Ready to saddle up for an adventure into the heart of endurance riding? We've got Dr. Jane Williams, a seasoned equine scientist and horse sport enthusiast. Together, we venture into the world of endurance riding, examining the role of the rider as an athlete, the synergy of horse and rider performance, and the current preparation gaps amongst endurance riders in the UK. We're set to unearth how we can improve equestarianism by focusing on the evidence at hand.
But our conversation doesn't stop on the course. We also examine how the concept of how pacing strategy extends to training. We consider how the course terrain, the horse's fitness, and even how the rider's fitness can significantly influence performance. It's a journey into the heart of endurance racing, complete with discussions about emerging tech tools, like heart rate monitors, that are crucial to maintaining equine fitness. We also stress the importance of a team-centered approach to performance analysis that benefits both the rider and the horse.
As we wrap up, we delve into the idea of 'social licence' in horse sports, emphasizing the need to cater to our horses' needs while respecting public opinion. As riders, it's important that we set realistic goals, objectively assess performance, and keep our fitness goals front and centre. We explore the often-overlooked aspect of rider strength, conditioning, and the importance of honest self-assessment when preparing for the next level. And we round it all off by emphasising the importance of promoting ethical equitation and staying informed with the latest research. So, giddy up and join us for this enlightening exploration into the world of horse sports and endurance riding!
@riderstrengthcoach
www.riderstrengthcoach.co.uk
Ready to saddle up for an adventure into the heart of endurance riding? We've got Dr. Jane Williams, a seasoned equine scientist and horse sport enthusiast. Together, we venture into the world of endurance riding, examining the role of the rider as an athlete, the synergy of horse and rider performance, and the current preparation gaps amongst endurance riders in the UK. We're set to unearth how we can improve equestarianism by focusing on the evidence at hand.
But our conversation doesn't stop on the course. We also examine how the concept of how pacing strategy extends to training. We consider how the course terrain, the horse's fitness, and even how the rider's fitness can significantly influence performance. It's a journey into the heart of endurance racing, complete with discussions about emerging tech tools, like heart rate monitors, that are crucial to maintaining equine fitness. We also stress the importance of a team-centered approach to performance analysis that benefits both the rider and the horse.
As we wrap up, we delve into the idea of 'social licence' in horse sports, emphasizing the need to cater to our horses' needs while respecting public opinion. As riders, it's important that we set realistic goals, objectively assess performance, and keep our fitness goals front and centre. We explore the often-overlooked aspect of rider strength, conditioning, and the importance of honest self-assessment when preparing for the next level. And we round it all off by emphasising the importance of promoting ethical equitation and staying informed with the latest research. So, giddy up and join us for this enlightening exploration into the world of horse sports and endurance riding!
@riderstrengthcoach
www.riderstrengthcoach.co.uk
Hello and welcome to Equestrian Edge, the podcast that aims to bridge the gap between research and rider. My name is Olivia Cornick and I am your host, and today's episode we are interviewing Dr Jane Williams, who's a lecturer at Hartpury. She's done lots of research and this episode in particular will be of interest, especially for endurance riders, who will be looking at her endurance demands paper, as well as looking at lots of factors that can affect performance and looking at objective ways to know if your horse is good enough for what you are setting out to do with your horse. So let's dig in and I hope you enjoy the episode. Don't forget to follow the podcast and share it with your friends if you enjoy it. Thank you so much for joining us today. Dr Jane Williams, hi, good morning. Please can you give an introduction of yourself? How did you get into research and your interest area?
Jane Williams:So I've been involved in equine science and it's brought us since probably for the last 20 years, so I did never have a traditional entry into academia. I was a veterinary nurse, went to work at a college in Devon which taught veterinary nursing, and my husband actually went to work there as a catering manager. And then I sort of got dragged into the deep and dark world of teaching and I soon discovered, once I was there, that I've always been passionate about horses and horse sports and I had horses and I started to get more involved in equine and very quickly I was involved in teaching on degrees which pretty much started to evolve around equestrian sport and equestrian science. And I started doing research with Professor Hayley Randall, who was at that time working at Clemethy University, and really got involved in the idea of why and how and what we do with horses and to try and look for real evidence base. So my current position is head of research at Heartbury University.
Jane Williams:I've worked there for possibly 15 years, on and off and again I've been very much evolving my research. So I would say at the moment I pretty much sit on two strands. One is equine welfare and it's very much looking at how we can support the welfare of all horses. Well, my other core interest is performance analysis and that I'll be honest, I say the horses might make my key interest in there, but equally that's the horse and the rider and the horse rider relationship, because it's just so embedded together. But I think a lot of my work is really looking at how we can take what we do, make it better and improve performance, with the aim that if you improve performance, we're also improving welfare for the horses and increasing the benefits to the riders who are working with them as well.
Olivia Cornick:Yeah, for sure, that's brilliant. Thank you for that. So today we are going to look at the performance demands of endurance riding, and this is a paper that you fairly recently published, so can you give us a brief overview of what led you to researching this area?
Jane Williams:Yeah, no problem at all.
Jane Williams:So in terms of endurance, we've been involved in endurance as a sport for a number of years now. So initially I got involved, working with Dr David Marlon, and we were looking at pacing strategies and endurance horses and trying to see if there was a way to evaluate what would and wouldn't improve completions and then also success measured as the top three placing. And we found that within pacing strategies, a more consistent pacing strategy across every loop of elite level so international competition endurance was a much more successful approach from horses and riders. The trend tended to be that people went out in the first loop really, really fast and then that led to an increased incidence of both gait and metabolic related eliminations. So that was probably the start with endurance and on the back of that I got to work with Fiona Bloom, who is a veterinary physiotherapist and endurance competitor, and we started to think about some of the broader aspects and actually in endurance there's been a fair bit of research done, looking at the horse and the demands on the horse and common injuries etc. Still much more scope to do more.
Jane Williams:But the rider really gets a bit forgotten and I think that's a bit of a trend we see in equestrian sports it's getting better and rider performances becoming a more prevalent field. But in endurance particularly, everything has tended to focus on the horse and actually, if you look at this from a rider perspective, there's quite a big physiological and psychological demands. So, like physically and mentally, it's pretty tough to compete in some of these long distance events and if you think of the training which goes with that as well and I would say I might have said a few people, but I think generally as equestrians we're not very good at looking after ourselves. We're not very good, I think, in ourselves as athletes when we're riding at whatever level we can be.
Olivia Cornick:That's so true. Yeah, absolutely agree with that.
Jane Williams:And we've been interested for a while about, you know, that concept of a rider as an athlete. For me, if that rider as an athlete, and the impact that has on the horse. So, for example, you know, if you're not operating at your full capacity in terms of physical strength, that's going to impact the loading on the horse Psychologically. If you're dehydrated, for example, that's going to affect decision making. So there's so much interplay between the horse and the rider performance and we thought, okay, we're going to start looking at endurance in more detail in the UK. So Fiona's PhD was started at this point and her PhD is focused on looking at UK endurance. So we're working with endurance GB and looking at eliminations and gate related eliminations specifically within them.
Jane Williams:But we should think about the rider and we should take a step back and see what and how the evidence suggests an endurance rider should prepare for competition and also to identify perhaps some of the gaps, and I think that led to the review. So we worked across the team this Jenny and Douglas said. Jenny is involved in rider performance and also a coach and fitness instructor, so she was doing a lot of that side of it. Emma Davis, colleague at Heartbury, who's very much involved in rider injury and psych of injury and sort of the psychological element of riding. And Christina Castigian-Riba is a Spanish colleague who's also heavily involved in endurance with her father. They both researched in the sport quite a lot over there.
Jane Williams:So we sort of came together as a group to really start to break down, okay, from a riding perspective, what are the physical and the mental elements which we should be looking at. And as endurance is a long distance sport, we sort of went to some of the ultra endurance activities in human sports. We still feel a bit weird saying humans, but obviously riding in it isn't human sport, but we think of it a little bit differently. But yeah, we looked at marathon training, but then particularly taking it a bit further than marathon training, because actually when you look at endurance, particularly at the higher levels, it's pushing beyond a normal sort of duration.
