Focus and Fitness in Horses

What Does Focus Have to do with Fitness?
It is a conundrum that many riders have faced in the midst of consistent focused effort despite hours of invested time and exercises the horses fitness and athleticism show no improvement. Even the most wisely chosen exercises do not seem to be working. One explanation for this might be due to the precision with which they are executed. Research from the past few years though has revealed an alternative and surprisingly nonphysical explanation for some of these cases.

What we have learned recently about horses brain function shows us that curiosity or mental engagement plays a large role in the success of physical adaptations. A horse needs to be alert enough not too much not too little in order to form the neural pathway bridges that create new movement patterns.
When a horse participates in a task without giving it full attention whether from dullness OR tensionanxiety he does not form an optimal number of synapses from the task that he would otherwise. This means he fails to form the pathways in his brain that connect nerve signals for particular movements. In fact these nerve signals will degrade over time due to lack of stimulation and chemical input to the areas of the brain that store them.
In the case of fitness this translates to diminishing returns. Rather than make consistent positive gains in the precision andor power of his locomotion the horse idles at his current fitness level. Many horses will not make the fitness gains you would expect after routinely performing exercises that promise strength agility and so on.
As an example from my own training I had the opportunity to work with a lovely Andalusian mare that had been schooled extensively with various groundwork programs. The problem was that she had done TOO much