Bad Habits
At some point during a horse’s career, he will likely find himself in a schedule of bodywork for maintenance or therapy and/or during a period of downtime. This chapter shows you how to approach bodywork therapies, and most importantly, follow them up with the appropriate corrective exercises. Plus, you will learn how to progress your horse’s physical condition even during periods of downtime.
After this chapter I provide routines for following up bodywork with exercise.
Chapter 4: Getting the Most from Groundwork
Learn how to make the most of times when you need, or prefer, to work with your horse from the ground rather than from the saddle. This is followed by routines for horses that are following restricted schedules due to rehab requirements.
Chapter 5: Exercises and Tips to Follow Every Day
Here you will find my non-negotiable and fail-proof rules for keeping any riding horse happy and performing well.
Following this chapter, I have offered recommended exercise routines for specific kinds of horses: gaited, senior, and youngsters.
CHAPTER 1 Corrective Exercises to Create New Patterns
Why We Need Corrective Exercises
Skilled riding is often all it takes to improve a horse’s athleticism, performance, and overall well-being. But just as often, even good dressage-based training programs fail to fully root out the habits and patterns that prevent many horses from reaching optimal movement and correctness of their gaits. Anything from a poorly fitting saddle to inconsistent exercise schedules to an injury or stress, or past postural imbalances can create compromises. These quickly become deeper impediments to a horse’s movement mechanics that persist even with good, regular riding schedules.
The body’s way of taking care of itself during physical imbalances is to put up defenses. These defenses take the form of muscular spasms, adhesions, tightened muscles, restricted joint motions, and signals to and from the central nervous system to move differently.
Curing these defenses is not as simple as giving the horse a period of rest, though that can seem like a sensible solution. Adhesions and spasms, for instance, do not go away on their own after aggravating sources have been eliminated. They require outside manipulation as well as correct signals from the body to clear out. Putting a horse out in the field for a few months with the hope that everything will clear up rarely fixes the underlying problems.
Therapies like chiropractic care and massage are generally successful in releasing areas of immobility so the horse is able to move optimally. They free up areas of tension and compromised mobility that the body will not release by itself. However, they only set the stage; they do not by themselves create healthy movement. For that, the horse must be taken through exercises that habituate correct new patterns (fig. 1.1). Physical motions are governed by an underlying wiring that will still store faulty signals until these signals are reprogrammed.
1.1: The state of an athlete’s body is always forming patterns that influence its mechanics. Little issues or imbalances frequently become larger ones when a pattern takes root. Training programs must make use of exercises that instill good patterns, while also strengthening the signals that control them.
This is where corrective exercises like the ones in this book come in.
Pilates or Yoga for Horses
And yet for all their success in curing balance and gait dysfunction, the real value of corrective exercises far exceeds this role alone. Their necessity for supporting equine athletes at the top of their performance cannot be overstated. Without joint and postural stability, for instance, an athlete cannot develop strength and power correctly. During regular riding and training, numerous factors make it difficult to target areas of the body that store the mechanisms for stability and symmetry the way corrective exercises do. These maneuvers access muscle fibers responsible for fine-tuned, well-coordinated movements while educating and strengthening the neuromuscular system beyond the adaptations gained from gymnastic work. For this reason, therapists sometimes refer to them as Pilates or Yoga for horses. This is an accurate way to view them.
If you regularly train good patterns in the horse’s body map, he can keep performing with ease for a long sound life. This simple practice also allows you to consider alternatives to joint injections, buckets of supplements, endless chiropractic appointments, career-ending physical limitations, and a surprising number of behavioral problems.
Understanding Fascia
A body-wide cloth of fibrous collagen called fascia envelops muscles, nerves, veins, and organs individually, and also connects them all together to form a network. This gauze-like web of tissue determines, in large measure, how a body is able to move. When this tissue becomes disorganized, strained, or dehydrated, its ability to glide across surrounding tissues is impaired. Eventually, this leads to a diminished range of motion in muscles and joints. The fascia adapts to this restricted pattern and spreads it throughout the horse’s entire system. Thus begins a cycle of restriction begetting more restriction.
fit tip
In human medicine, sensory and proprioceptive education has been instrumental in reducing the need for surgical intervention to repair joints in 50 percent of cases. It is logical to extend these findings to horses as well.
Common reasons for fascia tissue losing its glide or pliability include: localized strain, a poorly fitting saddle, injury or inflammation, repetitive movements, and emotional stress. Good muscle function depends on pliability of the fascia, not just for force effort but also for sensory input. The sensory nerves that communicate information back and forth between muscles and the central nervous system reside in fascia. If and when the fascia is altered, these signals about joint position and muscle coordination falter (fig. 1.2).
1.2: When disruptions occur to the health and pliability of the fascia, muscle patterns are negatively altered. If left unaddressed, these can lead to lasting imbalances. A horse will be unable to transmit energy forward from the hindquarters without restriction or resistance (red arrows). Stretches and corrective exercises provide an organizing force (blue arrows) that can realign fibers and movement patterns.
A hydrated and well-trained fascia network plays an enormous role in fitness. Its significance reminds us to not think about training muscles individually, because in reality that is not possible. Through fascia, the horse’s system is interconnected. It is analogous to a T-shirt hanging from a branch. If one part of the T-shirt snags, it will pull on and disturb the alignment of threads farther away from the actual snag. The physical shape of the T-shirt will change and continue to lose form over time.
Exercises that focus too repetitively on the same
