Book Review: Equine Fitness by Jec Aristotle Ballou

March 2, 2013

Last week, I had to place an order on Amazon.com for something work related. I work as a youth assistant at a downtown church, so we’re always ordering supplies for games, curriculum, etc… So I spend a lot of time on Amazon! Anyway, I usually click through the horse books that pop up as suggestions based on some of my previous orders and this book – Equine Fitness – came up and it was on sale for $7! How could I resist?

I’d never seen this book in person, but I read the preview online and I was fascinated! My husband and I had made New Year’s resolutions to get in (and stay in) better shape so I thought “why not include Dancer as well?” We could all use new workout routines as apposed to random “whenever” workouts that had proven to be few and far between for us humans. I figured that if I could motivate myself to workout, maybe I’d be more motivated to keep Dancer in better shape as well. So, into my cart it went!

Well, it just arrived a few days ago and I spent most of the evening flipping through and marking specific pages that I wanted to focus on. I have been incredibly impressed with this book for many reasons. The book starts off explaining how horse’s muscles work and gives examples of good and bad muscle tone. Then it explains how to assess your horse’s condition and explains what you might be doing to overwork your horse. There are great details about conditioning plans and wonderful examples to help you get started. It continues on to focus on specific muscle groups of the horse and really breaks down what to do, how to do it and it gives you ideas and specific exercises to help – and there are pictures for those of us visual learners out there! Another aspect that I thought was really great was that the exercises weren’t all in the saddle – some were massages! To top it all off, you can tear out flash cards in the back with all the exercises and brief explanations on them to take to the barn (I laminated mine)! There are also sample exercise routines which provides a great starting point for us riders!