Miles Before Muscles: Letting a Young Horse Build a Body the Way Nature Intended
Miles Before Muscles: Letting a Young Horse Build a Body the Way Nature Intended
What if the most vital "fitness regimen" for a developing horse isn't something we orchestrate, but something we simply cease to disrupt?
This morning I observed a young horse wander from the hay pile—not hurriedly, not dramatically—merely a silent choice to move. A handful of steps, a moment to survey the world, then onward again. Later, that same horse returned, grazed, departed once more. None of it resembled exercise. It resembled existence organizing itself around an ever-present imperative: food, fellowship, and ground covered in modest increments. We humans might recognize something familiar here—how our own bodies thrive not on scheduled intensity, but on the quiet accumulation of ordinary motion threaded through our days.
We tend to approach movement as a supplement. We "provide turnout." We "carve out time" for it. We quantify it in segments, as though the body only awakens when we declare a beginning and an end. Yet a horse's natural state is locomotion interlaced throughout each waking hour—kilometers gathered while trailing vegetation, drifting among companions, retreating from discomfort, returning to graze, shifting to find rest. When we strip away that tapestry and substitute immobility, the body doesn't receive an alternative form of movement; it receives a deficit of the only form it evolved to depend upon. Perhaps we too have forgotten that our ancestors walked not for health, but because walking was simply how life unfolded.
For a maturing horse, this distinction carries particular weight. The young body is engaged in the work of becoming. The surroundings either serve as collaborator or perpetual interruption. A horse confined to a stall overnight isn't "recuperating" in the manner we prefer to imagine—it is being denied what its physiology insists upon: keeping the digestive rhythm in motion, preserving the freedom to choose, allowing small distances to compound into something whole. How often do we impose similar stillness on ourselves or those in our care, mistaking restriction for rest?
Living alongside horses in this way can be remarkably simple. Not a novel protocol. Not an ingenious distraction. Simply ensuring our stewardship doesn't inadvertently obstruct the gentle, unhurried roaming that horses will naturally select when nothing impedes them. Uninterrupted access to forage sustains this rhythm as well—because once eating ceases, the acid clock begins its countdown, and the entire day can contract into anxious anticipation. There is wisdom here for any creature: that continuous nourishment—of body and spirit—prevents the slow tightening of a life spent waiting.
I find myself returning to this thought: how frequently we attempt to construct a young horse from the outside in, when nature's blueprint is maintenance through default—movement, grazing, and social connection, repeated until the body has no alternative but to grow into itself.
Equine Notion
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