http://www.theequestrianphysio.ca/, https://www.theequestrianphysio.ca/tep-training-app-landing-page

The Equestrian Physio, Guelph, Guelph, ON (2026)

03/19/2026

One of the things I emphasize most in my programming is picking and dosing exercises that are appropriate for what your body is actually capable of. Which raises the obvious question: how do we figure out what our body IS capable of?

The gold standard for testing strength is isokinetic dynamometry, but those machines are pretty hard for the average person to access. So I use other tests and movements as a proxy for assessing strength. We select movements that bias certain muscle groups, and because we're using repetitions to failure or holds to failure as our testing point, it's more of a strength-endurance test than a true strength test. But it's still incredibly useful to have objective data, because without it, we're just guessing. And guessing tends to mean either underloading (and not progressing) or overloading (and getting hurt).

Some of the tests I like to use with my clients:

🔸 Single leg sit to stand x 30 seconds, which biases more of the quads and glutes in a squat pattern movement. I like to see a minimum of 12-15. This one is particularly relevant for riders because it challenges single leg stability and strength through a range that mimics the kind of demand we place on our legs in the saddle, absorbing force, maintaining position, and producing controlled movement through the hip and knee.

🔸 Hamstring bridge to failure to bias more of the posterior chain. I like to see a minimum of 20-30 reps. Hamstring strength is hugely important for riders and often undertrained. Your hamstrings play a key role in pelvic stability, which directly affects your seat and your ability to follow the horse's movement without bracing or gripping.

🔸 Copenhagen plank to failure to bias the groin muscles. Adductor strength matters enormously for riders, not just for grip on the saddle, but for the ability to stabilize your pelvis and control your leg position independently. Weak adductors can show up as a leg that swings, a heel that creeps up, or difficulty maintaining consistent contact.

🔸 Side plank to failure to bias the lateral chain. I aim for 60-90 seconds minimum. Your lateral chain is what keeps you from collapsing to one side in the saddle, especially through turns, lateral movements, and any moment where the horse shifts underneath you. Asymmetries here are really common in riders and often correlate with one-sidedness in the saddle.

🔸 Calf raise to failure. I like to see around 30 if performed on a downward angle. Calf and ankle strength affects your ability to maintain a stable, weighted heel and absorb shock through your lower leg. Riders who struggle with their heels popping up or feeling unstable in their stirrups often find calf endurance is a limiting factor.

Through all of these, I like to see less than a 10% difference side to side. If a rider struggles to hit these minimums or has a big asymmetry, it often gives us a really clear place to start and sheds light on what they might be struggling with in the saddle. I've had riders test their side plank and find a 25 second difference between left and right, then realize that lines up perfectly with the direction they always struggle to sit the canter or hold a bend.

Now, if you tried these and your numbers weren't where you'd hoped, I want you to hear this: that is OKAY! That is information. And information is the most useful thing you can have, because it tells you exactly where to focus your energy instead of guessing or following a generic program that may or may not address what YOU actually need.

So what do you do about it? Two things.

First, the test COULD become the exercise. If your side plank dropped at 40 seconds, that's your starting point. Train it, build it, retest it. If your single leg sit to stand was 8 reps, that's where you begin. Use it as a starting point and get cracking. Always superior to knowing where you stand and choosing not to do anything about it:)

Second, and this is equally important, we can't ONLY train the tests. There's a principle called Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." If all we do is practice side planks and hamstring bridges, we'll get better at side planks and hamstring bridges, but that doesn't necessarily mean we've built the kind of broad, transferable strength that actually shows up in the saddle. We need to train more WIDELY, building strength, stability, and motor control across a range of movements and demands so that when you retest, the improvement is real and functional, not just rehearsed.

That's exactly where TEP Training comes in. The app includes discipline specific training programs, on-demand mobility and rehab workouts, and a full library of resources on biomechanics and training principles, all designed for riders who are ready to hold themselves to the same standard they hold their horses.

TEP Training App opens its doors for Spring enrolment April 13th. Comment "SPRING" and I'll DM you the link, or check the link in my bio!

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03/14/2026

What are the ingredients of an effective rider?
It’s a question I get ALL the time, and the answer goes well beyond just “core strength.”

Strength is what holds everything together. It’s your base. Not just abs, but glutes, hamstrings, quads, back, shoulders, everything working to keep you balanced and secure, even when your horse shifts underneath you.

Mobility gives you ACCESS to good position. If your hips, ankles, or lumbar spine are locked up, you’ll struggle to sit deeply, follow movement, or keep your lower leg still, no matter how strong you are.