Jane Williams:So we would look at it more as being akin to ultra endurance events. So, over American differences, events which are going in three, four hours in duration in length, and just trying to look at some lessons from them, really to see, you know, some core concepts which we should be applying and are there some lessons we can learn from other sports. But also I think there's probably some take-homes for just general riders in this as well. You know, thinking of us as an athlete and thinking about how we can improve our horses welfare and improve our horses performance by turning the camera a little bit introspectively on ourselves.
Olivia Cornick:That's something that I so often come across myself is people will see their horse as the athlete and they'll go above and beyond for their horse. They'll do anything from the horse, by every supplement under the sun for the horse, to make sure that they're okay, but they'll put themselves on the back burner. So why do you think that is?
Jane Williams:I think in some ways it almost gives back to that sort of duty of care, doesn't it? And the fact that we very much focus our attention onto the horse and in some ways, if you look at the literature, there's a lot of research that we treat horses as partners, as members of the family. We have that really strong emotional connection with them and that can both give us positive and negative elements of how we care for them. We can be really put all of our effort and care in and do it in a positive way. But we can also reflect on the fact we have an obesity processing horses at the moment, and actually that's probably us trying to also make them have the best life that they can slightly misunderstood and overfeeding, because we're happy when they're eating and they say ate it, and then they look really well. And I think it's that balance of getting it right. Equally, at some levels in equestrianism the horse is not treated as a family member and it is very much an athlete, a partner or even perhaps a commodity.
Jane Williams:I think we've got such a range of elements of how we interact with horses now. We engage with them, but I think we also think of the performance as being quite horse centric and forget that we are a really key part of that. Yes, the horses have to listen to us. We have to make sure that correct training protocols are in place, but we're understanding horse behaviour and how they learn to get the best out of them. But we have that big impact and we just don't see that. I mean, you think, most people on the yard and we've done research in racing and in broader sectors to support this you know what do you eat. How do you go about on a daily basis if you're thinking about how you're going to eat, if you go, ok, keep a diary of what you've ate. You might have had some snacks. You probably don't have a proper lunch. You might ride two, three, four horses without necessarily taking a break and having proper nutrition or having a proper drink. And when we eat, we probably eat some sandwiches, maybe more snacky than proper birds.
Olivia Cornick:Nutritious? Yeah, yeah, definitely. Something I come across as well and I just want to rewind a little bit because I know the endurance crowd will find that interesting is your pacing strategy. So you said how, when people rush around the first circuit, they had to hire rate of elimination. So what can you give us, your kind of advice on pacing strategy?
Jane Williams:Yeah, so I mean, this was undertaken looking at, as I say, international level competition, but I think one of the lessons we learn from mother sports and human sports is from sprinting through to marathons. Pacing strategy is a key concept that athletes will look at and it'll be part of their preparation for how they're going to complete, and there's lots of different pacing strategies that you can undertake, so you can have a linear one which increases as you go through. You can have one which goes up and down, but what we found from retrospectively looking at the data is there was this trend that people who went really fast at the start of the race then we're getting eliminated more at the end of the one, on loop two, whereas the competitors who were completing were having a more state probably is the wrong word, but a more balanced start, and what we were saying is a slight sequential increase on each loop, but that gave them the capacity then to increase on the final loop of races and to be able to be placed. We also pulled out the top competitors of the top 10 in all of the races we looked at and we found that the top three who were placing were always able to keep a more consistently higher average speed across all the loops and they're always a little bit in advance. But again they followed that same strategy. So that strategy of sequentially increasing was really key to success.
Jane Williams:I think what you see at the start of races, particularly in the busy endurance races you've got lots of horses and riders. The horses are a little bit excited and anticipating what's happening. The riders are a little bit anxious and a little bit excited to get going and there's maybe a psychological element to rush off really quickly. It's about to compete and that probably doesn't help with that sort of initial burst. But this is a long distance event. If we put ourselves in that shoes, if we run a sprint at the start of a marathon, that's going to have a really detrimental impact on our performance.
Jane Williams:So I think pacing strategy in racing is really important. But you can also flip that into training and you can start to look at your training and you can start to think about how you can maybe ensure with some physiological testing that your horse is going to be in the right place. You know that it's fitting off. You can start doing some heart rate monitoring. You can start to assess some of them physiologically, Some of the physiological parameters which are underpinning performance as well. I think that is something In Fiona's PhD when she's looked at the endurance GB data. Again, faster loops tend to be more associated with eliminations too. So I think this concept of speed and the speeds are nowhere near the same at EGB level as what we see in international competition.
Olivia Cornick:Yeah, the concept is lower.
Jane Williams:Yeah, they are definitely lower. So we didn't look at the international level competitions in the UK. It was at lower national level. But what we see is there's a relationship between faster speed and eliminations at all levels. And that probably does link through to some of this idea of pacing strategy. And just, you know, every horse is an individual. We see different breeds competing. They're going to be a slightly different levels of fitness across the season.
Jane Williams:You need to think about what is the best strategy for you and your horse at that ride at that point in the season and consider that. The ride itself, you know, is it got hilly terrain? Is it really flat? How is that going to impact on it as well? You know, some breeds of horse are going to cope better with a flat track as opposed to a really undulating terrain. That is the level of fitness might be really good on the flat, but not going to cope with the hills and the declines and that side of it.
Jane Williams:So I think sometimes we think it's really easy to jump on a horse. You do what you do, but performance is so multifactorial and you need to break each element of it down and I don't know if you've come across the concept of marginal gains. I'm sure you have, but I'm a big fan. It goes in and out of fashion. But for me, the idea of having small, bite size elements in a performance, that you can work on each of them elements and then you get the cumulative benefit of them coming together and the output so your success seems a really logical aspect to take. And if we break that down for a horse and rider, well, we can look at the horse, we can look at the rider. We should also look at the impact of the two of them together.
Olivia Cornick:Yeah, for sure. I think for some people that can feel quite overwhelming, especially when starting endurance. You've got both the horse and the rider and all these factors of what's the course going to be like. Can my horse cope with this? How shall I set my spits out? And yeah, from what you're saying you've almost got to take it similar to how runners approach races. So you've got to go negative splits kind of, or think what suits your horse best.
Jane Williams:Yeah, no, definitely, and I think you know one of the real benefits of endurance as a sport is that they haven't put a lot of restrictions in terms of what support you can have as a rider.
Olivia Cornick:So what I mean?
Jane Williams:by that is, you want to show jumping or dressage, try to use a heart rate monitor or trying to use some tracking tech and stuff like that. You have to get permission to be able to wear that in competition. You can do that in endurance and you can embrace some of the technology and embrace some of the support which is there. I'd also say don't be afraid to ask for help and to go to people who are undertaking support, both from a rider and a horse perspective, and performance analysis is really commonplace at all levels of sport. In the human field, the question in sport is getting better, but we don't take the same sort of wider team support approach as a norm that maybe you would see in other elements. I think an amateur runner would have their fit, but they would go into the gym. They would be linking potentially to a running coach. They would be looking at their performance and monitoring it, and I don't always see that happening as regularly across riders.
Olivia Cornick:So we could be making better use of objective data to ensure our horses are fit enough and we are fit enough.
Jane Williams:I can give you an example from a horse perspective that I've been involved with some work with event team and we would go and do some camps for people who were stepping up from two to three stars etc. One day particularly comes to mind we were at a training camp and there was a really nice big flat gallop and these horses were going out on the gallops and we put heart rate monitors on them and we were trying to get the riders to feel about you know, okay, how does a horse feel to you and what are we looking at in terms of the objective data that we're getting off the heart rate monitor and working out the percentage of heart rate max. So how hard the horse was working, using heart rate as an approximate measure. And there was this beautiful little thoroughbred met that the lady was taking out and it went round one circuit and the next circuit and it was just sticking at an aerobic heart rate and it could have done that for ages.
Olivia Cornick:Really.
Jane Williams:She was like I feel she feels really nice. She's telling me wow, I spoke. If you were using this as a training session, she won't progress because she's just staying at that static level, not going hard enough, and she couldn't tell whether or not she was. So we talked about the fact that she would need to integrate hills and she'd need to find a way to maybe to push the heart rate up to be able to progress that level of fitness. And in events she was finding on the hills that the horse maybe didn't have enough in that context.
