Category: Rehabilitation

I first learned about Hill Therapy many years ago through Linda Parelli’s Fluidity program. She taught me that knowing and understanding the posture, musculature and movement of horses is an important aspect of understanding dressage or even just general horse ownership.

Horses that have had a ridden career can often look very different from horses that have never been ridden. More often than not, it’s not for the better.

Unfortunately, this can lead to a horse breaking down in the long term, usually in the areas they over use to compensate for not sharing the load through the entire body such as the stifle, lower back, suspensory ligaments, hocks, and not to mention the knee, elbow and fetlock joints from landing heavily on the forehand.

Horse rehabilitation through Hill Therapy can completely transform a horse’s posture and movement.

How do horses get into this condition when ridden?

The reality is, a lot of this happens from ignorance. Ridden work too early on an undeveloped horse, inadequate preparation, poor saddle fit and poor riding all contribute to poor topline condition and development.

Horses that are started under saddle before the growth plates in their spine are closed are at significantly higher risk of damage to the skeleton and muscles that can lead to serious issues such as kissing spine or ankylosis. This leads to pain and weakness in the back, preventing the horse from being able to use their back properly to adequately build topline.

Horses that are left for long periods of time without being ridden and then the rider just drags them out of the paddock and jumps on to go for a 2 hour long trek are also at risk. Without adequate muscling and conditioning, the horse cannot use its muscles to lift through it’s thoracic sling, over it’s back and protect its skeletal frame.

Another big cause is the sad fact that many saddles are too restrictive for the horse.

A poor fitting saddle cannot do anything BUT inhibit the horses natural, flowing movement. Adding your weight to a poorly fitting saddle only compounds the issue.

I want to make it clear, trying to heal and repair your horses back without ensuring the saddle fits correctly is about as effective as poking yourself in the eye with a soldering iron to enable yourself to see better. It’s counterproductive to say the least.

The rider themselves could also be the cause. When the rider restricts a horse’s movement with a stiff, unfollowing seat, pulls on the reins constantly, lands heavily in the saddle or leans forward, putting their weight on the forehand; they will block the flow of energy through the whole horse much like a poor saddle does.

A ‘driving seat’ can literally push the horse’s back down with every stride.

The issues of saddle fit and poor riding alone are detrimental to the horse but the two combined are incredibly damaging to the horse.

Horse rehabilitation: Stop riding so the horse can heal

This is the hard part; some people are so fixated on riding that they have a lot of trouble coming to terms with the idea of staying off the horses back so he can heal. If the horse had blown a suspensory ligament, went lame or had an injury, not riding them is easy to understand because we understand that the horse needs rest in order to heal, but to do it when the horse is not limping or acting hurt is sometimes difficult to get our heads around. The reality is, you’ve got to see it coming and act on it now to prevent it.

Here’s some signs to look out for:

So, your horse is in bad shape

He’s a bit of a mess. He’s ticking too many of the above boxes. You need to do something about it.

Now, there are some pretty thorough and complex rehabilitation plans out there. Most of them require you to have a pretty decent skill set, an abundance of resources and obstacles, excessive amounts of time and the ability to get the horse to do things in juuuuuust the right way…or else.

I have something much easier to offer.

A simple yet incredibly effective treatment that takes about six Weeks: Hill Therapy

How to do Hill Therapy

1.  You need to remove all the things that could be causing the horse to change his posture and way of moving, namely the saddle and the rider. No tack, other than a halter or lunge cavesson and lunge line or long (22ft) lead rope.

2.  You need to let the horse move freely for a set amount of time in a certain way so that he can find his way to move more naturally again. In some cases the horse’s movement has been altered from the first day they ever carried a saddle and rider, and over the years they have actually habituated to it. A horse will completely change their natural way of moving even without a rider on them in order to protect their body. They need to re-learn how to use their whole body again.

3.  Hills are the best medicine. You don’t want a steep hill, just an incline that encourages the horse to use himself more efficiently.

4. Send your horse out on a circle using a lunge line or 22-foot lead line. A standard length or 12-foot lead line is far too short; and a 45-foot lariat is too long!

