Did you get an E-reader this holiday season? Midlife horse owners embrace searchable horse info!

Smart-Midlife-Horses_pixlr206x2501-123x150 — Click on the cover to order now!

I’ve heard (but I can’t remember where) that the E-reader was the most received gift this holiday season. And yes, great competition now abounds to the tried-and-true Kindle (now with its new Fire incarnation), and these puppies are all getting more affordable, easier to use and, offering us the options of searchable content and a way to bookmark and clip the ideas, thoughts and sections we want to remember from what we read, may just keep the margins of print books free of scrawled notes that mean little to anyone but us (Does anyone beside me read non-fiction with a pencil in one hand and a highlighter in the other?)

So what does this cultural phenomenon have to do with The Smart Guide to Midlife Horses? Everything, apparently. Here’s what our publisher had to say that made me do the holiday happy dance:

“Melinda Folse’s bestseller THE SMART WOMAN’S GUIDE TO MIDLIFE HORSES is surely ushering in a new generation of horse-related books. Her book’s appeal to the readers of ebooks—considered by some to be the future of book publishing—is apparent as sales in digital format have skyrocketed! We are thrilled that the book’s message and content translates so well across multiple platforms, print and digital. Melinda’s book is one of the first of its kind to offer great educational content, along with great stories and a few laughs, in a format suitable for the midlife woman on the move.”

So, speaking from one cultural phenomenon (Boomer women and their Midlife Horses) to another (the proliferation of e-readers) all I have to say is WooHoooooooo! And of course, thank you to all who purchased my book this year — in its print or digital format (I’ve heard several people say they bought it both ways because it’s faster to find specific information and resources with the searchable feature of the e-book, but they still prefer the print version to sit and read).

If you’d like to purchase The Smart Woman’s Guide to Midlife Horses for your new Kindle, click here. Got a different E-reader? No worries, as our friend Clinton Anderson would say. Click here to purchase The Smart Woman’s Guide to Midlife Horses in other e-book formats.

And speaking of Clinton, while you’re there, be sure to check out Clinton Anderson’s Lessons Well Learned, also now available in e-book formats! Getting to co-write this book with Clinton was one of the best assignments a horse crazy aspiring author could ever hope for — and Clinton’s stories and experiences with horses and people are as fascinating and enlightening as they are entertaining!

So . . . now what? As this fabulous year draws to a close, I’m catching my breath a bit, getting more content loaded on my newly revamped website, and planning a 2012 blog calendar filled with tips, resources, ideas and insights to help make 2012 your Year of the (Midlife) Horse.

Want to come along? Subscribe to this blog (comments always welcome!), shoot me an email, join our Facebook community, give us a Tweet, or share on our YouTube channel when something interesting happens or occurs to you on the Midlife Horses trail. Above all, please feel free to share your victories, challenges, questions and observations with the diverse online community we’re gathering here. It’s your life, Part Two! With Horsepower!

Happy New Year!

Is holiday havoc erupting between your eggnog and riding schedules? Give yourself a break! Here’s how to have your eggnog and hold your horses, too.

by admin Midlife News Women and Horses

This bit of holiday mercy just in from our friend and trainer, Denise Barrows of Practical Equine Solutions who shares:

“This is a really good newsletter- right along the same lines as what we are doing/promoting. While it is probably focused toward riders who are already knee deep in a fitness and riding program, it is also good for the not-so-serious riders to hear (I can relay it as, “See? there ARE times when you can take a break from regular riding and planning and stretching! Just not 51 weeks out of the year 🙂

I also appreciate the emphasis here on maintaining hip mobility. This seems to be an issue many of us struggle with. It’s nice to see that so many others are on the same page as we are!”

The fabulous resource Denise connects us with here is equifitt.com. Go there and click on the blue box on the upper right portion of the home page (scroll down to the bottom for the free stuff, but there are some cool things to purchase on the way to the sign up box!) to sign up for their free monthly tips and articles — and then click around this great site to explore the many fitness ideas and opportunities there to fit a variety of needs and interests!

Meanwhile, Denise shares their November newsletter (couldn’t find the link for you, so here it is in all its glory!) that got our attention after our recent Pilates enlightenment. Enjoy!

EquiFiTTip November 2011: Make the Most of Your Time

© Heather R. Sansom

Forward to a friend, subscription to monthly FiTTips is free.

It’s that busy festive time of year again when many riders find themselves torn: you really want to be at the barn, but there is that office party/social event/crammed holiday schedule and they just have not perfected cloning.

It can be a time of year when fitting in ‘extra’s like your own fitness plan really fall by the wayside.

Relax. The beauty of a yearly training plan is that it’s understood there are times of the year when optimal training cannot occur. In fact, there are times when it shouldn’t- your body needs to recover. I usually view the month of December as a maintenance only/alternative period of time. There is no point in fighting it- you need to have the balance of being able to connect with friends and family, and enjoy the general hum and extravagant well-wishing of the major holiday season.

