Imagine if you were watching a ballet and the dancers were straining to do the moves and they were pushing and forcing their way through moves without the proper base strength necessary - you would notice right away. I'm learning that you can see the difference in horses too and it's not just a matter of how it looks when the horse moves, but of how sustainable it is for the horse to continue as an athlete.
Massage definitely helps a horse, as does chiropractic, but a huge factor in a horse's athletic longevity is how they use their body. I'm not a horse trainer by any means so I am not the person to ask how to train a horse to use their body properly, but I had the opportunity to watch a trainer today who does know how to do that and as a bodyworker is was really exciting to see how much of a difference a trainer well educated in equine biomechanics can make.
My instructor has done a wonderful job training her Irish Sporthorse so far, but her mare is still young - seven years old - and still growing and she'd reached a little bit of a sticking point in their training. I checked her mares back before she rode today and I noticed some stiffness in her lumbar region, with a stress point on the left side and the tightest of the muscles on her left side. I off-handedly mentioned to my instructor's trainer that her mare had a stress point on her left side and was very tight then just sat and watched. The trainer had her walk for the majority of the lesson and had her side stepping one leg over the other ... over and over again. It ended up being exhausting to watch because you could tell how much the mare was resisting the movement. It just wasn't the way she normally moved and trying to understand what she was being asked to do was a challenge, not to mention it was using her body in a way that is different than what she defaulted to doing.
If anyone has taken a private pilates class where the instructor really helps you isolate those core muscles we don't generally use in our modern lifestyles, you'll know what I mean. You try and try to engage these muscles that you swear don't actually exist in your body, and the pilates trainer (or the reformer machine) helps support your body, or restricts movement of a part of your body so that you are put in a position where you need to use your core and then after enough support and enough instruction you finally find them and suddenly you are moving your body in a completely different way. Well, that's what happened to my instructor's mare - right in front me as I was watching, I noticed her hips begin to open and get more swing and her back began to loosen up and you could see in her eye that she had discovered the muscles they were asking her to use. When the lesson was over she stretched her neck out and stretched her back and let out the biggest sighs. She was so cute, you could tell she'd really had an "a-ha!" moment in how she moved her body and it was all because the trainer knew what kind of repetitions to do and how much to do them (well, and of course my instructor rode them so well!).
After the lesson I checked her mare's back and the stress point was still there, obviously, but the muscles around her lumbar region were so much looser and pliable. It was really a very cool thing to get to witness. We're planning on me working on her later this week, and I already know that my plan is to relieve that stress point and give the homework of "do those exercises in the arena every time you work that you did with your trainer on Saturday".
I'll ask permission tomorrow to see if I can use a video from the lesson today and if I can use the name of my instructor's trainer because I think it would be nice to give credit where it is due. It was a very fun day for me to get to be around such beautiful, sweet horses and watch some really great training.
For now here is a picture of my instructor's mare, waiting to get tacked up for her lesson. She's a beautiful horse, and I love her big, sensitive eyes.
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