Jane Williams:The same day there was an author, a lady with a lovely warm blood, and she went round and she also got for another second session and I was like, well, no, she was at a really high heart rate and she said horse feels fine. And you know, physically, watching and observing him, the horse was still moving, well, it was still pulling it, looking, but the heart rate was getting to the point where you go no, no, actually you're pushing it now. Now you should come back down and rest and think about it and I think we're not always the best at being able to interpret some of the subjective and observational signals. That said, there are some tools that we can use which are simpler. So in human sports, there quite often is there's a Borg scale that we can use and modified Borg scale. So when they do in fitness testing, you can have a zero to 10 rating. And so if you're in the gym at heart, bring a quick, you want a bike and you don't all the aerobic testing, we'd literally flip up a laminated sheet, but not to 10, not being not working at all hard, 10 being about to drop off the bike and you could pick how hard you thought you were working at that point and that's been linked through experiments to heart rate and is quite validated as a tool to assess, a simple tool to assess.
Jane Williams:So myself and Jillian Table took this out in some merely experienced horse and riders looking at from a trainer, a rider and either a coach in sort of sport horse disciplines, and we found it at experience level so I'll use the word elite as a proxy for experience that actually the riders and the trainers could really accurately assess workload Interesting to heart rate, so that it was verified in the same way. But we haven't done it in amateur and below. And again, I think that's probably where there's a there's that balance, isn't it? You learn, you, we learn, tend to develop our skills and the question is through trial and error and depending on what you come across. So I think you know some of these sport science tools could be really useful to help us to improve quicker.
Olivia Cornick:That's brilliant, and so for you said that that was experienced people. So if you're a novice rider, how would you suggest? Would you suggest actually just getting the heart rate monitor as your best bet?
Jane Williams:I mean, I think again it's been worth doing it in racing to say what, what's the best tools that you could look at to improve horse performance? And heart rate monitors come out as being one of the most reliable because you can track it and you know the kit which is available now is relatively straightforward to use. You can work out what your aerobic threshold is. So we talk about aerobic and anaerobic. So aerobic is when your horse is using oxygen or what we are, using oxygen as a fuel. And then when we become anaerobic, we're using fats and carbohydrates and you've got lactic acid being produced. So you obviously cannot sustain that level of performance as long. So one of the key goals of training and a principle of training is to prepare ourselves physically for a competition, and then we want to stay within that aerobic zone as long as we cost. So that's the low, yeah, so the oxygen and being used as a fuel, and then we have the anaerobic performance. And so for horses, they go anaerobic when they sprint and gallop. They also go anaerobic when they jump because they can breathe, so that they take a breath and you pop them into that anaerobic zone. So ideally, whatever we're doing with horses other than maybe like a five-fail-long sprint where you'd expect them to be going anaerobic quite quickly because of the natural performance. Even show jumping the jumping elements are anaerobic but the flat in between should be aerobic. So we should be preparing our horses to be fit enough and using a heart rate monitor we can calculate where the anaerobic zone is. So a horse's heart rate is somewhere between 220 and 240 beats per minute on average. So if we take that average horse, you would say that the anaerobic zone is around 180 beats per minute. So if you've got a heart rate monitor on and you can Bluetooth them to your phone so you can have it telling you every so many seconds what the heart rate is, or you can have it linked to a watch and therefore you can look at your watch.
Jane Williams:So if you're trying to do fast work to improve performance or you're doing endurance work where you want to make sure you're staying within that aerobic zone, you can just keep glancing down and you can also get the data. You can pull the data off, you can map your performance. You can do something like a standard exercise test where you have the same place that you ride at approximately the same speed, say every couple of weeks or every three weeks and you can look and you can map your progress. So if you did the same exercise in the same place at the same intensity and duration, if you're working on getting fitter, as that goes through, it should be decreasing your horse's heart rate because it should be easier. Same applies to us in exercise and in human performance. No difference at all. We can do the same sort of use, we can use the heart rate monitor to see how our performance is and I think we'd be quite surprised.
Jane Williams:Riding tends to be a lot of isometric activity and some of the work that Jenny did in my PhD shows that as much as there's a large oxygen uptake, actually a lot of the time we stay within that aerobic zone and maybe there's some other mechanisms which are at play, except for when we're in sort of two point seat or out the saddle, cantering and prolonged period of time in that sort of position and jumping when we might push a bit on aerobic.
Jane Williams:But I think again, we don't always look at our performance and see whether we're fit enough for what we're expecting to do. And the gym. Again, you can do the same sort of thing, you can see, we can test it and if we get tired, as I said earlier, you know a tired rider, particularly in endurance context if you're sitting on a horse and maybe the two point seat you don't use in with an endurance to be able to get out the saddle to save the horses back. Because we know from the work that's been done by Mission Group that some of the top courses of pain or injuries in endurance horses is back pain, foot pain, lameness. You know that whole relationship between the horses, back and feet is pretty key. So if we get tired and we start to slouch and maybe come down onto the saddle or we lean on the reins or we start to get a bit asymmetric in the saddle, that's all going to be potentially negative to our horse's performance.
Jane Williams:So we are really key to be able to give the horse, yeah, definitely responsible. And you know, the more and more as we go through, social licence is a real key discussion point. Yeah and we'll remain that way in a question in sport, and rightly so. Can you just explain what social licence is for people.
Jane Williams:Yeah, so social licence to operate is a concept that really sort of came about probably 20 or 30 years ago in a lot of economic industries. So a lot of it came through from mining and in mining, obviously, the miners were going into the mines and there was a lot of detrimental conditions and the broader public and the sector were okay. How are we sure that the big businesses who are making money out of this are actually being responsible for the people who are working for them? And that concept has evolved into lots of different sectors. But we see it a lot now where the animals involved in human activities and in equestrianism.
Jane Williams:It's about the horse world, if you like, duty of care to ensure that we're actually protecting the horses and, to be fair, the humans were also participating in equestrianism but that we're looking after them and that we've actually got, if you like, a framework which is putting us in the right position to be able to say that we do the best to support the health and the welfare and the longevity of the athletes that we're working with or general leisure horses.
Jane Williams:So it's very much about being credible and being credible in terms of policy practice, what we actually do, transparency I'm having a good regulatory framework in there as well and just really being able to be objective and to be able to showcase you know we are horses, we want to work with horses on a whole range of them. We don't want people to say we can't use horses for leisure riding, for ecualicist activities up to elite sports. But we have to show as a sentient but non-articulate partner that the horses aren't being forced to do something that they wouldn't want to do and that actually we're really all maximising their needs within all of this. And I think it's become more prevalent in the last sort of four or five years that that debate in equestrian sport but racing has been the area where maybe it's been polarised now.
Jane Williams:But if you go into your area there's a lot of debate around sport horses. You may have seen the ethics from well-being commission with the FEI who've been really sort of looking at sort of horse sports and the more olympic related disciplines and how the FEI can start to lead with this and I think it's trickling down more and more you there's a lot of bodies who feel that actually we shouldn't be using horses for human activities like stupe to cathlam, for example.
Jane Williams:Yeah, modern cathlam, if you think the grand national this year in the UK. There was a lot of protest at that. I believe protest the plan for the derby this weekend as well, and it's not necessarily about how the horses welfare is being looked at, because in some instances they could probably argue that you know, in racing, race horses, welfare is optimised. However, the fact we're using horses for racing is maybe some of the the ethos and there was some surveys being done with the general public and I think 20 percent of the general public just said well, you shouldn't use horses at all yeah, that's quite big number isn't it?
Jane Williams:and I believe in the same when there was another 40 percent who were like well, we don't really understand why and we feel maybe it's detrimental. So you've got horsey people, you've got people on the periphery of that and then you've got general public.
Jane Williams:You just see people on horses with whips and spurs and pulling them around, don't understand what's going on, necessarily, and you know that that picture where you form a judgment can be really powerful. And there is a lot of very practice, a lot of excellent practice in horse sports. But one of the biggest problems that we have is there's a lack of evidence and a lack of objective evidence to really justify what we do. So if somebody said to me, does a horse enjoy going around across country? Course I couldn't give you the evidence that it did. Yeah, scientific perspective. If you look at going back to insurance, if you turn around to me say, well, what's the best way we should ride a horse around elite level eventing and you say, well, if we go really fast, is that a good strategy? I can say, well, the evidence that we have today suggests no, that would be detrimental. So that duty or care would be to adapt our practice and to be informed by that research Sure.
