I'm Judith, and this is the Starline Equine Bodywork podcast. This is a podcast about all of the things that I've learned and continue to learn in my career with horses. For the better part of a decade, I've been a full time equine bodywork practitioner, educator, and author. My obsession how horses really work and how to get the most from our relationship with them in training and in sport. My passion helping horse owners and body workers and aspiring body workers get going.
Unpack the latest science, research and experiences behind what we do with horses to support their potential and optimize their performance. The more experienced a body worker is, the faster their assessment of the horse seems to be. And this is not just from sheer practice, but it's from learning a really specific set of reaction points in the horse. And there is a high value in learning these.
Basically, these are specific areas on the horse's body where you can observe subtle or even not so subtle responses to touch pressure or movement of the skin in those areas. They're a really important communication bridge between horses and humans. I like to think of them as the horse's way of talking back without using words. So when we use these, we're getting better bodywork outcomes from more accurate assessments.
We're having a stronger horse, human bond and even a deeper understanding of our horses well-being. So basically, when we go over these certain areas, what we're looking for are really common reactions. Things like their eyes blinking or slower blinking, little flicks of the ears. Often you'll see the bottom lip begin to twitch and react. Some horses will yawn. They will drop their head or even resist the touch. They can swish their tail. Step away.
Some of them will snap at you with their teeth or even kick out in sort of these extreme situations. Now, these aren't random responses. Horses use body language to signal their own comfort, their discomfort, or even a release of the tension in a certain area. Now there's good science behind this. Essentially, these reaction points are related to their connection in the nervous system. So they align with neuromuscular junctions, areas that are rich in nerve endings.
They're often on insertion points of muscles, or they can be in highly innervated areas like the pole or the sacroiliac region itself. Now extreme light touch when you go over these can stimulate the horse's parasitic parasympathetic nervous system and actually lower their stress hormones like cortisol and encourage, relaxation response just in your assessment.
So it's really fascinating is not only can you assess if there's tension or issues that need intervention, but sometimes just the stimulation of touch and awareness of touch in those areas can begin that unwinding of stress and mechanical tension in that exact area. It has extreme practical, benefits for horse owners. You know, this is a really empowering thing to learn.
I'm going to be really honest, learning these points, and teaching owners these points and how to spot tension or soreness is important because they identify it before it escalates into a lameness or a behavioral issue. So, you know, you think about a horse that's having a performance issue. Like it doesn't want to pick up one lead. It might show a subtle flinch up near, let's say, the weather area. And so you've got a clue how to investigate or what's going on further.
And you have something that you can discuss with your veterinarian that you can discuss with your body worker. And let's face it. Early detection of issues in the musculoskeletal system is seriously cost saving, right? We want to detect things early, reduce our vet bills, reduce the downtime that our horse needs to recover, and make sure we're providing appropriate interventions for their own well-being. Now, for body workers, it's so important to learn all of these reaction points.
It gives you a more precise way of working. Knowing them is going to help you refine your techniques. You're going to have less guesswork and, have more Targa stud releases in your actual session.
However, it is that you like to address the body, whether you are a chiropractor, a massage therapist, a bone therapist, a myofascial release person, there's a lot of different ways you can go in and address the body, but it's really interesting, to have that precision and know exactly where things are, even in the most stoic and subtle of horses. This, you know, it builds an incredible trust with your clients, your human clients.
Being able to explain why a horse is saying react, being stressed by something, during the session. And it allows your clients to really, understand the credibility behind what you're saying and behind, the, you know, the homework that you're giving them to overcome certain issues. It becomes really obvious a cause and effect situation. Why I love the idea of reaction points is the ability to read a horse, the art, meeting, the science.
It's essentially a balance of the practitioners who are experienced. It's a balance between your intuition and your observation. So it's not just about anatomy charts. It's about tuning into a horse's unique response to touch in these specific areas. And, you know, the stoic horses, they may barely blink when they're sensitive in one spot. And others might override fact. And both are very, very valid signals of things that are going on.
But that's where experience from a practitioner or from a horse owner who's repeated learning this and put the time in to learning their own horse and their own horse's reaction becomes, really important. And in fact, if you are a horse owner and you do practice these on your own horse, you track their reactions, let's say over the first week that you're doing it and trying to master it, and you're going to see certain patterns emerge, and these will begin to mean things to you.
That means if it suddenly changes down the road, you know, something is going on in an area and perhaps you need to intervene or, you will learn that your horse has a dislike for touch in certain areas, and then you can go ahead and address causes for that, whether it be equipment, fittings or things that are going on in, you know, training. What what can you do to make the horse more comfortable in that area?
Now, as a one on one bodywork practitioner myself, I have, palpated a lot of horses and there have been horses in my practice. I've gone over them. They have performance issues or behavioral issues. And when you go over and you feel them, I mean, they're beautifully trained animals. They have beautifully symmetrical bodies. Their posture is, you know, relatively good. There's no visually apparent cues.
And then you go in and palpate them and you don't feel any remarkable flinching or moving away. No, touch base responses that would warrant the type of behavior that the owners and the trainers are actually seeing.
And so one of the things I like to do is then instead of just relying on that postural assessment or that palpation assessment, in short of those typical areas that we see things going on with horses in certain sports, I like to run through a scan of all of these reaction points, and it's actually quite incredible because you can hit one of the reaction points and you see the horse ever so slightly blank, and every time you go over that same area, you are getting a repeat of that exact response.
And when you record them all and then go in and address those areas of the body in the session, you don't feel lost. You're like, oh, I don't know. I could, you know, throw spaghetti at this wall and hope something sticks. Or you can go through and systematically look at these reactions points and see where those stoic horses and a lot of our competition horses, guys, they're stoic. And so when you go through, you see these subtle responses and it changes the way you approach your session.
And those changes are often the things that unlock, the brilliance of the animal and help it move through those things that it's been guarding, protecting, not wanting to let everyone know that there's a subtle issue brewing. Right. So things we want to, avoid doing when we're looking at reaction points, we don't want to be providing too much heavy pressure, heavy hands on the horse that's actually going to mask some of the more subtle reactions and can stress a horse out.
And we don't want to ignore the context of the reactions of the horses. So a yawn might just be a yawn from boredom. It doesn't necessarily mean a release, but it could mean a release. So it's important to kind of consider that bigger picture. Was the horse tense before the session? What has the owner, the rider, the trainer been struggling with and going ahead and contextualizing all of those responses? Are there other horses that they can see? Is it feed time?
What's going on in, that sort of scan of these reaction points and we don't want to rush through them. It's really important to go over them a couple of times and let the reactions reveal themselves. Patience being the key. We're going to just very slowly, very calmly and with relatively light touch, go over these areas. Learning reaction points isn't just a skill, it's actually a way to listen to our horses on their own terms.
Blending science and our empathy and intuition so horses don't lie right that their reactions are the truth, and it is the truth that we are all chasing. So here's your actionable moment. Our new Skill Accelerator is going to help you identify these reaction points in horses and learn this incredibly valuable skill. And it's in the works. And you can be the first to pre-purchase it. We're going to drop that link in the show night show notes, and it will be on the website Starline bodywork.com.
And you two can learn to interpret the language of horses, have stronger bodywork sessions, and be able to have conversations with the professionals that look after your horses about where you're seeing and feeling reactions inside that horse's body, so we can get the best attention to your horses possible.