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. Really early in my professional career, I took a continuing education class and I heard something that was incredibly valuable and has stuck with me through most of my career. One of the facilitators of this continuing education class asked me, when you approach this. What is your therapeutic goal? Now this is really different than your desired outcome.
And let me explain. Therapeutic goals are specific inputs to garner a specific physiological event that will have a positive effect on the animal. Now, the outcome of that depends on the body's response to those inputs. And that's a little bit out of our control. But experience and intuition, of long term therapists, practitioners, anyone who works with the animals in a hands on way gives a really good idea of what is actually possible, but it's not a given or a guarantee.
However, your therapeutic goal is more of a guarantee. So here's an example. So a therapeutic goal in kinesiology taping. We'll say, is to decompress pain receptors in the lumbar spine or in the paw. Right. So consequently that will affect because I want a decompression I want to affect that area using a decompression taping. That affects my approach to the problem. So I want to take some of that physical, response that I know I'm going to get. I want to affect mechanoreceptors.
I want to affect nociceptors in the lumbar. I choose a decompression taping. Now my desired outcome is less pain in a better moving horse, but that is not my therapeutic goal. Now, why is this important? It's because it means that you're incredibly intentional. Intentional about what it is that you are doing with the animals in your sessions. What is going to be your systematic course of action to get from your therapeutic goal all the way through your chosen treatment into your desired outcome?
So too many people throw too many things at horses, and we don't have a sense of what is working and what is not working. Now, as body workers, we're not called out to be trainers on these horses. It's not in the scope of our practice, and certainly not for most people. Is that where they're comfortable speaking? However, if you're with a horse owner and you're getting a little to no results from your body work program, now it's time to look at the bigger picture.
It's time to have that conversation with our clients, because we know we have been intentional about our therapeutic inputs and what the goal is. And if we are not seeing the desired outcome, that's the point when we're going to have that conversation about training is the training you are doing with your horse exceeding the capability or the capacity of their body. In other words, is their body prepared to deal with the question you are asking of it?
This includes everything from, the duration of your workouts, the intensity of your workouts, the way you address recovery time, and how you balance these therapeutic interventions with your training. Now, it's important to look at the intensity of training. Has the horse progressed correctly?
Because if you don't have that situation, if you don't have owners who are doing range of motion check ins, if they're not doing palpation exams, then they're not doing the appropriate strengthening conditioning between workouts to prepare the tissues better for what's expected of it. And that is the situation where things will always breakdown and you will never see movement forward. So this type of knowledge, whether you're a horse owner or a body worker, is a really important thing to have.
And it's a really important conversation to be having with your clients from a body worker's perspective. I want to be touching base with my clients, making sure they know how, in between my visits to test the horse's range of motion to address some of the basic things that they need to address, to palpate the back, to know how the horse is feeling.