Before you get ready to put on the fuzzy slippers and pour yourself something that warms you, you really do need to know that recovery period does not mean it’s time to slack off completely. The purpose of a recovery period in your usual training regimen is to help you loosen up a little; to let muscles recover from long periods of use in order to avoid strain, and to let your brain unwind so that you can bring creativity and freshness back to the ways you are thinking about your sport. Letting yourself sink into a comfortable chair for the season, or run around with elevated blood pressure from shopping and socializing with no time for yourself, do not count as legitimate recovery.

Keep the end goal in mind: going into the New Year, picking up where you left off, having thought about your goals for the new year and ready to give it your best shot.

Total slacking or stressing for a month will not set you up to walk into this picture.

Recovery periods in an athlete training schedule are often referred to as ‘active recovery’. When you think about the concept applied to your horse, it makes sense. For example, in the off season (if you compete) you may take him out hacking, or play with gymnastics (if you are a dressage rider) or work on your dressage (if you are a hunter/jumper). You will generally give your horse some work that is light to him, and a little different from his usual routine. You’ll bring the fun back in. If he is injured, you don’t leave him standing in a stall. You keep him moving. In some areas, riders just turn their horse out for the winter where he can stay exercised going through snow and up and down hills, but otherwise get a mental break and just be a horse to get re-energized.

You both need a period where your horse’s training is lighter. This is a good season to do it, and there is a hybrid solution that can help normally busy riders, go through the busy holiday season and still be physically and mentally recovered and ready to pick up where you left off when your normal training seasons begins again.

You do not need to feel torn about not maintaining your training schedule, if you have planned to ride less, or make your rides shorter. You do need to plan in short segments of activity for yourself to replace the lost riding time. Luckily, it does not take nearly as long to go for a 20-minute walk as it does to head to the barn and back in an evening: you can fit in the walk AND the holiday party in on the same day.

Short bursts of intentional and fun physical activity will help keep you riding fit when you can’t ride as much or as long. They will also help reduce stress, build proprioception and neuro-muscular vocabulary (increase your ability to move and follow your horse), and even help you avoid potential strain issues that could be caused by your riding and are typically prevalent in middle-aged and older riders.

It doesn’t really matter what activities you choose in your recovery period as a rider. However, they should be selected to meet specific goals that help your riding, such as:

Maintain bone density and improve ligament strength(impact activities).

Examples: walking, jogging, kickboxing, aerobics, skiing, snowshoeing, training with weights or bodyweight/resistance tubing

Maintain hip mobility (for following the horse’s motion).

Examples: walking (probably the best one), cross country skiing, snowshoeing, skating, yoga

Build core strength.

Examples: core exercises, martial arts, swimming, dance (jazz, hip hop etc..) pilates, integrated training with exercise tubing

Improve rhythm and connection.

Examples: dance- especially social dancing with a partner, aerobics or other music-driven group classes, ‘mirror’ motion games with a partner

Maintain or build cardio-vascular stamina.

Examples: many of the activities above, as long as your heart rate is elevated for 15-20 minutes. If you are an Eventer, your cardio training should be twice as long. Using intervals of more intense activity are the most efficient way to train. For example, walking on hills or walking the dog with intervals of faster or slower walking; or swimming lengths with fast/slow combinations that you can keep up.

To get the most out of your exercise time as a mental break and for proprioception, it is best NOT to multi-task. Proprioception, or the finetuned control you need as an athlete and a rider, needs to be constantly honed. Stay focused on what you are doing so that you can give it 100% even if it’s only for 5-10 minutes.

If you have a busy family holiday season in addition to your riding and other commitments, 5 minutes may be all you have at a time.

Have fun, and Happy Riding and Training!

Equifitt training draws on multiple sport and fitness disciplines to help riders of all ages and types balance their bodies and reach their riding and fitness goals. Heather is a certified personal trainer and Level 1 Centered Riding® Instructor. Equifitt offers online eCoaching, clinics, personal rider programs, and Centered Riding® instruction.

www.equifitt.com

Equestrian Fitness Training

“Balanced Training for Better Riding”

Sometimes horses are horses. Sometimes, they’re much, much more.

by admin Book info News The Smart Woman's Guide to Midlife Horses Women and Horses

There’s something new bubbling up about this book that tickles me even more than its escalating holiday sales.

Beyond hearing from all sorts of people who have purchased several copies to give as gifts to their horse friends, what’s surprising and maybe even more gratifying is when I hear of people who aren’t middle-aged women or don’t have horses who read this book (usually either because they know me or someone else whose story is in the book) and exclaim, “This is a great book for anyone, whether or not you have, like, or want horses — and whether or not you’re a woman!

