08/19/2026
Rider Fitness Part 2: Do the hard thing.
Part of being an athlete—part of participating in a sport—means doing things that are uncomfortable.
You don’t become more athletic by staying within your comfort zone.
You become more athletic by doing the hard thing.
Doing the thing you don’t necessarily want to do.
In other words, part of being an athlete is sacrifice.
Sacrifice of some short-term comfort/ease in order to be better.
I touched on this in my previous rider-fitness post, but let’s talk about what that sacrifice can look like in practice.
Sometimes it means going to the gym.
But it can also mean doing difficult, uncomfortable work in the barn or in the saddle.
One exercise I do regularly is remain in a two-point or galloping position while riding transitions up and down through all the gaits—without pitching forward or backward, relying on the horse’s mouth, or grabbing mane.
It sounds fairly easy.
It isn’t.
First, your horse has to be responsive to your body and light aids. More importantly, it requires substantial core strength and *dynamic* strength to remain balanced and move with the horse throughout every transition.
And I didn’t do this once for a couple of minutes and call it good.
Every couple of weeks, I spend nearly an entire ride doing it.
It builds strength.
It builds balance.
It builds flexibility.
Most importantly, it develops the athleticism and independence necessary to stay with the horse instead of forcing the horse to compensate for my imbalance.
Is it comfortable? No.
Is it fun the entire time? Definitely not.
But training isn’t always supposed to be comfortable or fun.
Real athletic training means pushing yourself physically beyond what is comfortable—sometimes until your muscles are genuinely fatigued. It means continuing when your body wants to quit while still training intelligently and safely.
To be clear, that doesn’t mean continuing a mounted exercise after you are too fatigued to maintain your position safely. At that point, the horse starts paying for your loss of function—which rather defeats the purpose.
What it means is deliberately challenging your current limitations and gradually expanding what your body is capable of doing.
As riders, we spend an enormous amount of time developing our horses’ strength, balance, flexibility, responsiveness, and stamina.
We should be willing to ask the same of ourselves.
Granted, a lot of this takes place unseen, but I don't believe I have ever seen a rider intentionally physically pushing themselves in the saddle - Intentionally doing some sort of exercise, like the one I described above, whose only realistic purpose was to make the rider stronger and better.
If we want to become more stable, independent, and effective partners for our horses, we cannot accomplish that by doing only what is easy.
Sometimes, improvement requires discomfort.
Sometimes, it requires work.
Sometimes, you have to do the hard thing.