This is not meant to be a perfect lunge lesson. This is rehabilitation.

Some notes about the hill:

a. A small incline, say 10 degrees, is ideal for trot and canter.

b. 15–20 degrees would only be suitable for walk and trot.

c. Anything steeper than that should only be at the walk. 

Important Notes:

• This is not meant to be physically stressful for the horse because you are trying to restore his health, not wear him out more!
• If you don’t have hills, you can use barrels or barrel-sized logs (45cm/18 inches high) placed on the circle at three o’clock and nine o’clock.
• Finally, the horse must be sound! Not limping or sore to move because he has an injury, arthritis or a bad back. Hill Therapy does not help an already broken-down horse, it restores one that is breaking down.

The Hill Therapy Program

Week 1:  DAILY for 7 days

5 minutes circling.

2 minutes rest.

5 minutes circling in the other direction.

Week 2:  Three times per week

5 minutes circling.

2 minutes rest.

5 minutes circling in the other direction.

Week 3–6:  Twice per week

5 minutes circling.

2 minutes rest.

5 minutes circling in the other direction.

Note:

• If the horse is fit, you may be able to double the times by Week 3. But if the horse is not very fit and the worse its condition, take it easy and go slower.
• After following the six-week program, you shouldn’t need to do it anymore unless something causes the horse to deteriorate again. It makes sense that you would also need to check the fit and suitability of your saddle and address riding skills.
• Use barrels or barrel sized logs if you don’t have hills.

What to expect

In just six weeks the transformation can be significant.

You’ll see the stride lengthen, back and neck muscles smooth out and develop, short necks lengthen, long backs shorten, strong under necks and dropped bellies tighten up, withers come up, high tail sets go down.

Many people cannot understand how horses can change their “conformation” so quickly. In reality, it’s not their conformation. It’s their posture. Conformation is all about the skeleton, the size and length and proportions of the bones. Posture is all about the soft tissue, muscle tone and development.

Muscles hold the skeleton in place and that’s why a horse can change shape. 

You can test this theory for yourself. Stand with your shoulders rounded and belly sticking out, like that Orangutan…you know the one…like him. Now stand up straight, roll your shoulders back, engage your core and head up. Do you see how dramatically different you look just because you changed your posture? How do you tell a horse to stand up straight? How do you tell him to use his whole body when he moves? You can’t! So instead, you set it up so it occurs naturally. By asking your horse to keep moving, and setting it up to be a bit awkward because he has to take care of his balance going up and down hills, he finds a way to move much more efficiently. Part of the reason you have to do this for six weeks is because it has to become a new habit.

Troubleshooting

• Your horse keeps changing gait while circling.

Don’t worry about it! That can be hard, I know but you need to remember that this is not conventional lunging. It’s a therapy. While your horse is trying to figure out how to move better, he’ll probably change gait a lot, in fact the worse shape he’s in the more likely he is to change gait.

Usually what you see is them slowing down on the way up the hill and speeding up on the way down because they ‘fall’ down the hill on their forehand and can’t push well enough and round their back on the way up.

Allow your horse to change gait, wait for half a lap and then ask him to take up the original gait again.

If you make him feel wrong for breaking gait, he’ll get emotionally upset and tense in his body, losing suppleness. You need him to be soft, confident and relaxed which will come with patience and understanding. Remember, he’s having trouble in his body so don’t force him through it.

• Your horse keeps coming in to you.

Smile, give him a pat and politely send him on his way again.  Don’t sacrifice the relationship over his body!

• Your horse keeps trying to snatch grass as he goes around.

Well, at least he’s stretching his back! Allow him to grab a mouthful, count to three and ask him to move on again. Then each time allow less time; three seconds, two seconds, one second. Just don’t let it bother you or your horse will use it to rattle you!

• Nothing seems to be happening!