This puzzled me at first. I realize, of course, that getting a horse at this time of life does tend to upend everything you’ve come to count on as “normal,” and and the experience does cause you to look at many things in your life differently. Often, our emerging authenticity and “inner lead mare” authority (our horses are SO good at helping us find, regardless of whether we thought we wanted to look for it) does paves the way for different choices and a more engaged and joyful life. This, sisters, is the gift of Midlife Horses. (Click here to view the new trailer that will tell you more about this unique journey.)

But then one of of these non-horsey, non-middle-aged-woman readers explained to me that since the book touches on so many of the issues we all face in midlife (whether or not we have the horse thing going on), the book provides a framework, using horses as a metaphor, for examining these issues in the light of any dream or passion we’ve let slip to the wayside. As the last group of Boomers to cross the center threshold of our lives, it is important and natural to go back and revisit those things that once made our heart sing and see if there’s something there we’d like to do again while we still can.

I’d love to know more about how The Smart Woman’s Guide to Midlife Horses is starting to reach beyond the barn and into the hearts of anyone who wants to dust off a dream and discover a new path to living more fully in the second half of life. Post a comment here, join us on Facebook, or tweet your thoughts when you see this topic pop up on my Twitter feed.

And above all, to anyone out there thinking about dusting off an old dream,

Make Your Own Midlife Horses Fitness Cocktail: Find the Right Mix for YOU

by admin Midlife News Projects The Smart Woman's Guide to Midlife Horses

Did your ears perk up at the word “cocktail?” I know mine did. But alas, on the better nutrition front, those frozen margaritas are going to have to go the way of fried chicken if I’m going to get anywhere with this Midlife Horses Fitness Challenge. Probably just as well, but I’m hoping I can still get away with a small glass of wine at the end of the day. No sense getting too crazy here.

But I digress. What we’re talking about here is a daily fitness cocktail.

So how many times have you listened to or read a fitness program or regimen developed by someone who knows what they’re talking about, all right, but it just doesn’t seem like something you could or would want to do for the long haul?

I know. Me too.

I’ve been an athlete all my life and I have enthusiastically (some would say obsessively) participated in everything from tennis to taekwondo to cycling to downhill skiing — and now, of course, horseback riding. So I know all about running, I know about weightlifting, I know about circuit training. I’ve jumped, kicked, run, walked like a duck, hopped like an overgrown kangaroo and crawled like a crab, all in the name of conditioning for something. And, up until now, I’ve never been able to get excited about working out just for its own sake. For me, there has to be a bigger, more tangible purpose for it to stick.

And now I have one. My object now is not winning, getting better, achieving any particular level of accomplishment. My object is protecting my body from injury, getting stronger, staying flexible, and building endurance. Which means leapfrog, while effective, will probably not make the list. I want to be in good enough shape to ride my horse well and keep riding for as long as I possibly can. (In years, not hours, although sometimes that happens, too, like it did to me the day we got lost on a trail)

And, for those of us who have found our thrill with our midlife horses, the struggle here is not only which activities we should choose, but even more important, when and how we will weave this additional commitment into our lives when we’ve just converted all our free time to “horse time.” When we scarcely have time now to do all the things we’re “supposed” to be doing, how in the world can we work in a workout?

Just like elsewhere throughout the book, I remind you again here that the answers you seek are usually hanging out somewhere between your own ears. To coax them out of hiding, however, you have to ask yourself the right questions. Here’s help in the form of our first midlife fitness task. Continuing the recipe analogy, get out a piece of paper and identify your favorite and most readily available fitness cocktail “ingredients”.

Got a dog that likes to go for walks? Put him on the list. Enjoy the mental clarity you get from yoga, pilates, tai chi or some other “moving meditation?”(You are allowed to double dip!) What muscle groups are involved in your regular house, barn or horse chores? With a little focused attention and creative grouping of these activities, regular chores, slightly tweaked, can also become reps of this or sets of that.

When you string these normal daily and weekly “ingredients” together in a more deliberate way over a period of time, you can end up sneaking up on midlife fitness with a cleaner house, cleaner barn, a well-fed, watered, exercised and and shiny horse and rockstar conditioning. We’ve all heard “take the stairs instead of the elevators” (yawn), and “park farther away from the door of the store” (snore), but what about taking those stairs two at a time to simulate a step up into the stirrup from the ground? (Yes, people will stare, but another glorious thing about this time of life is it’s getting much easier not to care.)

The trick is if you can find some activity already in your life that can be amped up just enough to make it useful as a fitness component, you can sneak this new fitness “cocktail” into your life without a lot of drama. And another benefit is, if it’s something you already have to do anyway, you’re less likely to find excuses not to do it. Instead, you’ll start to get weird satisfaction from the routine things in your life that are suddenly doing double duty as fitness tools.

