Why Your Riding Energy Crashes (and Why It Isn't About Willpower)

TL;DR: Low energy in the saddle is almost always physiological, not a willpower problem. Sports scientist Fiona Hargraves treats rider energy as a trainable system, and the encouraging part is that you already know how to manage it, because you do exactly this for your horse every day.

You know the ride. It is 3pm, your legs feel like wet sandbags, your focus has drifted off to the float, and the horse can feel every bit of it. The easy story to tell yourself is that you did not try hard enough. Fiona Hargraves, the sports scientist who works with our riders on physical performance, says that story is almost never the true one.

Is low energy in the saddle really a discipline problem?

Mostly, no. When your energy drops, it shows up as the very things we love to scold ourselves for: scattered focus, a sloppy position, slow reactions, a short fuse. Fiona's point is that these are not character flaws. They are physiological outputs. An under-fuelled, under-recovered body produces exactly these symptoms, and no amount of trying harder overrides biology. The shift that matters is naming the real cause honestly, instead of reaching for the willpower stick.

What does Fiona mean when she calls rider energy a "system"?

She means it is holistic. Nutrition, fitness, recovery, sleep, stress load and emotional regulation are all links in one chain. When a single link weakens, the whole chain loses tension. There is no point training your fitness if you are running on four hours of sleep, and no perfect breakfast that survives a week of unmanaged stress.

Here is the part worth sitting with. You already run this exact system, brilliantly, for your horse. You watch their feed and their workload. You notice when they need a rest day. You read their mood before the saddle is even on. That instinct is the whole skill, and most athletes Fiona meets do not have it. Riders do. Turn a fraction of that same attention back on yourself and you are already ahead of the pack.

If you only shifted one thing, where would Fiona point you?

Away from the snack aisle. The hunt for the perfect pre-ride bite is the comforting version of the question, and it rarely moves the needle. Fiona thinks in terms of capacity: building a bigger fuel tank so you arrive at the arena with more in reserve than the work in front of you asks for. When fitness is no longer the limiting factor, your focus is freed up to do the thing you came to do, which is ride well. The how of building that tank is its own conversation, and a personal one. The principle is simple enough to start with today: your energy is not a fixed trait you were either born with or not.

A few questions riders ask

Is being tired when I ride just a fitness problem? No. Fitness is one link. Sleep, nutrition, recovery and stress all feed the same tank, which is why fitness alone rarely fixes it.

Do I need a gym membership or an athlete's routine? The goal is capacity, not a particular workout. It is about bringing more to the arena than the ride demands, in whatever form fits your life.

I already plan my horse's program. Does that help me? That is your head start. The instincts you use for your horse are the same ones this asks you to point at yourself.

Is this only for upper-level or competitive riders? Not at all. Energy sits underneath every rider at every level, and at the lower levels a steady tank tends to speed your progress up the most.

Can the right snack fix an energy slump? A snack is a patch. It can help in the moment, but the system underneath decides how you feel most days.

Written by Nat Foxon, founder of Performance Riders, from a members' session with Fiona Hargraves, a sports scientist who works with riders on physical performance and skill acquisition. 

Want the deeper version, the part where the principle turns into a plan for your week and your body? That is the kind of thinking we bring inside Performance Riders, across both the Gold Program for dressage riders and the Boyd Martin Eventing Program.