July 2024

Horse owners often obtain information about exercise/training programs during clinics, sessions with private trainers, and on social media. Many “specialists” recommend and explain specific exercises considered helpful for conditioning specific muscles or zones of the equine body. They explain what constitutes a well-balanced conditioning regime, e.g., the importance of cross-training or how to correctly dose the amount of training.

The critical missing piece, however, – and what we find worrisome – is that we seldom see attention paid to (1) the importance, prior to starting a conditioning/training regime, of making sure that the horse is actually “fit for training”, i.e., that the horse has undergone a whole-body assessment performed by a qualified professional; or (2) how the owner and trainer can recognize signs of pain or dysfunction during training, and how to know when the training regime should be modified or abandoned and the horse referred to a veterinarian or other qualified healthcare practitioner… even when the signs of dysfunction are subtle.

Too often we see horses being trained through pain and/or dysfunction, either because the owner or trainer is unable to recognize the pain or dysfunction or because the pain-caused behavior is interpreted as “simply” a training issue. Owners, trainers, and manual therapists need to be more aware of the harm that can be caused to the horse by asking it to perform movements that it is not “fit” to do at that moment in time.

Human / animal manual therapist Elisse Miki unpacks the concept of “fitness for training”. Then she and trainer Karen Rohlf chat with Dr. Haussler about how to break the training-injury cycle. Although we can’t all be trained or skilled in how to assess for fitness, we at least need to have a better understanding of the horse’s body and be more aware of the risks and the importance of seeking expert help.

Gatherings are 1.5-hour meetings including 30 minutes devoted to audience insights and experiences.