Here’s more big news. “They” (whoever the heck “they” are) use to say that we have to sustain our aerobic activity for 30, 45 or 60 minutes to do any good. NOW we know that five minutes here, three minutes there, ten minutes somewhere else, strung together over the course of a day, gets results just as effective and a whole lot less irritating and disruptive to our routine.

What’s already in your daily activities that could become fitness tools? Let’s help each other by pooling our ideas. Post your list of favorite fitness cocktail ingredients on our Smart Woman’s Guide to Midlife Horses Facebook page and get a free set of Midlife Horses fitness flashcards!

Aaaaaaack!!! Caught in my own trap! Do you, too, wrestle with midlife fitness challenges?

by admin Midlife News The Smart Woman's Guide to Midlife Horses

Bemoaning my fatigue the other day (and blaming it, of course, on this blasted August heat), it occurred to me that the only exercise I was getting these days was a few very short (did I mention that it’s HOT?) rides a week on my horses. As I heard myself start to argue that riding and dealing with horses is a workout in and of itself, I remembered how I debunked this whiny myth (begun, I’m sure by a woman just like me and perpetuated by anyone lacking time or motivation to do anything else but ride) in Chapter Four, “Leg Up!” of The Smart Woman’s Guide to Midlife Horses.

Obviously, I needed to go back and re-read my own book.

So here’s the crux of it, right in the middle of page 57: “If the only exercise you do is ride, you put yourself at risk for repetitive motion or referred strain injuries in your back, muscles, and joints caused by strength imbalances in your body.”

“So what’s the answer, Ms. Smarty Pants?” I mocked myself. Who has time for all this? Well, as it turns out, finding time for “baseline conditioning” is one of those things that’s very easy to recommend to others, and STILL hard to make your own silly self do. Sufficiently chastised, I continued reading.

Realizing that we all have natural strength imbalances in our bodies (Are you stronger on the left or the right? Do you tend to lean a little bit one way or the other in the saddle? If you’re not sure, watch your horse — he’ll likely reflect your imbalances with his own!), and how those imbalances can lead to injury, I started thinking (this time in highly personal terms) about how to improve my own conditioning without further taxing my already overstufffed daily schedule.

What can I do (and what will I do) to achieve and maintain that ideal baseline of fitness that will keep me strong, flexible and balanced — with enough stamina to ride well and often — and still have enough energy left over to power through the rest of my day without feeling like a dishrag by dinnertime?

And speaking of dinnertime, I also realized that this fatigue I was feeling was making me too tired and cranky by late afternoon to shop for, prepare and serve nutritious meals for myself and my family. Succumbing all too often to the lure of the drive-thru, take out, or pick-up of food that is, shall we say, less than ideal in terms of health, my trap was self-perpetuating.

Clearly, I needed the same kind of fitness and nutrition overhaul I so diligently gave my horse. (I’ve always said if someone would measure my food, add the supplements I need, and make sure I get enough turnout, rest and the right kind of exercise, I, too, would look and feel a lot better.)

So I issue this challenge to you, my Midlife Horse friends. Between now and the end of the year (to heck with New Year’s resolutions, let’s do it now!), let’s all agree to start taking care of ourselves like we were our own horses. Let’s head into Fall (will it bring it on faster if we start thinking about it more?) with the intent of getting fit to ride better and have “after five energy” left over for our families and friends by cleaning up our nutrition, shoring up our baseline conditioning, and correcting our strength imbalances.

Assuming you accept this challenge, as I have, what’s your program going to be? What are your midlife fitness goals? It’s funny to me that being a size 6 is no longer as enticing to me as being able to get on my horse from the ground quickly and without struggle, having enough core strength to stay balanced when my horse starts hopping around like a Texas jackalope, and enough muscle to apply an irresistible leg cue in these instances, even after riding for a few hours. See what I mean about how midlife shifts our priorities — along with our waistlines?

Let’s share our best ideas and explore in greater detail some of the resources I included in Chapter Four (and any others you may know about that I missed)! We’ll call it the Midlife Horses Fitness Challenge. If you’re in, post your top three fitness goals on our Facebook fan page and how you intend to “measure” your success. (Creativity welcome here —remember, midlife gives us the right to change the rules whenever we feel like it! As are “before” pictures and video demos . . .fitness challenges love company) And, if you’ll email me (mkfolse@gmail.com) your mailing address and t-shirt size, there’s a free Midlife Horses t-shirt in it for you, in addition to a new level of fitness that will free you once and for all from the self-perpetuating midlife fitness trap.

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Tagged: middle age

Did you get an E-reader this holiday season? Midlife horse owners embrace searchable horse info!

Sometimes horses are horses. Sometimes, they’re much, much more.

Make Your Own Midlife Horses Fitness Cocktail: Find the Right Mix for YOU

Aaaaaaack!!! Caught in my own trap! Do you, too, wrestle with midlife fitness challenges?