At first your horse will probably have a lot of trouble making a circle. He’ll make oblongs in trying to shorten the up-hill and down-hill parts. He will probably have terrible posture, speed up and slow down, even look really uneven and almost lame as he hollows out and stiff-legs it on the downhill run. He may even stop dead before going down the hill or bend his body all wrong or not want to go in one direction at all. Just so you know, that’s pretty normal in the beginning. Your horse is experimenting and pretty soon the changes will come. Try not to correct everything, just observe and understand why. It seems to be by the fourth day that the biggest change can be observed and right up until then you could see little or no improvement at all! But then the prize comes; the neck stretches down, the back starts to round up, the strides get softer, longer, springy; then his balance improves, he’s not on the forehand anymore, he doesn’t change speed or rhythm on any part of the circle and you start to notice subtle changes in his muscling like overdeveloped areas getting smaller and underdeveloped areas building up. It’s very exciting.

• Is it better to trot or canter rather than walk?

Not necessarily because you can change the incline of the slope you use to cause the horse to use himself more efficiently. It’s not about working up a sweat or tiring out your horse. You can think about asking for the canter towards the end of the program around Week 4 to help develop your horse’s balance at that gait.

• Why wouldn’t you keep doing it?

Because it shouldn’t be necessary. Once you’ve brought the horse back to health physically, you maintain it with ground skills and good riding and saddles. This is remedial therapy so once the horse is healed you shouldn’t have to keep doing it.

In what situations would you NOT do Hill Therapy?

If your horse was…

• Too green, meaning uneducated.

Hill therapy needs to be done in a controlled manner. A young, uneducated horse zooming up and down hills could potentially lead to slips, trips and falls that may cause serious injury. Over time, horses come to understand that there’s something to this. They feel the benefits, get to know the routine and can actually seem to enjoy it.

• Lameness.

If your horse is showing any sign of lameness, this is not the right thing to be doing for him. You should seek veterinary advice.

• Too old.

I would probably not do this with a horse that was older than 17 unless it was in good health. Even, then I would probably only do it at the walk on a slightly steeper incline. You have to be mindful that wear and tear on old joints is not what you want.

• Lordosis or a sway back

I would use walking cavalettis/poles instead and over a much longer period of time. Where exercise is indicated but needs to be minimal physical stress/impact, walking over a cavaletti can be a good substitute. It helps horses to stretch their backs and use their top line but is not as efficient in getting horses to dramatically change the way they move.

• Locking stifles.

Check with your vet first. Locking stifles are often caused by a lack of sufficient musculature around the stifle to keep the patella in the groove that it is supposed to slide up and down in. I have personally seen some very good changes in locking stifle problems through Hill Therapy but you need to be careful. It would be best at the walk, over a longer period of time and build up slowly.

Whether your horse has had six weeks off, six months off, or is returning from injury, there is one very tempting mistake:

Climb back on and carry on where you left off.

Don’t do that.

Bringing a horse can into work is a careful task. The horse remembers the work. They may feel fresh, enthusiastic and perfectly capable of doing it. They might trot around happily for 40 minutes on their first day back.

That doesn’t mean their body is ready for it.

Bringing a horse back into work isn’t simply about getting them puffing less. Cardiovascular fitness is only one piece of the puzzle. Muscles, tendons, ligaments, joints, bone and the postural system all need time and appropriate loading to adapt again.

The goal isn’t to see how quickly we can get the horse working.

It’s to progressively prepare the horse’s body for the work we eventually want it to do.

What Happens During Time Off?

The body adapts to the demands placed upon it.

When regular exercise stops, those demands disappear and the body gradually adapts in the opposite direction.

How much conditioning is lost depends on how long the horse has been out of work, what they were doing beforehand, their age, turnout and general activity, and whether the break involved injury or confinement.

A horse living outside and walking kilometres around a paddock is in a very different starting position from a horse that has spent several weeks on box rest.

But neither should automatically return to their previous workload on day one.

Cardiovascular fitness

The heart and lungs lose some of their conditioning during extended periods without exercise.

Interestingly, cardiovascular fitness can also return relatively quickly.

That’s useful for us and the horse but it can be deceptive.

A horse may stop puffing and begin to feel fit long before some of the slower-adapting structures of the body are prepared for harder work.

Muscle

Muscle strength and endurance decrease when they aren’t being regularly challenged.

For the dressage horse, it’s not just about the obvious muscles that propel the horse forward.