Olivia Cornick:So it's actually really important that we gather more evidence if we want to keep riding. We gather objective data to go actually no, we're looking after horses because this data says so definitely, and we're involved with a number of groups.
Jane Williams:So I'm particularly part of a sport horse welfare foundation where we're really trying to sort of work across the industry and bring both leading researchers and industry bodies and federations etc together to really start to try and develop that evidence base.
Jane Williams:But I think also on an individual level, as a rider, we need to recognize our duty of care and that's a duty of care just a basic level, about looking after the horse's health and welfare and doing the best that we can for them, how we manage them.
Jane Williams:But also, if we're looking at that from a competitive perspective, that will underpin you getting superior performance and having an increased career and for your horse, because you're going to be optimizing what you're doing. That involves having evidence, informed decision making, keeping up to date. It also involves, in the context of us as riders, being responsible for our own actions and you know if we aren't the right match for our horse, if we're not suitably prepared ourselves, then can we honestly say we're meeting that full duty of care? And you know some of the factors which are linked potentially to endurance sports where we do see that maybe the nutritional strategy is incorrect, the hydration strategy is incorrect, fatigue becomes a part. We know all of that psychologically can affect decision making and if our decision making is flawed then that is potentially again detrimental to that horse and we need to take that into account and be really responsible, I think, moving forward, because we will be questioned and challenged more and more as we go forward and, with that, decision making when you're under fatigue, which is negatively impacted.
Olivia Cornick:How do you know how we can improve that? Is it possible to improve?
Jane Williams:I mean, I think part of that is taking it right back to the principles of training for a horse or for a person. So the principles of training are to prepare the athlete for the test that they're going to have. So that's physiologically and psychologically. So physiologically, you need to make sure you're fit enough psychologically, particularly from the horse, with the right perfect. That's managing anxiety, it's managing the environment and being able to be familiarised with that environment. The second principle of training is about having the skills to be able to do what has been expected of you. So we wouldn't expect a horse to go out show jump when they've been trained to jump. Equally, you wouldn't expect a horse that was unconditioned to maybe compete with some of these.
Jane Williams:So strength and conditioning training is a key element of that skill preparation, that that skill in terms of physically preparing the athlete human or horse to be able to have the, the strength and the muscle capacity, but also the neuroplasticity. So that means that we've established the right sort of nerve connections so that we can speed up sort of the reactions. So if you think when you apply an aid and you get a response, once that aid is really established, then you will see that response a lot quicker, won't you? And that's because you practice something, you develop the skill. Actually practice the skill, the nerves which are connecting to that, that neuroplasticity, that speed becomes more second nature. Yeah, so you get a much quicker response. So skill training, in terms of actually practicing the movements that are required, but also repetitive elements to get them, pathways in place, but also the strength and conditioning is really needed and for me, ride a fitness ride, a strength and conditioning to underpin decision making. It is really key there.
Jane Williams:And the final one, in terms of training principles, is to improve performance and reduce the risk of injury. Well, if you hit the first two, you should hopefully be able to also not see injury and increase the career longevity, but you know if we have, if we prepare ourselves physically.
Jane Williams:That is about training. So we know we're aerobically fit enough for what we're trying to do. We know we've got the right strength and conditioning training behind us to be able to cope with it. We've got the right skills to be able to to ride and to react in the right way. There's also that element of doing a bit of background work as well and understanding, you know, getting some understanding of what the latest evidences, what the latest evidence suggests, but also knowing ourselves and knowing our horse.
Jane Williams:We talk a lot in the question in sport about looking at the horse as an individual, but looking at the horse and rider as an individual as well.
Jane Williams:And one size does not fit all and we need to think about how we can adapt that and be able to understand, across different horses and riders and then partnerships, how we can do that. And that might mean some tricky and difficult conversations at times. I mean, everybody probably has some sort of anecdotal um instant in the past where they know somebody where the horse and them just haven't got on and they might have kept on with it for a long time and ultimately, um, it maybe leads to something which has not been so good or that horse has eventually gone on to somebody else and has maybe done a lot better. Yeah, we don't get on with every horse. We were individuals as well. The horses are individuals and we talk about people will over horse. Again, it's that matching isn't it and you know you've got to really sit back in and objectively break down the whole relationship and think about it and think about you as a key cog in that machine as well yeah, and ultimately you've got to have that trust and bond together.
Olivia Cornick:So if it's the partnerships not working, even from you know just gelling, how's that going to then transpire into good performance?
Jane Williams:yeah, no, definitely, and there's ways and means you can work on that as well. I mean, it doesn't necessarily mean it's the end for a partnership, but, yeah, the recognition that something is maybe not brilliant or perfect. We need some help here. I'm thinking about how you change that, um, and I mean again anecdotally for me, but I see a lot of riders, as we said earlier, that will really think about that from the horse, but don't turn that lens on themselves and think about, okay, what could I do to help here and to be um, more sort of more of a, an influence, I suppose, in that partnership. Um, we see it with saddle fitting as an easy example. You know we get the saddle fitted to the horse. How many people really think about the saddle fit to themselves? You know it should be for both of us. It should be. You know it should fit to the horse, but it should also fit to the rider, because that enables both of us to get our optimum performance absolutely, and I think some of the certainly.
Olivia Cornick:When I've asked people about this, a lot of it comes down to the finances involved, because by the time you've got coaches in saddle, if you've got a brand new saddle that doesn't really fit the horse but fits us as well, people are always going to prioritise okay, well, the horse fits this saddle. So therefore I'm we're just going to have to take the back and I think I know it's a really valid point.
Jane Williams:You know, horse sport is expensive and there is a lot of financial considerations. Um, I would always advocate that we'd prioritise the horse as well, for because as I said they are working with us, um, and we're giving.
Jane Williams:Yeah, I mean we are. We are making conscious decisions about how, what actions we're taking. They are effectively our partner in that. So I think, yes, definitely, prioritising the horse welfare is key in there, but maybe it is thinking about you know, okay, what are my priorities? How do I build that together? And I'm a big fan, in terms of the human sports science field, of looking at periodisation and planning out how you would get there. So periodisation is looking at goals effectively. So you set goals short, medium and long term and then you link periods of training or cycles within them, goals, um.
Jane Williams:So if we took an Olympic athlete, they would have a macro cycle which would link to an Olympic goal um, so that big, big big long term yes, so in terms of, say, a four year cycle, in that context, then they might have a meso or a medium length cycle which would link to maybe European championships or or national championships on an annual basis, and then they would have micro cycles, which can be anything from a week to a month. Then they'd be short of some areas of training, if you like, and then we'd have little goals in there. But I think, goal setting, linking that through to what you can physically, financially, um practically achieve, because you know a lot of riders are working and there's a lot of other pressures on them in terms of work, life and everything else there too, but having that plan, not being afraid to adapt it, but having that plan in place with the goals, I think is a really good starting place, um, within that, to have monitoring as well, because the other thing we see is like people might set some goals but then they don't assess the progress. And this idea is you need to have your goals. You have your, your mini, if you like, on your medium and your long term cycles that you're working towards, but you're assessing your progress all the time and by assessing your progress you can decide whether you're making an increase and you need to adapt because it's going better than planned or maybe it isn't quite working and then you can drop it back and from that perspective it can also help you to manage yourself as an athlete and extend your longevity.
Jane Williams:We know riding takes a bit of a toll. We know there's a high instance of chronic pain in riders. So you know managing ourselves is also pretty critical in there, as well as the horses. But if you're monitoring yourself and your horse, you know some of the little indicators. You know, like before an issue becomes really big, you might see maybe a heart rate which is a little bit weird. Over a couple of training sessions you're like, oh, that's a bit weird. Heart increase, heart rates can make to pain. I wonder if the horse is not quite right and you might prick up earlier on some little setbacks which will happen as well.
Olivia Cornick:Yeah, and fix it quicker as well. Yeah, I definitely agree with you with periodisation there. That's exactly as the strength of conditioning coach. That's exactly how we look at the year and then you set goals to make sure that you're objectively meeting your kind of fitness criteria. So do you have any suggestions as to how endurance rider can objectively measure if they are fit enough to be riding the race if they aren't working with the coach?
