I haven't ridden in several months. Probably only once or twice over the last year due to a severe knee injury I had last April and subsequent surgery in September. Day after tomorrow I'm due to have surgery on my other knee. As soon as I have time to recovery I'm anxious to get back into a regular riding routine.
I spend time with my boy several days a week and we do free lunging and ground work but nothing that has helped keep him in any kind of good shape (his feed has been cut back, but without the regular exercise, he's still turned into a poofball). He's a coming 13 year old purebred Percheron that I ride bareback and English.
What I'm looking for is how to get him back into a shape with a fairly smooth routine. How many days a week and how long should the session be? 20 minutes, or more to start out and how quickly should that increase? I'm sure some of it will be probably depend on how quickly he adapts.
I know what he needs is wet blanket work. I don't want to push him too hard with him being overweight but I also want to make sure I'm doing enough to get some results. I want to avoid injury issues by not doing too much too soon. We've got some nice sloped pastures where I board so I can do some 'hill' type work.
This is a video of how he looks right now. Like I said, he's overweight. I don't show but I would like to do some trail riding and horse soccer this summer.
Any thoughts and suggestions on how to get him going would be greatly appreciated! I'm thinking I'll be able to start riding by mid March so I want to have a good plan in mind.
Thanks in advance!
Pasture Playing videos from friends & fun videos on webshots
I spend time with my boy several days a week and we do free lunging and ground work but nothing that has helped keep him in any kind of good shape (his feed has been cut back, but without the regular exercise, he's still turned into a poofball). He's a coming 13 year old purebred Percheron that I ride bareback and English.
What I'm looking for is how to get him back into a shape with a fairly smooth routine. How many days a week and how long should the session be? 20 minutes, or more to start out and how quickly should that increase? I'm sure some of it will be probably depend on how quickly he adapts.
I know what he needs is wet blanket work. I don't want to push him too hard with him being overweight but I also want to make sure I'm doing enough to get some results. I want to avoid injury issues by not doing too much too soon. We've got some nice sloped pastures where I board so I can do some 'hill' type work.
This is a video of how he looks right now. Like I said, he's overweight. I don't show but I would like to do some trail riding and horse soccer this summer.
Any thoughts and suggestions on how to get him going would be greatly appreciated! I'm thinking I'll be able to start riding by mid March so I want to have a good plan in mind.
Thanks in advance!
Pasture Playing videos from friends & fun videos on webshots