We personally don’t believe that riding holidays should just be for those who are fully riding fit and riding super regularly, so if you’re feeling a little lacking in your confidence and stamina but know you have the experience needed, here’s how to get riding fit in time for your escape.

The most important thing to do is to clock up as many hours in the saddle as possible. A lot of our rides require you to be riding for sometimes up to 8 hours a day and even if you’re riding regularly, this can still feel like A LOT on your body. But the more you ride, the more your body will get used to being sat in a saddle for longer periods of time. Make sure a lot of the hours you clock up are spent on hacks or trail rides to best imitate your riding holiday.

It’s also important to start building up the amount of hours you spend in the saddle. Start booking 2-3 hour hacks / trail rides and gradually increase the amount of these that you do. This will really help to get your body used to being sat in the saddle for longer than the average hour.

If you want to go the extra mile, it’s great to build up your strength in the gym and work on the muscles most used when riding. These include your glutes, hip flexors, hamstrings, abductors and calves, your core and ab muscles, and your shoulder, back and arm muscles. Essentially your whole body (and they say horse riding isn’t a sport). Any exercises that strengthen these muscles are great and you can do this in the gym or with some full body ‘activity’ work outs such as bouldering, swimming, tennis etc.

We would extra recommend that you spend time strengthening the muscles around your joints if you’re like Wild Mane’s founder Eleri and have hypermobility or anything similar (which tends to be quite common in horse riders). She found herself wrapping her ankle every morning of her Iceland trip in 2023 with vet tape after spending 6 hours on a very bouncy horse the first day. So if you have slippy joints and/or are prone to joint pain, we’d really recommend some joint strengthening exercises, especially for your hips, knees and ankles.

Outside of physical improvements, there’s one thing we’d recommend to get mentally riding fit in time for your riding trip. If you aren’t already riding lots of different horses, we can’t recommend doing this enough. Most riding schools / centres will likely give you a different horse each time you ride however it’s easy to get in the habit of riding the same horse, especially if you have your own. It’s great to be getting on different horses that are different sizes and have different temperaments because unless you’ve been on that riding trip before, you will be getting on a horse you don’t know and haven’t ridden before. If you’re really used to riding one type of horse, this may knock your confidence a little and lead to you feeling more uncomfortable. If you’ve got experience riding a variety of different horses, it’s much easier to get on a new horse with confidence and ease.

Make sure to get in contact with our friendly team if you have any questions or need help with discerning your riding ability.