6 Ways Horse Riding Can Improve Physical and Mental Wellness

Horse riding is an inherent part of western history, and is the favourite pastime of many UK residents, but what if horse riding is actually more beneficial to the rider than just a fun day out?

Horse riding has numerous physical and mental health benefits that are often overlooked by both riders and spectators. If you’ve never tried riding a horse, or if you ride a horse and aren’t aware of the good it’s doing you, this post will encourage you to start or keep on going.

In fact, the only negative health benefits of riding a horse are if you fall off and injure yourself. In this case you can make a horse riding accident claim to cover your medical expenses, and be literally ‘back on the horse’ in no time.

To help you realise the health benefits of riding a horse, this post will cover six of the primary ways it can be physically and mentally beneficial. Take a look…

How Does Horse Riding Improve Your Mental and Physical Wellness?

Horse riding improves your physical and mental wellbeing in the following ways:

1. Burns calories

Surprisingly enough, riding a horse actually burns calories. Part of the calorie burning comes from trotting, which the British Heart Foundation discovered burns an average of 600 calories per ride, and the rest from maintenance. 

Maintenance includes mucking out, moving hay bales, lifting saddles onto the back of your horse, carrying buckets, and all the other little bits you have to do to as part of the horse-riding experience. Studies have even shown that between riding and maintaining a horse you can reduce the risk of heart disease by up to 35 percent.

2. Forces you to socialise

In the age of working from home and talking to friends over messenger apps and social media, horse riding is a good excuse to go out and speak to people.

If you’re in the equestrian industry, or know someone who is, then you’ll have noticed how close-knit horse riders are. They tend to help each other out a lot, look after each others’ horses, and spend a lot of time in the yard chatting to each other whilst they work.

According to the Mayo Clinic, socialising “staves off feelings of loneliness, but also it helps sharpen memory and cognitive skills, increases your sense of happiness and well-being, and may even help you live longer”.

3. Improves your physicality

Photo by Mikayla Storms on Unsplash

We briefly touched on the calorie burning prowess of horse riding, but there are actually a lot of other ways it can improve your physical fitness.

With horse riding being an isometric exercise (that contracts muscles or groups of muscles), it targets specific muscle groups and builds strength in them. The muscle groups horse riding can improve include:

• Core muscles, such as obliques and abdominals, which are used to stay balanced on the horse’s back.
• Back, chest and inner thighs to maintain proper posture whilst riding.

The engagement of these muscles for balance and posture actually improves the rider’s strength and posture outside of riding. This is really important for your current and future physical health.

4. Gives you an emotional companion

Most sports don’t involve having a close relationship with an animal, and that’s a shame because there is a lot to be gained from working with one.

Horses are especially great companion animals as they are very sociable and are able to read and remember the emotional expressions of humans. According to a study by animal behaviour experts at the University of Sussex and Portsmouth, horses react more negatively to a person when they have previously seen a photograph of them looking angry. They, in turn, responded more positively, and less stressed, if they have seen a picture of the person with a positive expression.

This means that horses can read and react to your emotional state and can really help pull you out of a bad mood.

5. Relieves stress and improves mood

Photo by Alexander Dummer from Pexels

Speaking of improving your mood, horse riding is an inherently relaxing activity due to the fact you’re often out in nature, and the rhythm of the horse’s trot is particularly soothing. The gentle bouncing motion you feel when you’re riding a horse is supposed to have a massaging effect that not only relaxes the rider, but also improves circulation.

Riding a horse also releases serotonin, a mood-enhancing hormone that contributes to feelings of happiness. This hormone gets released when a person spends time with the horse, even when not riding it.

6. Helps with PTSD and dementia

Equine-assisted therapy is a new type of therapy being used to treat people with post-traumatic stress disorder and dementia.

This is partly due to the reasons we’ve mentioned in this post – they feel an emotional connection with the horse, their mood is improved by riding and taking care of the horse, and their overall stress levels are reduced.

This therapy is still at a very early stage, but is being used to treat more and more conditions as time goes on. It might even be completely fleshed out and available for a mental health or other medical condition you might have in the future.

Are These the Only Ways Horse Riding Can Improve Physical and Mental Wellness?

In this post, we’ve shared six ways in which horse riding can improve your mental and physical health.

There are lots of other ways horse riding, like any sport, can help you be more physically and mentally fit. But, the six we’ve shared in this post are the ones most commonly discussed amongst horse riders.

If you’ve never ridden a horse before and you’re thinking of taking it up to improve your mental and physical health, then hopefully this post has given you enough reason to go out and try it. What’s the worst that could happen?