Jane Williams:I wouldn't allude to be a human fitness expert by any means, but I think you know, doing some sort of general fitness assessment would be good and I probably would say that might be worthwhile investing, working with a coach to get that sort of initial expertise. And again, I think that's something that people sometimes believe if you're going to work with a coach, you've got to see them every week. Well, you know, if money is an issue and it's part of the decision making in this, pick the right person and see them are more stretched out interval, but get them to help you set out on the right path. So I think you know some standard fitness exercise testing would be really useful, but also adapting some of the tools that we use with the horses. So I talked before about a standard exercise test in the horse.
Jane Williams:We can do a standard exercise test in ourselves. You know, put the harrowing monitor on yourself. Yeah, do a standard ride, undertake a standard set of work in the gym and just see how your performance is actually being affected and see if you are staying aerobic or anaerobic. Monitor your training. If you're doing strength and conditioning training, monitor that as well and see how your progress is. But yeah, I mean, I think probably my key would be do work with a coach. But if you can't have it on a regular basis, be honest with them, have that conversation and go. Look, I really want to improve. Money is an issue. Can you, can I see you once every six months? Can we do an initial assessment?
Olivia Cornick:you set me on the right path and then yeah, absolutely the right coach would actually be filled to work with that sort of person, because if you're truly caring about rider welfare, horse welfare, then you're going to want to work with people that are also trying to do the same. So I think it's looking at the distance that they're trying to cover, so making sure that your heart rates in a good zone for that distance and then making sure you're supplementing your off rider fitness. But you know your squats, your hinging, your isometric training so that the squat holds and that sort of thing. So, and there's so much free information out there, I think it's really important that people are actually actively pursuing. What can I be doing as a rider if I can't afford a coach every week? What can I be doing?
Jane Williams:and I think I totally agree. I mean, I think if you look at sort of rider performance, you need flexibility, and so, if you were to look at how that could come through from training, you need core strength and you need to have strength. We know that when you get fatigued, it is your legs and your arms where the fatigue sort of tends to hit him first. And if you think about them in terms of the tools to give the aids and to control the direction, that is where maybe we can't keep ourselves out of the saddle. And endurance as well. If our legs are starting to get fatigued and if our core starts to fatigue, if we start to fatigue in terms of arms, then we're going to lean on the reins and again that's going to impact the horse. So I think that that's strength and conditioning.
Jane Williams:Training and the isometric work to be able to hold yourself in a position is key. It's also about symmetry. So you know there is no such thing as a perfect symmetrical athlete horse or rider and I think we will very rarely get to that point. But that would be your biological perfect athlete, if you like. But what we can do is control the degree of asymmetry that we have and work with. The functional asymmetry is that we have both from a horse and a rider perspective. We're all likely to be a bit wonky, but the degree of wonkiness is probably going to link us to whether that is something we can cope with and function with and manage to when it pushes us into having the potential for instability and injury.
Olivia Cornick:Yeah it's not collapsing into one side of the horse?
Jane Williams:Yeah, and we see it in our horses particularly. You know, once one element gets fatigued, then that's going to have a knock-on effect on the other elements of the horse. It's the same with riders, you know. You start to get fatigued in certain muscle groups, then other elements have to be able to compensate for that. If you're more wonky on one side than another, your horse is likely to start to mirror that asymmetry that you have too. So, in terms of training, fitness, work, strength and conditioning, flexibility and trying to think about how you're working with what you have, and you need an honest and frank assessment. You know where you are at certain points in time and I'm measuring some of them, factors as well, and that's where working with a coach can be really, really key to help and support you but often just a good awareness of yourself and being a frank, objective assessment, which is not always a comfortable place for us to be in.
Olivia Cornick:They're not comfortable and one of the main objections I hear to starting strength and conditioning is oh, but I lug wheelbarrows and lift bales. Why should I do strength conditioning?
Jane Williams:Yeah, and I think you hear that a lot in equestrians there's the work that we do around the yard, but also our ride tons and tons of horses. Now, elite level riders probably because they're riding 10 plus horses a day that they're probably building up pro movements. I'd still say they should go and improve and have some additional ancillary exercise as well, but their actual fitness is probably above and beyond the competition requirement.
Jane Williams:Whereas, again, if we're poking down to amateur level, you know what we do around the yard is not mimicking the movements and the skills that we need. Taking it back to, we're developing skills and we're developing our body to support the skills we need in the sport. And you know, lug wheelbarrows around is not mimicking riding and it is not. What you're probably doing is giving us back pain by the repetitive strain and the fear of unloading that we tend to do because we don't follow the whole health and safety guidelines in terms of weights and stuff and safe lifting a lot of time.
Jane Williams:So I think you know we'll be developing some underpinning fitness for our low level, because it's that low level activity. It will develop some muscle strength, but it's not mimicking what you need for riding and that's what you've got to do. You need to break down. You know a rider needs to be able to perform these skills. How are these skills supported in terms of muscles? What muscles do we need to therefore strengthen? What flexibility do we need, etc. So I think it's really key that we don't just take for granted when we could turn around and say that I run for the bus every morning, therefore I can't go and run a marathon.
Olivia Cornick:Yeah yeah, it's not the same thing it doesn't measure up. Yeah, so linked to that, there's a weight cap in terms of you can't be too light for endurance, but there's. I don't believe there's a weight max, is there?
Jane Williams:Do you think there needs to be? I think typically we should start thinking about some. But it's quite tricky for our male riders in endurance because quite often the the stamp of horse that we might use isn't necessarily always the sort of more middle weight, heavyweight horses. By the nature of the sport it's an endurance athlete and obviously we've got tax within that weight requirement as well and you know, if you're a taller, more muscular athlete then actually you might be starting to push it. There is a lot of debate about horse rider weight ratios and what is acceptable and I think that's probably where we need to focus that this debate into. You know what is the suitable weight that a horse can carry for that horse's weight and it's that ratio of rider intact to the horse. So 20% of the horse's body weight will be considered to be sort of the very, very top end of the scale. We're looking a lot of the time more down to sort of 12 to 14%. So if we're thinking about that sort of ratio, I think that's something we should really consider, especially in endurance because of the length of time and saddle. So I think it's about weight. As always, it's complicated and you can't just take the weight as one element alone. It's the quality of the rider and how balanced they are and how synchronised they are to the horse's movement and to how they hold themselves. Which takes us back to that, that training element, doesn't it? You know, a larger weight which is in balance and is synchronised to a movement is going to have a lesser loaded impact on a horse's back, for example, and something which is very static and disconnected. I like the weight.
Jane Williams:So it's about matching the horse and the rider, thinking about what is actually happening in terms of the skills, the activities, the duration of activity and what we you see from the endurance research.
Jane Williams:You know that that two-point seat is important. That two-point seat is going to be able to get the rider off the horse's back. So we need to be able to to be fit enough to do that, and that will lighten some of the loading from slightly heavier weights. But we know that once the riders start to fatigue, then they may come back down into the saddle more so therefore, you've got to think of that in terms of how you you pass lot of them components. We also see the desert seat, so where you have a much longer stirrup and there's like a more sort of forward. So the feet are long and slightly facing forward. See that a lot more particularly over in some of the sort of UAE races and stuff like that between the flat races and on sand they're also slightly back and their legs are slightly forward, so they're almost, yes, sitting slightly towards the horses back and they almost look like they're pushing themselves slightly forward out as well.
Jane Williams:So imagine you're sitting in a chair with your legs out. It looks a bit like that and the saddle designs are quite often a little bit lighter and slightly adapted for it as well, and some initial research has suggested that's more synchronous. So actually it helps the horse and the rider to cycle together more. But it hasn't been really widely looked at and I worry about the duration of time and, you know, again, it just feels that that could be something which needs more research to really understand.
Olivia Cornick:More impact on the back, potentially with an unskilled rider.
Jane Williams:Yeah, and I think you know, as always, it is about that partnership again and how well the horse and the rider are laid together.
Jane Williams:I have a colleague at Hartbury, celeste Wilkins, who did her work at a PhD looking at synchronisation of the horse and rider in the pelvis and there's lots, and she found like two or three different strategies that people utilise when they're riding. So there isn't a right way to do it, okay With a bad. That degree of synchronisation between pelvic movement and the horse is quite key to that interface and performance and I think within that sort of weight debate, you know, understanding the impact of the rider or whether rider is fitting with the horse in terms of synchronisation, is also really key and the fitness comes in there as well. But yeah, I mean, for me I would put maximum weights on. Going back to original project. I think we should be to protect the horse and I think that that fits with the social licence element it's about, you know, okay, if a horse not maybe a maximum weight, but maybe a ratio of horse to human weight.