Awareness is about knowing where your body is in space. Your alignment, your weight distribution, your contact. It’s what lets you make micro-adjustments on the fly instead of defaulting to overcorrection or guesswork.

Control takes that awareness and makes it useful. It’s the ability to stabilize, isolate, and move with precision. Without it, energy leaks and your aids get noisy or unclear.

Power is your ability to move fast and effectively. It’s the difference between slow reactions and athletic response. Think lead changes, clean transitions, or reacting mid-air over a fence.

Endurance keeps your form and function consistent throughout the ride. When it fades, position breaks down, aids lose clarity, and you end up compensating or fatiguing in ways that don’t just impact your horse, but safety as well.

These six pillars don’t work in isolation; they overlap, support, and build on each other.

And we don’t just need “enough”, either. You NEVER KNOW when a spook or a trip will come, and having each of these components in EXCESS of our day to day demands is what keeps us safe, minimizes injury risk, and allows us to stay in the saddle long term.

And it’s centered around these six pillars that I do every physio eval, every clinic, and write every training or rehab program.

If you’d like to take the next step in your own riding journey, the TEP Training App opens this April!

With programming built specifically around these pillars to help you ride stronger, longer, and more effectively.

Waitlist is open now, link in bio.✅

03/08/2026

2026 Goals: Run Like A Girl

03/08/2026

Some acts of micro feminism you can carry forward this international women's day 🌿

Refer to the vet, the farrier, the coach, the judge, the course designer as "she" until told otherwise.

Compliment her ride, her position, her problem-solving, her fitness before you compliment her outfit.

Say "women," not "girls," whether you're talking about your barn friends, your clients, or the riders in the warm-up ring.

If she gets interrupted in the aisle, at a show, in a clinic, redirect attention back to her. "actually, I want to hear what she was saying."

If a coach is talking over her, bullying her, or dismissing her, say something. Silence is a vote.

Refuse to yield your turn in the warm-up ring just because a man assumes you will. Claim your space in the arena, at the in-gate, in the meeting room.

Leave a review for a female-owned barn, tack shop, coaching business, or equestrian brand. Buy from female-owned businesses.

Say "horseperson." or just say nothing and let her expertise speak.

Stop apologizing for taking up space or asking a question. You are not a burden.

Ask your female students to stack the poles, carry the standards, lift the hay bales. Don't default to the young men for the physical work and the young women for the detail work. Strength belongs to everyone in this barn.

Read books and listen to podcasts by women in sport science, horsemanship, and equestrian performance. There are brilliant ones. Find them and share them.

When you write about a woman rider, trainer, or competitor, let her accomplishment stand on its own. "the Olympic team gold medalist" needs no footnote about her family status or who her husband is.

This sport has always been ours. Let's act like it. 🤍

03/08/2026

Happy International Women's Day to all you beautiful, fearless, powerful ladies out there 🤍. Every single one of you who identifies as a woman, this day is for you.

But a the same time, this day always leaves me feeling two things at once. On one hand, wildly celebratory, but on the other, still deeply reflective. And I think that tension is exactly the point.

Women's sport has NEVER been bigger. The viewership, the investment, the recognition we have always deserved is finally, FINALLY showing up. We are breaking records, breaking ceilings, and breaking into spaces that were never built for us. That is extraordinary and worth every bit of celebration we can muster.🎉

And yet we're still fighting battles that should be long over. Women still carry a wildly disproportionate share of the invisible work; the mental load, the unpaid labour, the orchestration of entire lives that goes unrecognized and uncounted. Female professionals still have to out-perform, out-prove, and out-hustle their male counterparts for the same opportunities.

And in our own sport, a sport that is female dominated, women still face gender bias in sponsorships, in media, in business. Certain aesthetics are still rewarded over skill and results. Research and equipment are still built around bodies that aren't ours.

We are measured, constantly, by standards WE never set.

So today, hold both things. Celebrate how far we've come, because it is GENUINELY remarkable. And also recognize every woman around you who is showing up, carrying more than anyone sees, and doing it with grit and grace.

And then keep pushing, because settling has never been in our nature.

Happy IWD 💪🤍

03/06/2026

There's a common assumption in the equestrian world that if you ride multiple horses a day, you're automatically fit for the job. But is that necessarily true? Especially when you look at sport science or exercise physiology principles?

Riding ABSOLUTELY builds riding-specific conditioning. The timing, the feel, the skill, the sport-specific coordination that comes from hours in the saddle, that's real and it's irreplaceable. Not to mention, just the general physical conditioning that comes from hours in the saddle. Nobody is arguing that. If you're putting in serious saddle time across multiple horses, you are developing something that no amount of gym work can replicate.

