What Makes Horses More or Less Likely to Miss Training Days?

Researchers recently determined that several factors–from the animal’s history to the owner’s training and management techniques–appear to make horses more or less likely to miss training days due to injury.
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Horses with sound orthopedic histories and/or varied workouts are less likely to miss training days. | Photo: iStock
The next time your equine athlete is on stall rest, don’t ask why his barnmates seem so much sounder than him unless you really want to hear the answer: Researchers recently determined that several factors—from the animal’s history to your own training and management techniques—appear to make horses more or less likely to miss training days due to injury.

Horses with previous orthopedic injuries typically need about twice as many days off as horses without such histories, said Agneta Egenvall, DVM, PhD, professor in veterinary epidemiology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences Faculty of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Husbandry, in Uppsala. Conversely, horses in a varied work program—regularly training in different places and in different kinds of activities—are far less likely to have injury-related days off than those in rigid programs, she said.

Researchers studied the training and injury records of 263 elite show jumping horses in the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Of those, injuries forced 126 horses to miss 2,357 days (6%) of the cumulative 39,028 days they should have been in training. The vast majority of the days off—77%—were due to orthopedic injury, Egenvall said.

Interestingly, Egenvall said, the researchers found very little correlation between workload and days off, said Egenvall. “There were perhaps a few horses with ‘half-clinical’ injuries that could not be trained that much (horses that had days lost, were then entered into training, but lapsed back into days-lost again),” she said. “But these horses were often not trained much from the beginning anyway (as far as we could tell). However, this is a question that needs further elaboration from the general principles of training physiology/pathophysiology

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Passionate about horses and science from the time she was riding her first Shetland Pony in Texas, Christa Lesté-Lasserre writes about scientific research that contributes to a better understanding of all equids. After undergrad studies in science, journalism, and literature, she received a master’s degree in creative writing. Now based in France, she aims to present the most fascinating aspect of equine science: the story it creates. Follow Lesté-Lasserre on Twitter @christalestelas.

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