Stable Rest and Rehab

16/03/2024

Studying anatomy is MUCH more fun when you get to learn through the eyes of a child 💚

Every time I look at these bones, I am struck by something new. To see the open and completely disconnected growth plates on the spine is incredible. To find and fit the cartilage caps onto the right vertebral bodies is such fun.

These bones were buried for YEARS before we dug them up, so there is a lot of degeneration and damage on them.
I look forward to cleaning and investigating a 'fresh' canine and equine skeleton a bit later this year 🥰

Thank you to Tinkie for being our live model, and for Allon who was so eager to learn!

27/11/2023

😱Not everything is wrong😨

I'm sure my fellow equine practitioners can resonate with me this one, but something I have increasingly become aware of is this notion of only seeing what's 'wrong' with a horse😫. As practitioners, in any field in the equine industry, this is what we are trained to see, as mostly our job is to improve the 'problem'. Whilst of course this is useful, it can also be a hindrance, especially considering the owners take on your findings and all they hear are negative things about their horse 😢

Having owned a typical broken Thoroughbred for over 14 years and another pony with body 'issues', riding, feeling and even dissecting many horses, I can safely say the 'perfect' horse does not exist🤯!

Every horse is crooked, every horse has something 'wrong' and this is where the job can get exhausting and deflating😮‍💨. Instead of focusing on the negatives and prescribing your horse 'cant' do this and that, I think it's more important to realise what the horse IS capable of, and positive ways it can manage its asymmetries or postural issues, or even emotional ones.

Yes your horse may be crooked and short stepping on the left, but it doesn't mean you should not touch them, the same as us, if you have a compensation pattern or a postural habit, you need to work through it in a way that isn't going to cause more harm. In my opinion exercise and movement is the best way to achieve this! Being overly conservative can do more harm than good. So if you are feeling like there is no hope and your horse is broken feel free to give me a call as I'm sure I can flip that way of thinking and get you and your horse achieving wonderful things 🦄
🥰🦄

27/11/2023

Good quality “physio” exercises tend to look like just a scaled version of regular training, with slow, progressive increases in load, volume or difficulty. After assessing an injury, a quality rehab practitioner will use their knowledge of the injury type, the tissue involved, the capacity of that tissue, the grade of the injury, and the healing timeline of that tissue to decide how much to scale, and how quickly to progress.

Fancy gadgets, shockwave, laser, EMS, PEMF, hydrotherapy systems, the latest orthobiologic injections, all have their place. And depending on the context of its use and the evidence supporting them, they MIGHT help push things along. But all these tools are the 5-10%. They are the cherry on top of rehab. The icing and sprinkles on the cake. But if you try to make a birthday cake entirely of icing and sprinkles… I hate to tell you, it’s probably going to fall apart.

27/11/2023

27/11/2023

Our horses life is not their training, their training is not their life. But all of it needs to work seamlessly together.

For the last 12 weeks, 80+ horse people from all around the world have been exploring a deep dive into a group coaching program that explores a fundamental question; “Are you at home with your horses? Are your horses at home with you?”. In this program I’ve taught intermediate groundwork techniques from first contact to the mounting block. Plus, very deep dives into emotional neuroscience. From the theory we drew direct connections to the practical techniques explored. The insights have surprised us all, myself more than others. The results ranged from controversial blogs on my public page that ended with death threats (truly) to transformational experiences with my students.

One student said to me quietly at the end of a lesson yesterday
“I’ve never had such a good year with my horses thanks to you”

Juxtapose that with death threats. You can imagine a it’s a confusing time for me. At confusing times I bring it back down to the fundamentals. What’s really important?

A theme that has come up again and again in this program is a theme that I believe is the final frontier for cutting edge horse training.

Horse care.

Though I can teach you explore care and nurturance within training as a foundation, I speak not about our emotional care of our horses… but horse keeping, horse care.

Their lifestyle, environment, and the other hours of the day outside of training.

Sometimes I forget to say the obvious. Forgive me. But here are a short list of assumed and fundamental understandings, that are so important to me that I rarely talk or teach them (does a fish know it’s wet?)I think they are important to all our horses.

Species appropriate lifestyle
A horse requires forage, friends and freedom. Based on the biology of their gastrointestinal tract, their circulatory and musculoskeletal system, forage needs to be ad-lib, or if fed in meals, not fed with fasts longer than 2 hours until the next forage is dosed. The forage needs to be clean, low in non-structural carbohydrates, and appropriate for non-ruminant livestock (not cow hay)
A horse requires friends. Over a fence line is better than nothing, but it’s not a long term success plan. A horse needs other horses, carefully and gradually introduced, and properly matched, so that they can be the social animal that millennia designed them to be.
Horses need freedoms. Freedom from and freedom to. Freedom from pain, fear, discomfort and freedom to, make choices about how to move, when and where to eat, sleep, play. Freedom to design their time and explore according to their wishes.

These things are very important. As an owner and professional whom, like many of you, was at the mercy of public boarding businesses, or ad-hoc private arrangements until only a few months ago, I have experienced the highs and lows of trying to give my horses these above species appropriate non-negotiables without the luxury of having my own place.

