Horse Movement Journey

Below is a selection of some curated Biomechanic Research, all conducted by Centuar Biomechanics www.centaurbiomechanics.co.uk

Travelling

• The kinematics of your horses’ limbs will change after just 2 hours of travel. That means your horse will move differently at your destination if he has been on the road for a minimum of 2 hours.
• It is ESSENTIAL that you cool your horses down on arrival at a competition to allow the postural stabilisers a chance to recover. An in-hand walk for 15-20 minutes is ideal.
•  If you travel for 4 or more hours, your horse will have his worst performing day the 3rd day after arrival.

GIRTHS

• Most pressure from girths is located behind the elbow
• Ergonomic girths; ones with more space for the elbow have proven to improve stride symmetry and have a 10-20% increase in Hindlimb protraction

BRIDLES/BONNETS/NOSEBANDS

• Any pressure over the TMJ  (Temporomandibular joint) effects the symmetry of the hindlimbs
• If there is any interference of buckles or bonnets underneath one ear, the opposite foreleg will by asymmetrical in flexion and stride length
• Buckles at eye level can create a head tilt
• A Grackle noseband is the kindest in terms of pressure
• Crank nosebands provide good stability but there are problems with being able to over tighten them.

SADDLES

• The horses back expands 30 mins after exercise and again after another 30 mins. This asks the question of how should we be fitting saddles?
• A saddle that is too narrow can impinge the most active part of the Longissimus muscle. If pressure here can be reduced, the hindlimb can improve by 22%
• A saddle that is too wide creates a de-stabilising effect on the horse, which will effect his locomotion.
• Saddle slippage requires a multi-pronged approach to remedy; is it the saddle? the horse? the rider? is it a combination of all 3? Find Your Tribe to get a solution. You need your saddle fitter and your bodyworker working together to solve this one.

SADDLE PADS

• Foam and wool reduce the most pressure
• Gel do no reduce as much pressure

SAFETY FACTOR

This is the load that can be applied to something before it breaks.

For example, a lift often has a safety factor of 10; this means it will tolerate 10x its maximal load; when it says only 20 people allowed in, it will be able to carry 10 x this many people before failure.

For the horse at full gallop, his safety factor is only 1.5 times his maximal load.

LOADING CYCLES

The horse only has 10,000 loading cycles before the bones and tendons wear out.
Each step really does count!

As a horse owner, you will see and look at your horse every day. Probably more than once. You look at him when you are feeding, grooming, tacking up, hosing off, rugging, etc but are you really SEEING him?

When you see something or someone every day, sometimes multiple times a day, it is hard to notice subtle changes in their appearance because we just stop seeing them so clearly. Ladies, this is why men don’t notice your new haircut…it is the same thing with your horse. Working with them every day can tone down your observation skills until something is so obviously different that it appears to have happened ‘overnight’.

The art of seeing is quite an interesting and complex subject. We don’t all see equally. What I mean is, we will all notice and see different things even when we are looking at the same subject.

For example, this has been proven with people looking at, and describing art; It is extremely common for people to assess and describe exactly the same painting, but pick out different elements that they saw; ‘didn’t you see the massive table in the background?’ ..’No, I saw the sunflower in the corner..’ It is an odd phenomenon, but it is a very human trait. In the world of crime, taking witness statements and documenting crime scenes is fraught with challenges as peoples’ recollection of events and what they saw can be quite polarizing.

So, what does this mean for you as a horse owner?

The musculoskeletal development of your horse provides you with encyclopaedic volumes of information, all you have to do to unlock this info is to SEE it. At this stage it doesn’t matter that you might not know why or what you are seeing, you just need to see it and describe it.

Next time you are doing something with your horse, take an extra 5-10 mins, stand back and just look at your horse. Don’t force anything, just look. Look at the shapes, the soft contour lines and the more rigid lines. Look at the muscles, look at the feet. Look from both sides, from the front and from the back.

It might be handy to do this with a partner. Have both of you looking at your horse and then describe what you see to each other. It doesn’t matter how basic your assessment is. Get used to just describing what you see.  Remember if your sightings differ it’s because we all see differently and focus on different things!