But here's where I think the assumption breaks down, and where sport physiology actually has something useful to say.

There's a foundational principle in exercise science called the principle of specificity, sometimes called the SAID principle,

Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands. It essentially means that your body adapts to the specific demands placed on it. The adaptations you get from riding are specific to riding. Your nervous system, your motor patterning, your endurance, all of it becomes more efficient at the task of riding.

But specificity cuts both ways.

Because riding is specific to riding, it doesn't reliably develop the broader physical qualities that structured strength and conditioning training targets. General strength, progressive overload, tissue resilience, power development, recovery capacity, these things require a different kind of stimulus than riding provides.

Generally in the saddle, the load isn't progressive. The intensity isn't controllable. The recovery isn't manageable in the same way. Riding simply doesn't deliver the training variables that produce those adaptations consistently.

Riding volume and physical preparedness are not the same thing.

And I get it! For a lot of you, you're about to comment "I ride six horses a day, I'm plenty fit." And maybe you are, for the specific demands of riding those six horses. But what you're describing is OCCUPATIONAL adaptation, not athletic preparation.

Your body has become efficient at a repeated task. But efficiency at a repeated task is different from being physically prepared in a way that supports longevity, injury resilience, and raising your performance ceiling.

Think about it this way. A farrier who swings a hammer in their forge all day has adapted forearms. That doesn't mean structured strength training is redundant for them. A nurse on their feet for 12 hour shifts has developed real endurance. That doesn't mean cardiovascular training adds nothing. In fact, general conditioning will likely help both of them substantially in meeting their occupational demands (and protect them from injury/overload). In both cases, the occupational demand produces specific adaptation, and structured training builds on top of it in ways the occupation alone can't.

Riding is the same. The adaptation you get from riding is SPECIFIC to riding. The adaptation you get from structured training is broader, and it feeds back into your riding in ways that saddle time alone simply can't replicate, because the two stimuli are targeting different physical qualities through different mechanisms.

They serve different purposes. They build different things. And genuinely, you need both.❤️

If you're not sure where to start, how to structure your training, or how to fit it into an already packed week, that's exactly what the TEP Training System is built for. No guessing what to do, how to schedule it, or whether it's going to work. It's all laid out for you, with answers and support along the way.

Comment TRAIN or check out theequestrianphysio.ca for a link to join the April waitlist. 🐴❤️

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03/05/2026

Hip mobility… we either love it or we hate it, but it is ESSENTIAL no matter what discipline we ride

And why? Simply put, horses are WIDE😂. So not only do we need mobility in “neutral” ranges, we also need significant mobility in wide outer ranges.

If we want accurate and precise aids from our seat & legs, one of the first steps is to start at the hip. We need mobility BEYOND what’s sufficient to simply get our leg around the horse, in order to accurately bring the leg on and off, rotate in and out, and bring it forward or back.

This 90/90 drill helps build just that. Different than a typical 90/90 where you casually drop your knees from left to right, in this variation, we seek to MAXIMIZE the amount of rotation in one hip before letting the other leg join it.

Picking the back knee up as HIGH as we can to maximize that external rotation, before coming to neutral, then dropping the new back leg as far as we can before letting the other one go.

This exercise also helps us build CONTROL in those outer ranges, really helping us develop the body awareness and strength to provide accurate aids.
If this one is too challenging, start with it leaning back/hand supported before moving to this version.

Want more? TEP Training is opening for spring enrollment in April! With structured training programs AND On-Demand mobility, it has all you need (and probably a lot more) to build that confidence and control you've been striving for for years.

Comment "TRAIN" or check the link in my bio to get on the waitlist!

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03/05/2026

Horse ownership is already full of expensive, time-consuming non-negotiables, and most of us don't even blink at them anymore.

Farrier every 6 weeks. Saddle fitter when something feels off. Bodywork. Board. Blanket repairs at 10pm in a cold barn because it's supposed to drop to -15 overnight. Early mornings washing fetlocks and putting ointment on mud fever because it's not going to treat itself.

We make all of it work. We budget for it, we schedule around it, we show up for it, because we understand that this is part of what it means to care for a horse. It's an innate part of the deal.

So why is rider fitness consistently the thing that gets written off?

"I don't have time for the gym." "I can't afford a trainer on top of everything else." "I'm already exhausted by the time I get done at the barn."

And those complaints are VALID. To be clear, I'm not dismissing them. Horse life is genuinely demanding, and adding anything else to that plate is a real ask.

But I also think we need to start looking at our own fitness through the same lens we apply to everything else. Not as an optional luxury or a "nice to have". As part of the deal.

