Is Hacking As Good As Turnout?

Is hacking as good as turnout? Hacking and turnout for your horse are somewhat similar, in terms of benefits. They both involve being outdoors, providing mental stimulation that you just can’t get in the arena. But for those who struggle with accessing turnout, or don’t enjoy hacking, can one replace the other?

The Benefits of Hacking and Turnout

Training

The addition of both turnout and hacking adds some variety to the horse’s routine. Hacking diversifies ridden routine, as a change from doing endless loops of work in the school. Meanwhile, turnout can provide variety and enrichment in the horse’s down time.

New surroundings open horses’ eyes to unfamiliar objects and can prepare them for competition and travelling to new places. Additionally, whilst you’re on board, a hack is the perfect opportunity to know how your horse reacts in the face of fear, strange objects, and surroundings. With a confident rider, it may also provide horses with subtle encouragement to investigate objects they wouldn’t normally choose to.

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Advice from a professional

Hacking adds to the ridden routine, ensuring your horse does not become bored or switched off during ridden sessions. Hacking advocate and Olympic dressage champion, Charlotte Dujardin states;

“It’s important for horses to go out for regular hacks and see the world. It’s a vital break from the training routine that keeps them happy and means they’re experiencing new things.”

On the other hand, turnout can diversify stable routine, and reduce boredom when it comes to what your horse does in its own time. This can prevent them from becoming destructive in their stabling environment or perhaps finding anything that’s lying around to sink their teeth into, in an attempt to alleviate their boredom. 

With turnout, many owners find that behavioural issues on the ground are solved, such as excitability, aggression, and depressive symptoms.

Additionally, turnout could benefit your hacking adventures, ensuring horses have had appropriate exposure to the ‘big, wide world’. Turnout can expose horses to those little things, that could normally cause a massive panic attack, and let them investigate and process it in their own time.

Repeated exposure to ‘scary’ objects or events helps horses to get used to them, eventually accepting the event or object as ‘normal’; this is called ‘habituation’.

If you are struggling to get near something ‘scary’ in your arena, why not try turning them out in the area, allowing them to investigate in their own time?

Health

Not only does hacking and turnout benefit training, but the list of benefits for mental and physical health is also endless.

Turnout has massive health benefits. Mentally, the freedom to socially interact whilst turn out aids mental well-being and can therefore be beneficial to reduce handling problems.

Additionally, turnout is better than the stabled environment for respiratory health, reducing the harmful particles horses inhale. Also, gut health can be greatly improved by allowing horses to roam and eat simultaneously.

Meanwhile, hacking is great to improve the fitness of both horse and rider. Incorporating hill work can improve stamina and muscle tone, whilst working a variety of surfaces can reduce the occurrence of injury when swapping and changing the terrain you ride on; especially important for eventers.

It is also common belief that road work ‘hardens’ tendons.

Tendons cannot ‘harden’, and if they did this would actually lead to more injury as they would be more prone to snap. Properties we should encourage in tendons is extensibility, otherwise known as stretch.

Encouraging the extensibility of tendons is done by working on a variety of soft and hard surfaces, which can support the development of tendons to withstand increased strain.

Additionally, working through a variety of paces, which the great outdoors provides the space for, can also encourage tendon extensibility.

So, which is better?

Both hacking and turnout have their individual pros and cons. On one hand, although turnout is beneficial for light exercise and freedom of movement, fitness is one aspect of horse health it cannot improve or monitor, whilst hacking can.

Hacking is also great for combining training with routine variety and engaging the horse’s brain. However, turnout has benefits which hacking cannot cater for, too. 

Turnout provides the freedom for social interaction, which is vital for mental well-being and cannot be achieved sufficiently in a fully stabled routine. Additionally, the provision of turnout can reduce stress and stable related health conditions, which may have a knock-on effect on performance.

Reflection

Taking into consideration the topics discussed here, it is beneficial to include both hacking and turnout into the horse’s routine. The unique advantages of each will provide horses with optimum mental and physical health, including aiding performance simultaneously.

If turnout is limited, try enriching your horse’s stabled environment with toys and new objects.

Include lots of time out of the stable too. If hacking space is limited near your yard, opt to take your horse to new environments via transport. Don’t just book on upcoming competitions. Try a whole range of riding facilities available, from steeplechase to farm rides!