When horses have reached peak fitness, they will follow a training routine with a mixture of walking, steady canters and faster work.
Generally, trainers will gallop their horses twice a week, usually on set days. Many will have Sunday as a rest day before starting the weekly programme all over again.
The training routine will often be adapted to the needs of different horses and any runners will have their programme tweaked to ensure they go to the races at their very best.
The gallops used by different trainers can vary hugely. Jumps trainers generally have much stiffer gallops. As they run over longer distances, National Hunt horses need to improve their stamina.
That said, Newmarket’s famous Warren Hill gallops would still test the most hardly of human athletes as it climbs away from the town centre towards the top of the stiff incline. It still wouldn’t be, compared to some of the Lambourn gallops used by jumps trainers, anywhere near as severe.
Modern-day methods are usually based around ‘interval’ training when horses gallop over shorter distances but the exercise is repeated several times.