There are also muscles that are responsible for posture, balance and stabilisation that also need rebuilding.

That especially includes the muscles that are supporting the back, abdominal chain, pelvis and joints.

Tendons and ligaments

Tendons and ligaments adapt to repeated mechanical loading.

They need that loading but they need it progressively.

Suddenly returning a previously conditioned horse to its old workload can expose structures that are no longer conditioned for the forces being placed upon them.

Bone

Bone isn’t an inert framework either.

It continually responds and remodels according to the stresses placed upon it. Appropriate weight-bearing exercise encourages that adaptation. This is known as Wolff’s Law.

Again, the key word here is appropriate.

More work isn’t automatically better. Progressive loading gives the body the opportunity to adapt.

The Brain Remembers Faster Than the Body Rebuilds

This is one of the biggest traps with experienced horses.

They haven’t forgotten how to canter.

They haven’t forgotten lateral work.

They haven’t forgotten how to collect.

An experienced horse returning from a break may happily offer movements that its current physical conditioning isn’t ready to sustain.

Skill and physical preparedness are not the same thing.

Just because a horse can perform something doesn’t necessarily mean it should be performing it yet.

This is particularly important with movements involving greater force loading, impact, collection, impulsion, lateral loading or repeated transitions.

Bringing a Horse back into Work after Injury Is Different

If the horse has been out of work because of injury, the rehabilitation programme should be based on the structure injured, severity of the injury, healing stage and veterinary assessment.

A generic “six-week fitness programme” cannot account for that.

Some injuries require controlled straight-line walking. Others may require restrictions on circles, uneven surfaces, speed or duration. The appropriate progression for one injury may be completely inappropriate for another.

When returning from injury, veterinary rehabilitation instructions take priority over any general conditioning advice.

Once the horse has been cleared to progressively return to normal exercise, however, the same underlying principle remains:

Load → recover → adapt → gradually increase the load.

Start With Walking

Walking isn’t the boring bit before the real work starts.

Walking is work.

A purposeful walk allows the horse to begin rebuilding conditioning while keeping forces relatively low. Purposeful being the objective word here.

Depending on the horse’s starting point, early sessions might consist almost entirely of walking.

Start with a duration the horse can comfortably manage and build from there.

For some horses that might initially be 5-10 minutes in each direction on the lunge or hand walking; gradually increasing to 20–30 minutes.

The correct starting point depends on how long the horse has been off, what they have been doing during that time and why they stopped working in the first place.

You Don’t Have to Start Under Saddle

Returning to work doesn’t necessarily mean returning to riding immediately. And you shouldn’t.

There are plenty of ways to begin rebuilding the horse before adding the weight and balance demands of a rider, especially when trying to protect a spine with weakened back muscles.

In-hand walking

Probably the simplest place to begin.

Forward, purposeful walking can start rebuilding general conditioning while allowing you to observe how the horse moves.

Over time you can introduce changes of direction, poles and varied terrain where appropriate.

Groundwork

Good groundwork can help re-establish responsiveness, body awareness and basic movement patterns before ridden work resumes.

Keep the emphasis on quality rather than making the exercises complicated.

Pole work

Walk poles can encourage the horse to organise its feet, increase joint flexion and use its body differently without requiring speed.

Introduce them progressively rather than immediately creating elaborate pole grids.

Long-reining

For horses already educated to long-reining, it can be an excellent bridge between basic groundwork and ridden exercise.

It allows purposeful forward movement without the rider’s weight while beginning to reintroduce more structured work.

Lunging

Lunging can be useful, but it deserves some caution.

Working continuously on a circle creates different loading from travelling in straight lines. Small circles and prolonged lunging aren’t necessarily appropriate for an unconditioned horse and could even be specifically unsuitable during rehabilitation from certain injuries.

If lunging is used, begin with large circles, short periods and plenty of changes of direction.

It shouldn’t become “20 minutes of trotting around in circles because we’re getting him fit.”

Frequency Beats Heroic Sessions

One enormous workout followed by several days doing nothing isn’t particularly useful for progressive conditioning.

Regular, manageable sessions are generally more productive.

