The workout...Protocol

Saturday 1/09/2010:

After his breakfast Ambrose was booted with the EasyBoot Gloves and taken out for a pony off of the quad.  Our typical route takes us down into the canyon for about 1 mile, which I call my warm up jaunt.  We then turn around and come back out of the canyon and past the ranch and down the other side.  My guesstimate of elevation is about 600 feet or so, I will be able to tell exactly by looking at the Garmin files.  Today Ambrose was ponying perfect, we went down into the canyon at a nice 12mph trot, we turned around and came back up, his trot would go up to about 14 before he wanted to break into a cantor.  I held him at about this speed as I did not want him to cantor much.  There are some gradual uphills where I NOW let him break into a fast cantor but keep it under control, as soon as he wants to go faster I make him slow down some.  I am not looking for any spleen dumps or a anxious horse.  At about 5 miles he lost a boot on the left rear, he tore up the gaiter so was not able to put it back on so took off he other rear boot.  We then headed for home which was about 1.5 miles away.  Ambrose drank out of the horse trough as I reset the Garmin to check his recoveries.  He drank well and had a nice sweet going.  We walked to the stall for some POST ride carbs and waited for his HR to come down.  I either use 64 or 60 so am going to have to decide which I will use.... 64 is the HR that we have used mostly while competing with MONK in the FEI rides, but think we will stick to 60.  For the past 15 years I have used a recovery of 60 in 10 minutes was a good number to shoot for to determine if you actually had a workout or just a jaunt in the woods.  Of coarse this is pretty arbitrary depending on the horse and the terrain but because I have done it for almost 20 years over the same terrain with some success that is how I will do it.  If you pull up after a good work and your horse recovers to 60 in 5 minutes you probably did not stress your horse enough to accomplish anything.  We are not to the conditioning aspect yet, more of just the legging up period.  I want to get to the point where I am doing maybe 30 - 50 miles a week off of the quad, with only a slight amount increase in either mileage or speed.  Once we are under saddle comfortable that will be thrown into the mix.  Same method will be used of only increasing the workload/speed a little bit at a time.  To make sure we do not get into to a over training mode resting HR and actual weight will be checked several times a week.