As I’ve mentioned before, I get arena questions all day long. “What should my footing depth be?”, “What is the best footing for me?”, or “What’s the difference between the TruStride and LiteStride ”. The most common question I’ve been getting lately is “How often should I groom my arena?”
Grooming an arena is a maintenance that cannot be ignored. Neglecting your arena maintenance can cause serious, and expensive issues down the road. The problem with the common question that I get, is that there is no equation for how often you need to groom your arena.
An arena should be dragged as soon as ruts, or holes appear anywhere in the arena. But the frequency really depends on the traffic in the arena. If you’re grand prix style jumping, with 15 horses a day on the footing, you will be grooming much more often than a private arena just doing ground work. A busy lesson barn could be dragging the ring multiple times a day, while a private barn can get away with dragging once every week or two.
The footing also plays a big role in how often you drag. Some sands can compact hard when they’re ridden on and need to be dragged to loosen the material up. Some sands are fine granules and move very easily, so the arena develops ruts quickly.
When purchasing footing for your arena, it is important to take maintenance into consideration. When ordering a traditional sand arena, you should find out the angles of the sand as well as granule size and research how that typically performs in an arena. Our dust-free footings are composed of pure silica sand, wax and synthetic fibers. The combination of these components creates a footing that does not compact, and does not move as freely as traditional sand. We get a lot of feedback from customers stating that they do not have to groom their arena as often as they did with traditional sand. Our footing is much more stable, so it takes longer to create ruts when riding. By purchasing our footing, you will significantly cut down on your grooming time!
In addition to our footing, we often suggest to purchase a PARMA Groomer to groom the arenas. PARMA Groomers are a less aggressive groomer so that the fibers in the footing as not pulled out. These groomers are very lightweight and can be pulled with anything from a tractor to a golf cart!