If you have the time, jot your thoughts down and then repeat the exercise for the next 5 days, writing down your assessment each time. Your horse is constantly evolving; the work you do, the time of year, health and age will all play a role in how your horses’ posture changes. You must start to see your horse as a dynamic entity that is constantly changing. That way you become a much more discerning owner, and noticing subtle changes can potentially help to prevent problems before they have manifested.

Why Your Horse needs You to Know How

The warm up procedure of competitors at a show gives you a glimpse of what riders do at home.

There are those who are focused on their horse; attentive to how it is feeling, systematic in their gradual increase of work intensity; considerate of environmental conditions and empathetic to the time required for the brain to become more work focused.

Then there are the others who walk a little bit, have a little trot. Stop. Check their watch. Chat to the people on the side lines, watch others in the arena. Walk a little bit more, canter a 20m circle and head in to do their test. These riders are generally the ones who, after their test sit on their horse at the exit of the arena and dissect what they have just done in a fashion that suggests they are writing their own version of ‘War and Peace’.

The habits you display at a show do tend to mirror your habits at home, so if you don’t have a warm-up and cool down practice in place every time you ride, not only are you not getting the best out of your horse, you are also creating an environment that isn’t just inviting injury, but practically begging it to show up.

Let’s take a look at why the beginning and end of your training session are imperative to your horses’ welfare and performance.

The Warm-Up

The warm up is the time where exercise intensity is gradually increased to prepare the horse’s body for the demands of athletic effort.

An efficient warm up practice has multi-dimensional benefits that fall into both physiological and cerebral categories.

Physiological Benefits; what happens to the body

As the body is moved, an increased amount of blood begins to be directed away from the organs and the digestive tract and is sent towards the working skeletal muscles and the connective tissues of the limbs. With this increased flow of blood comes a rise in temperature of the horses’ body, raising the respiratory and heart rates and allowing the horse to feed and cleanse the muscles more rapidly. This highway of nutrients and removal of waste is essential to keep muscles from fatiguing when work load and waste accumulation rises.

As the soft tissues (muscles, tendons and ligaments) become warmer, their malleability increases and their tolerance to force rises considerably, making them much more resistant to injury.

As the horse begins to move faster across the ground, the joint stabilising muscles (which play a key role in injury prevention) have to switch on so they can respond to the rapid fire of messages and support the joints as they begin to move faster across the ground under an increased amount of load.

Environmental conditions (heat and cold) need to be taken into consideration, as this will effect the amount of time it takes for the soft tissues to become warmer.

Cerebral Benefits

Having a warm up routine allows the horse to transition into work mode not only for the body, but also for his brain.

It allows him the opportunity to explore how his body is feeling, how he needs to regulate his temperature to the environment, what the rider is asking for and what might be lurking in the hedge. If you are warming up at a competition, this part of your preparation may require more time than when you are training at home, as the amount of external stimulation is far greater.

The warm-up is also essential for the rider, as it can provide feedback of encyclopaedic value if the right attention is given; what feels easy, what feels more challenging, how attentive is he, has he learnt anything from yesterday, what needs to be focused on once we are warmed up, etc should all be part of the dialogue that you run through every time you get on.

Horses are not dissimilar to people; their bodies will feel different dependant on what they did the day before, or 2 days ago, how much movement they have had, how hot or cold it is, when they last ate, what equipment they are wearing and how the rider is feeling.

Environmental Considerations

It may sound obvious, but you would be surprised at the number of people who don’t warm up with a rug over the horses’ hind quarters in cold weather. The whole premise of preparing your horse for training is to warm the soft tissues and increase heart and respiratory rates. Cold weather means that the internal temperature of the muscles will be lower than on a warm day. By keeping the back and hind quarters under a rug, for at least the first 10-15 mins will aid your preparation and allow the horse to relax into his work far quicker.

Warm days present their own challenges; the muscles will be at a naturally higher temperature even at resting, so your pre-work regime may be modified so that you don’t overheat your horse.

There is no one formula, but the principles do remain the same;

• • Warm the tissues so they are pliable and can cope with increased load via elastic stretch
• • Allow the horse time to focus the mind on the job
• • Glean invaluable information on how your horses body is feeling, so you can adapt your training session accordingly.

The Warm Up Process; having a plan

The warm up should have as considered an approach as the main training session. There needs to be a plan, which is adaptable but anchored with a consistent regime/theme.

Comparison can only be made of peas in the same pod; it is much harder to compare how your horse is feeling from one day to the next if your work is not consistent.