Olivia Cornick:Sure, and it's as a rider going, being responsible for your horse and going okay, what's the age of my horse? What's the musculature across the back like? If this is a really unmuscled horse, they're not going to be able to take as much weight as a really musculature.
Jane Williams:Completely, and you know any rider should make them decisions. You know, we should look at our horse, we should look at ourselves. If it's not conditioned, if maybe we're a little bit heavier than we normally are, you know, think about what you're going to do. If you're going to take it for a walk around a block, then you probably will be fine, won't you? Yeah, if you expect to go off and do a 40 kilometer ride, um not going to work and something's going to happen and something's going to become, um affected by that, isn't it? Um, but you have to.
Jane Williams:Again, I sound a bit like a broken record, but it is about looking at all them different elements, isn't it? And I'm making an informed decision, breaking down all of the components, which is daunting. Yeah, part of our duty here to sort of really take that step back and go. Okay, you know, we'll look at tack, we'll go, we'll set off tack. Okay, we might go out and buy the latest colours and make sure everything's all matching, matching. You know, yeah, draw back from some of that and look at some of the basic stuff and go. You know, like what's our fitness? Like what's the condition of the horse? Like what?
Jane Williams:am I like, how is all of this working together? Yeah, we get away. Can we pull a horse out of a field, should it be in the field? Or we can expect it to go out for three, four hours at a weekend because we want to go on a really nice long ride, you know that's the interesting one, yeah, and you know we've got to think about it as a partnership and think about are we actually doing a meeting both of our needs by how we're actually working with our horses?
Olivia Cornick:absolutely, yeah, I'd agree with that. So can you just I was reading your paper and can you give a quick overview of how skill level can affect the physiological demands of endurance?
Jane Williams:yeah. So I mean, I think, in terms of skill level, you obviously become more practiced at the movement and you have got a better underlying, if you like, an eight developed skill set which is going to be able to support it. So I think, at the highest skill levels, or as you've developed your skill, you are hopefully more synchronized, as we've said, with your horse's movement. You also develop, hopefully, better decision-making as well, so that experience enables you to adapt to situations as they arise and to be able to make the right decisions. So you would hope that with an increased level of skill, you're more in balance. You're therefore reducing the loading on the horse.
Jane Williams:You can link it into pacing strategies because you've learned what works for you and your horse. You have that better nutritional strategy. You also have the right sort of strategies and the ride in terms of hydration pre, post and during the ride You're adapted in the right way to be able to get your maximum performance. So I think it's about setting yourself up to be the best that you can in terms of skills and developing that skill coming through, also because you've tended to work your way up through the levels. Then that, hopefully, is also preparing you for the next one I think we see in the research we've done, it's that transition period from one level to the next, or the jump up, which is where people maybe need a bit of support both in managing the horses and also managing themselves.
Olivia Cornick:And what would that support? Perhaps?
Jane Williams:look like. So in their venting they have the Bridging the Gap series, which is designed to be able to support riders from one star to two star, up into the three and the four star and above, where maybe there's increased physiological demand and you need to think about it in a slightly different way. And endurance EGB has done some seminars linked to some of the work that FI is done, but I think it's about stepping back and thinking okay, what is the difference From a horse's perspective and a rider's perspective? The physiological challenge at a different level is going to be greater. You're going to have to compete at longer distances, so therefore you need to be able to be adequately prepared to be able to undertake that. There may be more increased travel and other sundry elements which you've got to look at there as well.
Jane Williams:So I think for me I'd be assessing particularly the horse and also from the rider's perspective, for how you were coping at the lower level in terms of recovery rates, general rates of fitness. So looking at lactate levels, looking at heart rate levels during the course of a competition, seeing if you're in a comfort zone, if you like, you're staying within them zones, which is showing that you're undertaking this and it's within your capability, I would look at injury records, I would look at post-race recovery, the recovery at the vet gates and to see how quickly all of that is happening, and then they would start to give you a few clues as to whether you're ready to step up to the next level and that increased physiological and physical demand. And then I would monitor. I say I mean it goes back to what I've said before. It's about prepping yourself correctly, but also monitoring your progress and working and building on that as you go through and how easy is it for people to actually take blood-lactate levels?
Olivia Cornick:is that a realistic?
Jane Williams:Lactate is probably something which is not as user-friendly to be able to undertake. So if you're working at a team level you've got vets and you've got support staff you can do that for people. We can do it relatively easily. You can do like little pinprick tests and other bits and pieces, but the heart rate is probably the better proxy measure.
Jane Williams:It's not perfect because we don't get the lactates, but you know heart rate has got a new relationship for our horses, up until you get into sort of 220 bits per minute and really sort of fatigued or fast galloping Heart rate, has been shown to be a good proxy measure for capacity. So we can use that relatively confidently, and the same with new athletes too. So for a user-friendly, nice, easy way to be able to start monitoring it, I think a heart rate monitor is a good start. The only caveat I would say is that a lot of the systems will give you lovely, pretty pictures and data and they'll give you some level of interpretation. They don't always fully tell you what the numbers mean, and I think that's one of the elements which is missing at the moment in the sector it is that interpretation, so you really understand how to use the information you get to its best capacity.
Olivia Cornick:So can you point people towards a resource that they could better understand this information?
Jane Williams:I think some of that is about doing some of the reading around and looking at some of it. I can do a CMS plug for the book that I've got. So there's a training for equestrian performance which I wrote with colleagues a few years ago which has some basic information in which would be useful. Arianna, I've also produced a nice little guide about using heart rate in horses, which is quite nice. My sort of top tips are to use the watch or to use a Bluetooth so that you can get the rates and use it physically within your training, so that you do know where your anaerobic threshold is or you know what level of work you're doing. And probably not as easy to articulate in that context. But if you take your horse's maximum heart rate so let's say we're gonna work on 240 as a maximum heart rate you take away your horse's age and then you times that by 0.8 and that should give you a rough approximation of where it anaerobic zone is.
Jane Williams:So you can then utilize that to be able to have a baseline level. So, yeah, I would do that and I would monitor it and stick the percentage of time aerobic to anaerobic that your horse is working at each training session and start to just calculate that in a diary or something and work it through. But there are apps and there are other bits and pieces that will help. I think that for me in equestrian sport is where a performance analyst can be quite useful and just to work and to help to do some of that interpretation. It's not tricky, it's just. It's about putting yourself in the right sort of head space and understanding and then you can slide with it yourself.
Olivia Cornick:Yeah, great, well, I'll put that in the show notes that you've just said there with your resources, so that'll be really helpful for people. So thank you for that. And in terms of can we just touch upon the nutrition strategies for endurance riders, because this is hugely over-lurched and if people get to a vet gate they'll rush their horse through, make sure the horse is hydrated and fed, but so often they don't do it themselves. They fill in a rush. So what would you recommend?
Jane Williams:I mean I think you take the same approach as what you would see in the ultra athletes and ultra endurance sports. So you should be thinking about your nutrition outside of the event and you should be thinking that you've got enough stores coming into it. So carb loading in terms of an athlete going forward into it, but also thinking about actually during the event how you're actually going to maintain your nutrition and your hydration. So you should be having hydration breaks and we've seen you can go alongside in the top level events. You can have your team, we can get you to give you bottles of water, et cetera. You usually see the riders throw over the horse and not drink the meat else and you're like, no, you drink some of them. It's really key. You do actually have that. You know a good isotonic drink which has got electrolytes of fermentation in there as well. But also you know, like the gel packs that you can get now you can go and buy them commercially. That's the glycogen stores. You know literally quick energy that you can carry lightweight, easy, not a huge amount of volume that you can eat, and you can have to replenish your energy as you're going through the events too. But I mean it's really key that you do do that.
