Да, через траверс удобно учить, методов много, главное выбрать подходящий. Пока мы только начали. А бинты - когда просишь боковые и лошадь в ногах не очень, может стукнуть себя ногой по ноге. Мы так "удачно" через палочки побегали, что потом два месяца отдыхали. С задней ногой, причем, и без подков.
Мнение о современных лошадях. Почему "сейчас" нам не "тогда" и разница подхода в тренинге. Смысл статьи в том, что в погоне за эффектностью движений заводчики создали лошадей специфических. И проблемных. Что такое гиперподвижность и чем она грозит.
Переводить не буду, а то набегут знатоки английского и скажут, что все не так. В принципе все понятно.
Is your horse hypermobile? And what does that mean?!
Breeding horses on spectacularity has its price. A spectacular horse must have big movements with lots of bounce and suppleness and preferably with a lot of bravoure, which in practice means that you need a horse with a lot of blood. Then we also love elegant, so long and thin legs, long lines and small heads ....... The modern sport horse nowadays looks more like a cat than a horse.
But what does this mean for our horses ?! This hypermobility, which means that these horses have more freedom of movement in every joint of their body than average or normal, creates large spectacular movements and an unprecedented athletic capacity in side steps. Only it has more consequences. Hypermobility is caused by an increased elasticity of the connective tissue. Joints are stabilized by tensons and ligaments and they are all made up of connective tissue. The fascia that shape and stabilize the whole body are of connective tissue and all tendons are connective tissue structures.
Not only the joints in the legs are hypermobile, but also all joints between the vertebrae.
This means that these horses have a lot of trouble to stabilize their core. Muscles must compensate for the increased elasticity of the connective tissue. This means that we have to give hypermobile horses extra time to build up their muscles.
The average sport horse doesn’t get older than 7-8 years. And there are a lot of horses with recurrent tendon injuries and that has to do with this too weak connective tissue.
Nowadays, we regularly find horses who around the age of 16-20 go through their fetlock joints, usually only the hind legs, but sometimes all four legs. Since many hypermobile horses do not even reach this age, this problem is not yet recognized.
If you look at the picture, you see a 5 year old horse that is already going really low with the ergot. This is an extremely hypermobile horse, recognizable by increased movement possibilities of his four legs, neck and back. In addition, he is extremely sensitive (on touch), very sensitive to stress, he can become so stressed that he is unreachable and he can go from relaxed to full panic in a split second. He has uneven feet and he bounces too far down in the leg joints of the hind legs, not only in canter.
This horse is an example of an extremely hypermobile horse with all other characteristics that go with it.
How do we keep such a horse healthy?
Most of these horses drop out at a young age. So how do we keep them healthy?
- first of all, these horses need more time to grow, they are real late-bloomers. Both physically and mentally. That means we certainly should not take them under their saddle in their third year of life.
- muscles must compensate for the lack of stability of the connective tissue. In the torso this is possible because there are muscles. But in the legs from the front knee and lower and from the hock and lower there are no muscles. Here the stabilization depends on the tendons and other connective tissue structures. It is therefore no coincidence that the ergot support system fails.
So a lot of time has to be taken to build up muscles so that the horse can at least stabilize his torso.
- training on balance is essential. These horses have little compensation possibility. We must therefore ensure that the skeleton is piled up as well as possible so that the horse does not lose any power to compensate for an imbalance.
- we cannot afford to let it go wrong and then rehabilitate. Once there is tendon damage, there are easy new injuries under the old injury. prevention is the key.
- the horse must be able to move a lot, this trains the connective tissue, but must have LITTLE training load. That means that he has to be able to move freely as much as possible and have short training sessions only 3-4 times a week.
- Fascia respond to nutrition and stress. We therefore have to optimize all factors for the horse, which is immediately a challenge because these horses are stress-sensitive. Sometimes even dangerous because they can go into blind panic.
And then it is still a postponement of execution. Where a horse should be able to reach 25 to 30 years old, this is a very high exception for hypermobile horses, depending on the extent to which they are hypermobile.
The horse on the photo is now 8 years old. He begins to really go through his rear ergots. Especially in his left back leg. Because of this, his hock is overstretched, making it painful and overloaded. I once got this horse because he was very dangerous to ride. It turned out to be possible but it was not very comfortable for him. He is an extremely intelligent horse, another characteristic of these horses. When they are at rest they learn everything very quickly. But if they are stressed, they hardly learn. This makes it very difficult to teach these horses that a rustling bush is not scary.
Soon I will have to say goodbye to this horse ........ the result of breeding on spectacularity. This is not different from what we did with Persian cats, the flatter the nose the better, that they always have tearing eyes and cannot breathe proporly ... that does not matter ..... In horses we also have gone well over the line!!
When does this stop and when do we breed healthy horses? Horses that are not trapped in a body full of discomfort, but feel strong and good ?!
In the meantime we have to do our best for our hypermobile horses! How to teach your horse to balance himself in the 4 dimensions; vertically, horizontally, laterally and diagonally, and by this way preventing your horse from getting FROS or kissing spines, you can read in my book “Compassionate Training for Today’s Sport Horse; Biomechanics in Four Dimensions, The Key to improving Posture, Balance and Strength”.