There is no one formula that is suitable for every horse, but there needs to be a formula that is suitable for yours.

As with any athletes training programme, you need to be consistent but adaptable. If you need longer in the warm up phase to go through more suppling exercises, more transitions etc then take the time you need. It may mean that this is all your horse requires on that particular day.

The key objective is to become disciplined about your warm up. Don’t waste steps or energy, be efficient and fair and empathetic to practicality. If you can’t start in walk because it would be unsafe, move forward in trot. Return to the walk once you can! Use this time to be attentive to how your horse is feeling. Not only will this help guide your training, but it may also alert you to potential problems.

The Warm Down

Once exercise has been completed, the body needs to be gradually returned to its resting temperature and pre-exercise physiological condition. Failing to warm the horse down correctly is as damaging to the body as failing to warm it up.

Circulatory System

As we have seen, exercise sends oxygenated blood towards the working skeletal muscles and away from the organs. The warm down period is when this volume of blood is gradually redistributed around the body, sending more back to the organs and the digestive tract.

Muscular Health

Physiologically, the main adhesions within soft tissues will occur as they begin to cool down. All that energy and micro trauma that has been created through work starts to settle in as the tissues cool and it is in these moments where muscular restrictions can start to take hold.

By cooling the horse gradually through steady movement, the systems have a chance to effectively catch up with waste removal from the muscles. The stretching and contracting mechanism that happens to soft tissues as they are moving allows the fibres to gradually return to their resting length, cleansing as they go.

The cool down requirement will depend upon the intensity of your training session. As a general rule, the more intense work you have done, the longer your cool down should be but all should consist of  a steady trot with a lowered frame (not a loose, on the forehand frame) for 2 mins around the arena in both directions to start, moving into at least 10 minutes of walking. This can be increased to 15 or 20 if you have been doing higher level movements and intense collection. It is a good idea to do the latter stages of the cool down in hand.

Of course, weather plays a role in how you manage your cool down as well. In hot temperatures, you may need to reduce the horses body temperature with water and longer walking in hand. If it is cold, put a rug over his hindquarters; sweat will cool quicker than water, so a sweaty horse on a cold day can begin to chill quite quickly.

The success of your training and competition experiences can be predicted on the effectiveness and intelligence of your warm up and cool down. You are in charge of preparing an athlete for training and for allowing the body to recover from training in a safe and controlled manner. For soundness, welfare and performance reasons, neither end of your training session should be neglected.

 1.Cross Train your horse

Professional athletes train in a variety of activities to condition every area of their body. Your horse requires the same attention to ensure the body is conditioned as a whole, rather than some structures receiving more training than others. The body should be considered as a complete unit, with every individual component being prepared to do its job. This is only achieved through variety such as pole work, hacking, hill work, etc. This work must be functional and be sprinkled throughout your training.

2.Don’t leave it too long between shoeing

a) At the end of the shoeing cycle, and particularly when this reaches above 6 weeks, the increased length of toe changes the hoof/pastern angle. If this changes by as little as 1 degree, the increase of pressure of the DDFT (deep digital flexor tendon) on the Navicular bone goes up by 4%. Pressure and friction result in inflammation, damage and pain.

b) When shoeing has been left ‘as long as possible’, changing a longer toe back to a more correct angle can affect the horses’ movement and co-ordination initially.

To avoid problems, it is best to keep them on a cycle that prevents any pronounced changes in hoof shape.

3.Stay Relevant

Your training and conditioning should be tailored to the stage of development your horse is at. It should also be relevant to your horses’ (and your own) abilities and limitations.

4.Warm up and cool down;

A 20 minute warm up; ten min walk, some trot and canter in a stretched frame will increase the body temperature and improve oxygen delivery to muscles. It allows tendons to become more elastic, thus enabling their ‘stretch’ facility. Studies have shown that warm soft tissues cope with higher levels of load than cold ones.

Be mindful of the environment you are in; cooler climates will require a longer warm up to raise the body temperature. Conversely, if you are riding in a warmer environment, the temperature of the horses’ body will be higher before you even start work, so be mindful of how much is needed.

5.Manage the surface you train on

Whatever the reality is for the surface you have available to you, the key is to keep the footing consistent and level. Surfaces are a minefield of exploration, and there is plenty of research happening that will guide us on the best options, but for the sake of real life, keeping the surface consistent will be the best thing you can do.