Jane Williams:And then post event, it's about hydration. I'm not over hydrating, but also making sure that you're getting there. So for me, at a vet gate, ideally, we obviously are a look after the horse, but I would have a little rider pack, which it would be maybe some of these sort of commercial energy gels and stuff which you can get back in a banana. But you know something that would get in there relatively quick and easy and hydration, and if you did that for yourself alongside the horse, it's not going to be a massive impact on the performance with the horse at all. You know you can still manage the vet gate, but you're putting yourself into a much stronger position. It goes back to what we said, doesn't it? You should physically be able to meet the demands of the next stage of the race better, because you've got energy, you're hydrators, so you should make better decision making. You know the impact on performance by looking after yourself and just spending a little bit of time to do that could be quite key, definitely.
Olivia Cornick:I think that's a good message. So I think we'll move on to the questions from the audience, if that's okay. So we've actually covered this slightly is saying how do I manage to do the extra work for strength conditioning and fitness whilst I look after my horse and have a job? How do I fit this into my life?
Jane Williams:It's tricky, isn't it? It's getting to about sort of, you know, taking the time out and thinking, okay, this is really key to doing it. You know even 10, 15 minutes a day to be able to put some time aside or to have a few days in the week to be able to do it, because recovery is also key when you're training yourselves. I think it sounds pretty brutal, but it's one of them elements. You've just got to go, you know, Suck it out.
Jane Williams:Yeah, I mean I would rather not spend half an hour grooming the horse so it's gleaming, and maybe go out with it a little bit dirty. Just do a quick brush of its bridle and area and a saddle and make sure it's okay and save a bit of time there to be able to work on yourself as well. But I think you know the benefit of doing it will hopefully outweigh it. And also, you start getting it dolphins, don't you? Once you actually start doing it, then it becomes enjoyable.
Olivia Cornick:It's really good and it does improve them and actually if it's someone that's not started already, that's much, much easier than someone that's got a level of fitness, because a new starter will need less stimulus to get muscle gain compared to someone that's already trained. So even just by starting with body weight movements at home. So you think squats, squat holds, squat, jumps, think even planks these all body weight movements press up that you can be doing at home just to get a starting point and you want to be, doing kind of full motion in terms of injury prevention, but then also look at what does the riding look like for endurance and then try and replicate those movements into a training.
Jane Williams:So I think that's probably a good place to start, and you know it isn't always necessarily about going to the gym and pumping weights, is it as you say? There's other alternatives that you can look at and you know you can make that start at home without necessarily going into an environment which is a bit intimidating, absolutely yeah, and that can all be from at home to begin with.
Olivia Cornick:So I think if you're struggling to fit into your lifestyle, aim to do, like you said, 10, 15 minutes at home. That's better than nothing and you've got better. So where do you see right of S&C or fitness going in the next five to 10 years within an insurance?
Jane Williams:I think, particularly with the link to social licence across endurance but also all sports, that the lens is going to be focusing on us as riders more and more and at the moment that probably focuses on the horse in terms of injuries and some of the key elements like whip use, which are very visible. But as we delve deeper into that, I think people will start to question the rider more and you know, is the rider suitable? Yeah, so I think that there will be an element of that which we'll also then be looking at. You know, like are you the right weight and fitness and the right skill set to be able to show that you're doing the best for your horse?
Jane Williams:But I think from a performance perspective I don't know if it will go that way, but I would hope that actually people will start to recognise I'm a huge advocate of performance analysis and equestrian sports for horses and riders, but I think, you know, more people have the evidence that the more we talk about this, the more people will see the real benefits to them and the horses from actually engaging with strength and conditioning off rider fitness and it makes that relationship so much better, both from competitively but also just for general enjoyment. You know you're less likely to get injured. You're going to be able to work with your horse a lot better. So I think it will become more commonplace and I see more riders now engaging with rider-specific fitness programmes, which I think is probably one of the ways to get people more engaged generally. Because you know, if you can understand that link between what you're doing in terms of exercise and what that means to your passion, then I think you're more likely to sort of pull it together and to do it.
Olivia Cornick:It makes you engage to actually be encouraged to do what you want to do, because it's going to improve your performance on the horse and improve horse welfare as well.
Jane Williams:Yeah, and in length, and you're riding career potentially yeah.
Olivia Cornick:And that's the thing our sport's so different to other sports, because actually we have this long career where we can ride into, you know, 70s, 80s, so yeah, I think that's great. As riders, what can we be doing to promote ethical equitation?
Jane Williams:So I think that probably comes back to what I've made, so you don't write the way through. This is about understanding the evidence, knowing what evidence is out there and making evidence informed decisions. Riding historically has been based on tradition, trial and error, learning, and in our modern era that is not going to wash with that broader public perception and in showcasing that we really are meeting the needs of our horses. So I think it's about trying to stay as up to date with the evidence which is coming out, the research which is taking place, and to embrace it. That isn't always easy and that link between science and the real world is a tricky one to navigate. So I think there's many podcasts, conversations that we're having like today, where we can start to be taken out and become user friendly. I think that that's the real way to take it forward. But from an individual level, it again it's probably taking that step back and really thinking about, like, what am I doing and why am I doing it? What's the purpose of this?
Jane Williams:There's so many instances with what we do that if we actually broke it down, we maybe would see that that isn't the best result.
Jane Williams:So, for example, if you're thinking about an ethical approach to riding.
Jane Williams:We know our horses learn through cues and responses and we basically shape them in terms of what we do.
Jane Williams:So we're putting a leg on to move forward is something that we shape. So if you take a show jumping rider, let's say a show jumping horse refuses, how often do we see the rider maybe pull them round and use the whip to get them to go forward at the same time as holding the reins to stop them moving forward? Now, if you break that down, that is a total breakdown of communication because the cues we're giving are just not matching the responses that we want and therefore, in their mental cases we can't justify that as being ethical. But I'm also pretty sure a lot of people might have been taught historically to do some stuff like that. So you know, thinking about what we do, thinking about when things maybe don't go well or when they do go well, and breaking down why that is, and using ethically sound practices, working with the horse, thinking about how the horse learns, understanding the wealth and the horse's perspective that that could be a really key way to start to maybe embed some of that ethical equitation in your practice.
Olivia Cornick:It's like when emotion, emotionality, takes over and our justification goes out the window. Yeah, totally.
Jane Williams:It's a tricky place. Everyone can probably think of an example where, with hindsight, you wouldn't have done what you would do, and it's not about putting your fingers or beating people up over what they've done, it's about you know what. Let's be honest here, let's be reflective, let's think about what the best way forward is and let's try and keep everything calm, logical and effort-based and just taking responsibility of that.
Olivia Cornick:Yeah, that's great. How much does logistical challenges such as vet gates, feeding, monitoring for effect, performance for horse and rider?
Jane Williams:I'm not sure if they affect performance per se. We've got evidence that shows things like travel distances can be in the frequency of competition. It can link into performance as well. I think a lot of it for me is about the preparation and understanding. You know that that monitoring and being able to do that can be a really key tool in your toolbox to be able to see how you're moving forward and how you're going on.
Jane Williams:I would say from some of the work that we've done in endurance that maybe people want to think about competition frequency and think about you know the frequency, so the cumulative distance in training, the ability for horses to rest and recover and to be able to have sufficient breaks in between, about sort of prolonged exercise and also, if you've got competitions, if you're eliminated from a competition, then thinking about that sort of mandatory outer competition period. So the FEI obviously have mandatory MOOCs where you have the eight days and you wouldn't be able to do something. I think actually we should think about that on an individual level for endurance too. If there's been a little issue, if something hasn't gone quite right, you know, we should take that step back and think about you know, how do we adapt our training and stuff that way to be able to move it forward.
Olivia Cornick:So what would a good break in between prolonged exercise look like?
Jane Williams:It depends on the horse and the rider, to be fair. So it's about you monitoring yourself. But again, quite often we will find traditional training regimes might be that you would have a long distance and then you might go and do something again the next day. You will be looking for signs of recovery. If a horse is really depleted, it takes up to 72 hours for them to be fully repleted again. If you do a piece of fast work, you probably won't be giving a couple of days before you do the next piece of fast work. It's a sport-specific and, to a extent, individual horse specific. What you shouldn't be doing is lots of distance and lots of speed repetitively, without that ability to recover, because they're the factors which will lead to injury.
Olivia Cornick:Yeah, and again that heart rate would also help. They would have elevated your heart rate, if you started off.
Jane Williams:So you would see that within a quite early start of work you'd have that increased heart rate and that your horse was working at a level above where it should be for its normal exercise heart rate at that sort of exercise intensity and duration.