I’ve experienced wonderful locations, private and public where me and my horses were given every grace and opportunity to enact sufficient and quality care. And I’ve experienced highly compromised and even dangerous horse keeping situations. Here is what I have learned that I wish to share with you:

Do the best until you know better. When you know better do better.

AND

Do the best YOU CAN. When you CAN do better, do better.

So, if we find ourselves in an less than ideal horse keeping scenario, become radically honest about that. And understand that you are on borrowed time. Consolidate and stabilize your horse, and look for an alternative. Meanwhile, communicate and request, try and exhaust all possible options at your fingertips to improve things. Ask for additional turn out. Ask for more hay, or ask if you can buy more hay. Ask for cleaner water, better fences.

Heck, I once made my own arena at a public boarding facility out of a disused paddock. I asked permission. I spray painted the tree stumps yellow so I could avoid lameing my horse on them, and spent an entire Sunday dragging a pallet across the old earth to Harrow it. Just so my horse had a better place to train with me.

This last year, after a long and rather arduous journey, I found a small, perfect, affordable little farm in probably one of the last pockets of countryside in Western Europe where horse keeping is not a financially exorbitant exercise. It has consumed every waking moment of my life the last 12 months to move the horses across country, into the farm, and invest in equine infrastructure from scratch to keep them here in a really good way. I see the light at the end of the tunnel now. Despite heat waves and hurricanes, my horses are well in a mixture of modern and traditional environment set up, with ad-lib hay, shelters and more on the way to improve their quality of life

Be resourceful. Ask for what you want but be prepared to get a No. Be prepared to lose friends, or contacts, in your relentless pursuit of giving better for your horses. Because often it is just human social constructs which stops horses living better lives. And sometimes to give them better, you have to break social rules, or reform them if you can.

And please, if your training is being used as a compensation tool to make up for inadequacies in horse keeping, do that with skill and awareness. But know that it is a potentially inappropriate long term strategy and you’re on borrowed time. Keep your horse healthy, and dream of a day when training is about abundance for your horse, not basic needs or management

24/05/2023

The “Top-down” control system, where the brain controls everything, is too complex and slow. Physical intelligence elaborates systems such as “muscle synergy” or efferent copy, allowing movements faster than our mental processing. A single synergy cannot generate a complex action, but overlapping synergies in a particular order can create complex movement. Robotics evolved from the “Top-Down” control system as it did not permit fluid motion. Engineers use structural elasticity mimicking humans’ and equines’ close kinematics chains. In humans, as in equines, close kinematics chains combine multiple parts into mechanical loops, which allows complex movements to be regulated by structures. In the body, close kinematics chains are nested modular units of various sized that make up an integrated movement system that extends through the whole body and work in synergy with the nervous system.
The belief that proprioceptive feedback should be developed in an unmounted situation is questionable. Only on the horse does the rider’s physical intelligence resort to muscle synergies, efferent copies, and close kinematics chains, allowing reactions faster than rational thinking. Only on the horse, the rider has the feedback that refines the rider’s perception and control. Physiotherapies focus on the range of motion. The rider’s range of motion on the horse is limited. The relation with the horse occurs at the level of subtle nuances in muscle tone. It is about the subtle interaction of forces, and only on the horse are we in a situation where we receive and manage forces in simultaneous and multiple nuances and directions.
One of my injuries could have confined me in a wheelchair. It was very close. The initial inflammation paralyzed my legs. I regained mobility when the inflammation reduced, but I felt I had lost the refinement of the perception. The therapies focused on motion, but I needed proprioceptive feedback. I decided to ride my horse and focus on the subtle interaction of forces. I could only work at the walk for two months, but I gradually regained the subtle nuances in muscle tone, which was the essence of my conversation with the horse. Of course, the doctors would have been furious if they knew that the horse was my therapist, but they were amazed by the rapidness and extent of my progress.
Biotensegrity refines the interactions with the horse to subtle nuances in muscle tone and the integrity of the whole physique. Close kinematics chains and muscle synergies do not obey the “correct aids;” they work in synergy with the nervous system for greater efficiency. We create conditions likely to allow the kinematic chains to work efficiently. A concept that is easy to understand is the horse’s natural cadence. If we rush the horse faster than his natural cadence, we alter the proper function of the close kinematic chains. With practically every horse who came into the Science of Motion’s rehab program, the first thing I had to do, whatever the nature of the problem, was restore the horse’s frequency, slowing down the cadence.
Our task is to know the body coordination orchestrating the horse’s physique for the athletic demand of the performance and create situations guiding the horse’s mental processing and physical intelligence toward efficient body coordination. The “situations” are the rider’s muscles adjustments, cadence, balance, choice of gymnastic exercise, etc. Education works both ways. When I risked losing control of my legs, the horse’s movements and forces reeducated the components of my nervous system and fascia more accurately and efficiently than any unmounted therapy could have.
Jean Luc

23/05/2023