I’ve never rode a horse, but it seems like the horse is doing the work while the human just sits there. I googled if calories are burn during horseback riding and I found that riding a horse for 45 min burns 200 calories. How is this possible if the humans not really doing anything except sit on the horse?
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Because the rider is having to engage various muscle groups in order to stay balanced on the horse and not fall off. It’s actually pretty tiring after a while! 🙂
It takes a lot of energy to remain upright on a horse. All of the bouncing around requires that you hold on fairly tight and constantly make a bunch of minor adjustments to your posture.
If you just sit there, you’re in for a very bumpy ride. You use your legs a lot as shock absorbers. And that’s just for starters, but I’ve only ridden a few times, so others can provide a lot more details.
A horse isn’t much at all like a car. The rider has to move to account for the horse’s bouncing, control where the horse goes, and of course balance to avoid falling basically any direction. If it were “just sitting there” it wouldn’t be such work to get good at it.
I suggest you go and ride a horse for 45 minutes… if you are able to stay upright and do it you will surely have a lot of muscle pain the next day to show for the effort it took…:)
Laying or sitting on a couch isn’t the same thing as trying to stay perfectly balanced on a couch going 30mph over uneven terrain while you are anticipating what could be up next and around the corner that could spook the couch and kill you.
It depends on the way you ride. If you ride at a walk then you do indeed not use much calories as the rider. As you say you just sit there and balance. But if you go at a trot, a bit faster, then the horses back goes up and down so the rider need to go up and down to match the rhythm. So you are using the stirrups and legs a lot. If you go even faster, at a gallop or canter the horse move even more up and down but also pitches back and forwards. So the rider needs even more movement to stay balanced and even on the back of the horse. You might even have to stand up in the stirrups with bent knees and move the legs up and down with the horse. This is very tiring and you can burn quite a lot of calories.
Maybe engaging core muscles to keep balance as well as doing that hip lifting thing so you aren’t bouncing around on the animals back.
Occam’s razor applies here perfectly: “How is this possible if the humans not really doing anything except sit on the horse?”
The answer is that humans *aren’t* doing nothing. It takes a lot of effort and training to ride horses effectively and handle the shock and strain on your body.
English riding uses a lot of core and quad muscles to post trot and posting without stirrups. I definitely felt really tired after a lesson.
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