It doesn't have to look like an expensive gym membership or an hour of training every day. Just like we find more economical farriers, or learn to do basic bodywork ourselves, or share a saddle fitter visit with a barn mate, there are ways to make rider fitness more accessible and time-efficient.

But we have to start by DECIDING it's non-negotiable (and my hope is that the industry is already shifting this way).

Because right now, for a lot of riders, it isn't. And I think that says something about how we value ourselves as athletes in this sport.

03/04/2026

K friends, little poll time! 🙋‍♀️

What does “functional fitness” mean to YOU as a rider? No googling, just your gut instinct!

Drop it in the comments 👇

03/03/2026

Comment SYMMETRY or check the link in my bio, and I'll send you the link to sign up for the FREE TEP Rider Symmetry Screen!

One of the most common questions I get in my DMs is some version of "what exercises should I do to fix X?" And honestly, it makes complete sense that that's where our brains go first! We notice something isn't working, and we want to fix it. Totally reasonable instinct.

But there's a step that tends to get skipped, and it's actually the most important one: figuring out WHY the problem is happening in the first place.

Take something as common as sitting heavier on one side. That could be coming from limited hip mobility on that side, a strength dominance in the hip or leg, restricted back mobility, ankle stiffness, a subtle pain avoidance pattern your body has adopted, saddle fit, or even your horse's own asymmetry, or a combination of several things! That's not even an exhaustive list.

So if someone messages me asking "what exercises should I do to even out my seat?", I genuinely cannot give a reliable answer until I know what's actually driving it. It would basically be throwing s**t at a wall to see what sticks.

That's exactly why I built the TEP Symmetry Screen. It's a free resource that walks you through a series of mobility and strength checks, joint by joint, side by side, so you can actually see where your body might be contributing to things like:

🔸 a bouncy hand (or hands)
🔸 always heavier in one rein
🔸 shifting to one side in the saddle
🔸 a horse that struggles to pick up a lead or bend one direction

The screen includes video walkthroughs so you know exactly what you're doing, plus a worksheet to track your results and monitor your progress over time. The goal isn't perfection (unless you're Ingrid Klimke, in which case, hi). It's just clarity, so you can stop guessing and start making a real plan.

Comment SYMMETRY or tap the link in my bio to grab it for free! And if you've got a riding friend you want to do it with, share this their way 👇

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03/03/2026

You know that quote, “The biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place”?

Communication isn’t what you say. It’s what people hear.

And honestly, I think my post yesterday was a great example of that 😂.

I wrote a critique about young riders doing laps in two-point SOLELY with the intention to build strength. What I was trying to say was...

“Let’s be intentional about where we build general rider capacity, and about the message we send young riders around stewardship and responsibility as equestrians.”

What a lot of people heard was something else entirely. They heard "two-point has no value", or "the gym replaces riding", or even "training strength in the saddle is pointless"...

Obviously NOT what I was trying to get across, but I find that gap intersting.

When that many people jump to the same alternate interpretation, it tells me the topic hits a nerve (and also tells me my writing did not convey the message I was trying to, lol).

But maybe, there's tension around rider responsibility, or maybe tradition, or even stewardship? Around the idea that maybe general physical capacity and riding-specific skill are not the same thing?

In most sports, off-field prep is normal. Youth athletes lift. Rugby and soccer athletes develop their strength & cardio in the gym. Hockey players don’t only get strong just by skating. It’s just understood that athletes prepare outside their sport.

But in equestrian sport, suggesting riders intentionally build their own strength off-horse still creates friction! Suggesting we normalize that from the grassroots level up still feels disruptive? Even talking about stewardship in how we use our horses can feel uncomfortable.

So let me say clearly where I stand, and what I was aiming to get across with my post yesterday, even if it didn't quite land (keep in mind, I'm not a professional writer. I don't have a team behind me. It's just little old me and my thoughts, trying to spark some critical thinking and conversation:).
______
Riders are athletes. In a partnership sport, preparation is shared responsibility. Physical capacity is often most efficiently built off-horse. Saddle time is precious and best used for developing skill, feel, timing, and applying that capacity with the horse. And as riders, we have a responsibility to show up physically prepared for that partnership.
________

This is not a conversation about banning kids practicing two-point, or even the practice of simultaneously building strenght and skill in the saddle! The point of this post, at its core, has nothing to do with two-point, or any other drill commonly used to help riders develop strength.

It’s about intention, and athlete identity, and partnership.

And if that makes people a little uncomfortable, maybe that’s exactly why it’s worth talking about.🤷‍♀️

The Equestrian Physio

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