For a sound horse returning after ordinary time off, 3–5 appropriately sized sessions each week may be more useful than one or two big workouts.

That doesn’t mean five hard training sessions.

Early in the programme, a “session” might simply be:

• 20 minutes purposeful in-hand walking
• a short groundwork session followed by walking
• a ridden walk
• a gentle pole session
• walking over suitable varied terrain

The workload can gradually increase as the horse adapts.

Recovery days are part of conditioning too.

Increase One Thing at a Time

There are several ways to make exercise harder:

Duration: working for longer.

Frequency: working more often.

Intensity: progressively asking for more demanding work.

Complexity: progressively adding transitions, poles, lateral work or more difficult exercises.

Terrain: introducing slopes and different surfaces over time.

The mistake is increasing everything simultaneously when you should be changing the workload gradually.

For example, first build the duration of walking. Then introduce short periods of trot. Gradually increase the amount of trot before introducing significant canter work or more demanding schooling.

There doesn’t need to be a rigid universal timetable.

The horse should determine the rate of progression.

What About Trotting and Cantering?

Once the horse is comfortably coping with its walking workload, trot can be introduced in short intervals.

Think:

Walk → short trot → walk → recover → repeat.

As conditioning improves, those trot intervals can gradually become longer.

Canter follows the same principle.

Don’t introduce it simply because the horse feels fresh enough to canter.

Introduce it when the horse has developed sufficient conditioning, balance and strength to perform it without fatigue significantly compromising the quality of movement.

Fatigue Changes Movement

This is one of the biggest reasons not to push a horse through a return-to-work programme too quickly.

A tired horse doesn’t simply become slower.

As muscles fatigue, the horse’s ability to stabilise its body and maintain good movement can deteriorate.

You may notice:

• rhythm deteriorating
• stumbling or toe dragging
• shortening of the stride
• increasing crookedness
• difficulty maintaining balance
• reluctance to go forward
• transitions becoming progressively worse
• the horse leaning increasingly on the rider
• loss of coordination

At that point, doing another twenty minutes isn’t “building fitness.”

The quality of the work has already deteriorated. Now you’re training sub standard quality work.

Conditioning should create adaptation, not exhaustion.

Don’t Forget the Training Scale

Returning to work isn’t the time to immediately chase collection.

Go back to the foundations.

Rhythm comes first: can the horse maintain a regular tempo without fatigue?

Suppleness develops as the body begins moving freely again.

Connection can be progressively re-established once the horse is confidently travelling forward.

Impulsion requires sufficient strength and conditioning to produce energy without rushing.

Straightness becomes increasingly important as the workload grows.

And collection belongs later, once the horse has developed the strength to carry more weight behind.

The Training Scale isn’t something we abandon while getting a horse fit.

It helps tell us whether the horse is ready for the next step.

Watch the Horse Between Sessions

Don’t judge the programme solely by what happens during the workout.

Look at the horse later that day and the following day.

Are they moving freely?

Are they unusually stiff?

Is there heat or swelling?

Have they become reluctant to move forward?

Has their behaviour changed when being caught, saddled or asked to exercise?

The response after exercise tells you whether the previous workload was appropriate.

If the horse isn’t recovering comfortably, increasing the workload isn’t progression.

There Is No Universal Six-Week Programme

A timetable can be useful as a guide, but horses don’t read calendars.

A young horse returning after eight weeks living in a large paddock is not equivalent to an older horse returning after months of restricted movement.

Neither is equivalent to a horse returning from tendon rehabilitation.

Progress according to the horse in front of you.

Instead of asking:

“What should we be doing in Week 4?”

Ask:

“Is this horse physically ready for the next increase in workload?”

That’s a far more useful question.

Build the Horse You Want to Train

It can feel painfully slow when you’re desperate to get back to schooling.

But those early weeks aren’t wasted time.

They’re where you’re rebuilding the physical foundation that everything else depends upon.

Walking, groundwork, poles, gradual trot work and progressive strengthening aren’t obstacles standing between you and dressage.

They’re part of training the dressage horse.

Once the basic conditioning has returned, we can begin using the environment itself to develop strength, balance and coordination.

That’s where Hill Therapy comes in.