If you want to wade through a scientific paper on the recent FEI research into surfaces check out the link below:

https://inside.fei.org/news/world%E2%80%99s-most-extensive-equine-surfaces-study-published

6.Consistency is key

People with an office job for 5 days a week suffer injuries when they are let loose at the weekend and think they are Tarzan, it is just as true for horses who are ridden once or twice a week with an owner who expects them to be ‘on form’. Winter is a killer, I get it, so just play down your expectations and understand that 2 days a week is not training, or hibernate and come out when the weather allows you to have more time in the saddle.

7.Condition, Condition, Condition

If your horse has had any time off, it will need to be slowly conditioned back into work. 3 months off means at least 3 months of long, slow (yes boring) work to prevent re-injury and to aid recovery. You have to make like a tortoise in this situation if you want to end up on top.

8.Ice

Hosing and icing legs after work is a great preventative measure to help sort out any micro traumas in the soft tissues of the lower limb.

9.Invest in YOU

An unbalanced rider will affect how the horse has to load his limbs; creating an imbalance of weight-bearing and therefore increasing the likelihood of lameness/injury.

Imagine yourself as the mast of the ship; the mast moves the most and impacts how the ship balances itself underneath. What you do in the saddle will have a direct impact on how your horse can operate.

Work off-horse will help you sit in more balance on your horse, and this may well help to reduce the chance of lameness.

10.Keep Exercise Functional

Be prudent when deciding what extra-curricular activities you think your horse should do; keep work functional. If it doesn’t ADD value to your horses’ development it is either a waste of time, or damaging.

For example; swimming might be fine if you are going through rehab and you need to take the weight off the skeleton, but if you are wanting to condition your horse to be fit for eventing for example, working across the ground is more functional.

Horses and people are all crooked. Yep, sorry folks. All you wonky ones out there, you are not unique I’m afraid! That longer leg you have? That dropped shoulder? Yup, we are all gloriously wonky, messy and imbalanced!

The same goes for your horse too. Whilst you have a dominant hand or leg, your horse will have his own dominant side and patterns of movement as well. Sometimes these will match yours, making for a spectacular show of crookedness. When you think about it, it is a wonder we get off a circle at all…

The difficulty we all have then is getting our bodies, and that of our horses’, straight or as I prefer to think of it; aligned.
So why is this so important?
The foundation of being straight creates BALANCE. We have all been in a café or restaurant where the legs on the table have been different lengths and it creates that awful wobble. Someone presses down on one side and gets a lap full of bacon and eggs or floods it with coffee. The table doesn’t feel stable. It is not evenly balanced. It is not aligned and there is a heightened risk that it will topple over. The base of support is not there. You get the picture.

Your horse has 4 legs (in case you weren’t sure) and it is the rider’s job to work towards getting your horse to use his 4 legs as evenly as possible. At this stage I’m not too worried about the 60:40 ratio that we are all familiar with, I am more concerned about each leg taking its own portion of the load. Every horse will want to have 60% of his weight over the front two feet and 40% over the hind two. The issue comes if there is a disparity of load between the hind feet and the front feet. When this happens, it is an issue of alignment and it will mean that your base of support is not stable. This creates difficulty turning, going sideways, being even into the contact etc. It also means that one leg or one side of the body is working under greater stress than the other, and is therefore vulnerable to injury.

What often happens is these imbalances are ignored. The rider gets used to having a horse who is heavier in one rein, harder to circle one way and slow off the leg but pushes on, keen to get doing lateral work and more interesting movements. The horse scrambles to maintain balance, having to increase the dysfunctions by getting heavier in the hand, dropping further behind the leg and not bending one way. What is happening here is the rider is training INTO the DYSFUNCTION. Every crooked step you take strengthens the crookedness!

Training alignment/straightness is a never ending job. It should be part of everyday work because as we know, our crookedness is always wanting to be present.

Training the body to operate in a different way than what it is used to is demanding and requires a methodical process. The secret is to always be mindful of the crookedness in your horse, and in your own body. Remember your horse only has one hour (or thereabouts) of training each day. For the other 23 he is leaning into his crookedness. It is the same for riders. Professional riders might be riding for the majority of the day, but if they don’t do this with an awareness of their own crookedness, they are strengthening the wonkiness of their body rather than moving it more into a place of alignment.