Olivia Cornick:So basically, everyone needs to go out and buy a horse for you to heart, it's not the only way.
Jane Williams:But I mean it is a useful. It does give you objective data, doesn't it? Yes?
Olivia Cornick:very helpful.
Jane Williams:It can be really really helpful.
Olivia Cornick:Definitely, can horse breeds other than Arabs be successful at endurance.
Jane Williams:I would say yes, there's a lot of breeds which are suitable. I mean, the Arabs have got a real key place and there's a lot of Arab blood in some of the Thoroughbreds which maybe are doing successfully as well. Again, it's about the preparation, but it's also about recognising that in certain environments and climates some horses are going to be more superior performers than others. But you know, prepping your horse correctly and having that right sort of horse rider match is there. But the more lighter weight breeds, I think particularly, are going to be more suitable. The endurance breed, I think we should say, are other than lightweight breeds. But the endurance breeds are more likely to be able to be competitive, but the lower levels. There's no reason why most breeds, if they're trained properly, are not going to be capable of being successful.
Olivia Cornick:Sure, okay, so someone's just wanted to get involved in as long as they're due to training.
Jane Williams:Yeah, it's there. I mean, it's the lower distance rides. Just, you know, manage your horse, manage your horse. Within that, you'll still be able to go and have a good day and be able to go out and be successful. It's about the preparation, isn't it? You know, if you think again, if we look at the comparison to marathons, for example, you see a whole shape and range of athletes that complete marathons. Some might take longer than others, but if that prep is there correctly, you can achieve.
Olivia Cornick:No, having a great time. Yeah, that's brilliant. What can endurance riders specifically aim to improve in off horse training? I guess we've kind of covered this, haven't we?
Jane Williams:Yeah, I mean again, I think it goes back to that sort of, doesn't it the flexibility, the strength and conditioning, so the core strength in particular, and also the skill development, and that's underpinned by that strength and conditioning training.
Olivia Cornick:And in your paper you mentioned how in the long distance people go between the two point and then they do the rising to kind of replenish that their muscle, because the two point takes up a lot of energy. So if someone's currently not doing a two point position and they're doing rising, drop for the whole ride. So, novice rider, should they aim to be looking to do?
Jane Williams:Yeah, I think increasingly trying to integrate some of that two point position is really useful because it does your support your own way. You're taking the weight off the horse's back, so rising trot is the sort of the next best strategy. But the more you can get your weight up and you can control yourself, the better. So I mean, when you're doing your training and your work, standing up in your stirrups and my now great fan of standing straight up in your stirrups improves your core stability, improves a bit of your muscle strength as well. You know, on the horse that's a nice strategy to start doing it and you can do it for like a minute or two minute and build up the time you can do it. But then off the horse, doing your squats, doing your core exercises as well, is also going to support them.
Olivia Cornick:Great. So, to finish off, I always finished a podcast with five quickfire questions. So where were you, where are you now and where are you going with your research?
Jane Williams:Where were I? So I suppose I was looking at performance analysis across all sports in terms of particularly endurance, thinking about that, that link to horse injury and conflutions. What I'm doing at the moment is still continuing that on across the range disciplines. So I'm doing work, of course, racing, still in endurance, with show jumping and with dressage, and applying performance analysis both from a competitive perspective but also underpinning to welfare. I'm also doing a lot more now linking through to the performance and well-filling. So we're doing a lot of work to think about how we can really increase that knowledge and understanding and develop that evidence to make that transition. I mean going forward.
Jane Williams:I think I will continue to do the work looking at performance analysis because I think there's real potential there to improve both horse and rider performance and welfare. But I think, particularly with my work with Sport Horse Welfare Foundation, helping to support individuals but also broader federations to really get the right messaging and the evidence-based messaging which can support horse and rider competitive performance but also horses and riders everywhere to be able to do the best that they can and to get the best out of the sport and also to stay healthy and fit and have a nice happy life. So I mean, it's all for me at the moment about a good life for horses and a good life for people who are working.
Olivia Cornick:That's really important work that you're doing, so we really appreciate you know we need more people like you to be doing the research so we can continue doing what we love doing. What do you wish you knew before you started your research career?
Jane Williams:It's hard work and there's ups and downs and there's always challenges. So I think I sort of maybe I don't think it would be that. The frustration, I suppose, is you never quite know how much it can change and it can develop. I suppose what I'd really like to know is a lot more of the technology, but actually I wouldn't like the technology to be available when I started to be able to take that forward. But you know, there's always questions of the best thing about research. There's always going to be more to learn and I think that open mind is a really key skill. But yeah, I'm not sure exactly what I would like to have known. I suppose maybe that actually can make a difference and we were starting to see it make a difference. You know, having that at the start would be really encouraging.
Olivia Cornick:Do you ever still get imposter syndrome? Oh, all the time.
Jane Williams:definitely there always and you just think about it. You know researchers for everybody. You've got little idols and you hear us. You know we can't speak to them. They're all normal, lovely people who will happily chat to you and just talk about what they do. So you'd never be afraid to ask questions or to approach us here and I'm as much as you guys. I'm like, oh, we're coming at them. That everyone's very open and that's really helpful.
Olivia Cornick:What do you think we can be doing to make research more accessible and understandable for everyone?
Jane Williams:I mean, I think for me this science, comms is the sort of the area which we really look at. But you know, it's just about getting it out there and, from a research perspective, it's about looking at different ways to articulate what we do and different communication strategies and, from an individual basis, to start to join some of the societies, to link into some of the podcasts and the webinars and just really embed yourself within that world. It's a bit scary but again, don't be afraid to ask questions. If you don't understand something, ask the people who are doing it. There is no such thing in my world as a stupid question. I thought somebody could understand it and that we can have that conversation, because the conversations are really important and we're all in it. I fundamentally do believe that everyone's in it for the well, the well-being and the good of the horse and therefore we're all on the same page.
Jane Williams:So you know, just just speak to people, engage and ask.
Olivia Cornick:Fab, if there's one thing you could teach the horse world, what would it be?
Jane Williams:Um, oh, good question, I think, for me. I think one of the things I'd really like people to take on board is to not always to believe in traditional practice and to be open minded. So I think if I could teach everyone to be open minded and reflective and to really think about what they were doing, that would be a cool message for me is, like you know, question your actions. Can you really fully justify what you're doing for the good of the horse.
Olivia Cornick:Just because it's always been done that way doesn't mean it's the right way.
Jane Williams:Now, and we see lots of parallels in other areas as well, don't we? You know? There's a lot of practice in all elements of our life which would have been acceptable 30, 50, 100 years ago, which we don't accept now. So I think that open minded and reflective question and approach is really key.
Olivia Cornick:Great. So if you can talk today's message, what is your last message to the audience? So I think, for me.
Jane Williams:I mean, I'd really like people to read the paper. If you have any questions, please to do like pass them on to me. But I mean, I think in terms of endurance and broader equestrian sports, it's really about thinking about what the evidence is that's out there to support people, to generate more evidence by engaging with research, but just to question what you're doing and why and to really sort of try and use evidence-informed approaches as much as you possibly can.
Olivia Cornick:Amazing and so further to that. If people do have reader people or they have questions at the back of this podcast, how can they contact you? Are you on social media? Can they ask some questions?
Jane Williams:I am on social media but I have to be on someone always the best. I normally on any paper there's an email address for the corresponding author. If you drop them an email, then that is a really good way to be able to start to open a conversation with them. But equally a few for heart. Remembers the staff. We have a repository called pure, so if you go to google and but Jane Williams, pure, that will link to all the research that I've done. And again, there's ways and means that you can contact us through that and most academic institutions have the same open access repositories. So we're required to publish a version of the work that we do so you can get access an awful lot of stuff in that way. But yeah, I'm on Twitter I think it's jmwilliams106 and then Facebook as well, if anybody wants to follow me on that Brilliant.
Olivia Cornick:Thank you so much. We really appreciate all the work you're doing. You are a fountain of knowledge, so thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for joining us today. Cheers, cheers. And that wraps up our first episode. I hope you enjoyed it and learnt lots. Don't forget to follow me on social media at Rider Strength Coach. I'm here for all your strength and conditioning meetings, so do follow me and ask questions. I'm more than happy to help. Have a great day.