s take a look at different workouts types together.

Workouts for riders: core strength & stability

Your core has an important role for you as a rider:

1. absorbs the movement energy coming from the horse and helps you to sit softly in your horses movements
2. connects your hips and upper body to help you have signed and balanced seat
3. helps you to stay symmetrical and in the middle

And when we plan core workouts for riders, we need to always remember:

1. there is multiple muscles in your core and they all have a different role and that’s why core workouts for rides need to be varied and have different type of exercises – just doing planks and crunches is not the best way to train your core as a rider.
2. when you do core workouts, pay attention to your breathing: you should always be able to breathe through out the exercises because if you hold your breath or brace too hard when you’re riding, it will make sitting in your horse’s movements near impossible

If you want to try out 2 different type of core workouts for free, see these ones below:

11min Quick & effective core workout for riders

33min Pilates workout for riders for seat symmetry

Workouts for riders: strength workouts

Next we look at strength workouts for rides.

When we plan workouts for riders, we also ask your riding discipline because it matters – especially when we look at strength training.

Dressage: in dressage you need especially muscle endurance in the muscles that help you maintain harmonious seat:
– core muscles & hip flexors
– back extensor muscles
– glutes / hip stability muscles

Showjumping: in showjumping you need especially power in the muscles that help you maintain good balance between and over the jumps:
– calf muscles and foot work for stable stirrup contact
– strength and power in legs and posterior chain
– ability to use your hip join effectively to have good balance over the jump
– core and upper body strength for balance and good contact

Eventing: is a combination of dressage and showjumping, but needs to have an extra focus on muscle endurance because tests are longer.

Try out this 40min Full body strength workout for riders

Workouts for riders: mobility workouts

If you only ride, it will make you feel stiff in your hips and lower back and doing your mobility workouts helps you to:

1. Sit deeper in the saddle and have your legs long, around the horse. If your hips get stiff, it results you feeling you sit more on top of the horse and also asymmetries in your hip mobility can result challenges to have your horse straight.
2. Riding puts a lot of load for your spine because the movement energy and impact coming from your horses movement. To keep your back feeling good, we need to do mobility workouts that rotate and decompress your spine.

When we plan mobility workouts for riders, we always include:

1. Hip rotations
2. Hip flexor openers
3. Glute openers
4. Spine rotations
5. Spine flexion and lateral flexion

Try out this 15min hip mobility workout for riders or this 22min dynamic mobility workout for riders

Workouts for rides: balance

When we plan workouts for rider’s balance, trying to do movements on a bosu ball is not the most effective way, this is why:

1. The base of your balance in the saddle is your stirrup contact, meaning that you should be able to have solid contact through the widest part of your foot.
   
   To train this, we need to teach your body to do that on the solid ground first because typically you lose your weight to the out of your foot and miss out on connecting the root of the big toe to the ground and then in activating your gluteus medius (a muscle that is responsible of keeping your hips in the middle)
2. When doing exercises on bosu ball, your body ends up compensating and finding crooked ways to stay balanced which is not the goal for a rider when what we actually want is the total opposite: symmetry and ability to stay centered.

To improve your balance you need:
– movements that improve your ankle mobility
– exercises that are done your heel off the ground
– one leg exercises to balance out differences on right and left side
– movements that improve your ability to connect through muscle chains all the way from ground contact to your hips and core

Try out this 20min core & hip strength workout for riders for more balanced seat

Where to start?

You’re dedicated to becoming better as a rider. You know it, people around you know it and your actions show it. But how do you manage to stay consistent with your own workouts when we all know life with horses can get quite busy sometimes?

It all comes down to individualization and understanding riding as a sport – when it’s made for your needs as a rider, it feels motivating to do, it fits your schedule and it brings you results you can feel & see in your riding.

All you need to do is tell us how you feel in the saddle. We then choose the workouts for you to finally have an answer for that one question: How should I train to really become better as a rider.

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