Progress is made when you start to take more balanced and straight steps than crooked ones. You want to be strengthening from a place of alignment. This means that your horse loads each side of his body with the same amount of weight. The left fore should carry the same load as the right fore, and the left hind should carry the same as the right hind. Get this weight distribution even on a lateral plane and you will start to strengthen INTO alignment.
It is only then that you will feel an even contact, that turning left is as easy and as fluid as turning right. It is at this point that you can start to introduce the next step of your training.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Train Straightness/alignment every day
• You make progress when you and your horse take more straight steps than crooked ones
• You are NOT making progress, or making your horse a happy athlete if you continue to strengthen INTO a dysfunction/crookedness
• Straightness = Balance = Ease of Movement = Injury Risk Reduced

Watching top athletes making their job look easy can be incredibly misleading. The top end product tells only a snippet of the real story. Mastering any skill takes a very long time, and it is important to appreciate this when training your own horses.

Let us look for a minute at the fastest man in the world, Usain Bolt. He makes running 100m in sub 10 seconds look like a walk in the park. What we see is him running 100m in under 10 seconds. What we don’t see is how he has made that possible.
It is the same with the top equestrians. We see the end product and marvel at their skill. What we don’t see is how they made it happen.
Because we are only really seeing horse and rider combinations when they have reached the top of their game, it is hard to imagine the road they have taken to get there. We seem to think they have been waved with a fairy godmother wand which has catapulted them ‘overnight’ to great success. Unfortunately, unless you are successful at winning lotto, there is no such thing as an overnight success, and it is imperative to the welfare of our horses that we remember what success is built upon.

It is so important to remember that away from the bright lights and trophies, the normal, day to day training takes place which is actually reasonably unremarkable in its execution.
Usain Bolt doesn’t run 100m that fast every day! Just like Valegro doesn’t train at competition Grand Prix level every day. Eventers don’t jump 4 star cross country courses every day and tennis players don’t play Grand Slam Final level tennis every day! They have had to invest in hours and hours of strength, flexibility and control training before mastering and fine tuning their skill and technique.

When it comes to your own horse, it is essential to remember what you are achieving every day at home. Every horse requires strengthening and skill/technique training. Just like every rider. This happens through methodical, slow, thoughtful steps. It is not having the horse in a competition frame every day, or allowing it to fire around the arena moving to its maximum ability every day. It must be allowed the time to build the framework/scaffolding required that will give him the base for building muscular strength. He must have the time to build and develop control over his body so that he gains confidence in his work, and avoids injury. This is done by slow, small, unremarkable steps. If I asked you to make big movements or run really fast without any preparation, how much control over your body do you think you would have? How likely are you to injure yourself when you move your body without control?
But if I asked you to move with thought for each step, make the steps smaller, the body control rises and the risk of injury dramatically reduces.

As a write this I am thinking of young, talented horses as I think their bodies are the most vulnerable. When the joints have an exaggerated movement and the limbs are moved extravagantly, we see it as a talented horse that is more evolved and capable. The mistake that can happen is that there is a subconscious expectation that the horse knows its job already and is ready to perform. The assumption tends to be that the hard work is done for us, movement that can be created by good training and strength in a lesser moving horse is naturally there, and the danger is that the base of support, the infrastructure and the ability to control the body, is not developed.

In order to minimize the risk of injury, the horse must be strengthened from the inside out. This is done by controlled movement of the joints and placement of the limbs. Applying controlled amounts of load, with a controlled direction of load will enable the soft tissue support system to develop the strength it requires to stabilize the joints. Once the joints are stable, the muscular system can be strengthened and the skill and technique for the job at hand can start to be taught.
It all starts with the foundations, and for the horse this is the infrastructure around the joints. Get this system strong and balanced and then build on top of that. Trying to build heavy, bulky muscle on top of weak joints is a recipe for disaster. The only way your horse will be comfortable and confident in his work is if you create the base of support that he needs.

Once your horse is able to do the work you are asking, only then will he be a happy athlete.
KEY TAKEAWAYS

-Build the layers of strength from the inside out
-Cannot and should not train at optimum every day
-Controlled steps will strengthen your horse safely
-You cannot reach the top overnight
-Talented moving horses require even more care and time