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. This week's episode is actually an email I received from a podcast listener. She writes one wish I would like to hear your experiences and opinion in a podcast episode on the subject of preparing for the show season. How I can, as a dressage rider, prepare my horse physically for the higher workload and support it to prevent injuries and overloading.
Well, Johanna, this episode is about solutely for you now. Preventing overload in training, especially when we are increasing the workload, is a really important part of long term soundness, success and even the ability to do skills with our horses because they feel good in their own body. Now, in order to prevent overloading tissues, we actually need to know where the point of failure for each skill is. So I want you to keep that in mind.
But before we get into that part of it, I would like to talk about a couple of quick things. I program into each and every single one of my horses, regardless of the discipline they do on the ground, so that I have a little reset, a little neurological reset button in my horses for when we start to do the exercises I'm about to talk about. So these are the preprogramed things.
Number one, I teach all of my horses to walk backwards in hand for a minimum of ten marching steps with their cervical spine neutral, their head not too high, and I make sure that their hip flexors engage, that their lumbar sacral junction is healthy and rotates underneath them, which is going to be a really important part of the horse to keep healthy. Whether you are a dressage rider or a jumping rider, this is, key to being able to reset the horse when it is fatigued.
And the other thing I do is lay out some pulls and just really simple, 3 or 4 pulls in a row just set to walk over the pulls. And this also, ensures that the horse has level and even steps on the left and right hand side of its body, both in the front and in the hind limb, and helps a little bit with timing of that. When horses are a fraction fatigued or wanting to fall into a cheat position.
So before we even get started, we need to program in those couple of, I want to call them rescues or reset buttons, for our horses. So when I am preparing my horses for competition, I look at what the end product has to look like. What is the skill set? The sport specific skill set that those horses need to do. So let's talk about a dressage horse. Let's talk about let's say we have to do a pirouette on our dressage horse.
And if we go to perform that skill and we feel in one direction, the horse starts to speed out of that exercise, out of that skill set and fall forward onto its shoulder, let's say we're going to the right and you feel it speed up to the right. You feel it's not taking up enough load in its hind legs, and it gets a little wide behind and begins to quicken. We know that drills that over and over and over again is not going to make the horse successful. At the pirouette.
There is clearly some skill set, probably physical, in that horse's body that's preventing it from being able to come out of that pirouette slowly. So it's important to know where we need to work on. A lot of the times our trainers will be able to or a trusted ground person, or if you video your daily rides, your sessions, you can see this yourself and highlight those issues.
Okay. So using that example of the shoulder falling out, and speeding up in, in the pirouette, one of the things I would do is say, okay, so in order to control that shoulder, we need to take it a step back and work on an exercise that will help the horse control the shoulder. So let's say, we're going to go to a half pass. And this will help us learn a little more straightness, control of speed of the shoulder.
And we'll know if the horse is having problems with adduction or abduction, when it's moving, whether it's the hind limb or the fore limb, and will be able to have a little bit more control over where the ribcage is with that horse. Now, here's where it's important to discover where the point of failure is for the horse. So if you can take 3 or 4 beautiful steps and the horse falls out of it, then you know that's your point of failure. I'm not talking about point of failure like catastrophic.
It's not performing well. It's frustrated. It's sore. I'm talking about where does the skill set break down. So we know if the skill set breaks down after 3 or 4 repetitions of or 3 or 4 steps, we need to take a break, get straight and then come back to it so we know that's our set number. And we want to be slowly increasing that number of repetitions of that smaller exercise so we can event surely put it into the pirouette.
And that's and we won't have the same issue falling out because we're strong and we've gradually increased strength in the parts of the body that we're failing which show up in the end. Exercise. Right. So we know that there's a part of the body it needs strengthening or mobility or even just awareness first. And knowing this, this is what's going to prevent overload and set up a better prepared horse and a horse that's then capable of doing these skills.
So make a list of all of the skills you're going to be required to do. Try the finished product. Take note of the weaknesses and the exercises you can use to correct the weakness itself. Before you go back to drilling the finished product. We're going to then ride those exercises to the point of failure to start to create some tissue adaptation and some strength and some fitness, and gradually increase the fitness here and then retry all of the skills and rehearse the skill more.
Once this, the finished skill sports specific skill test specific skill is more correct. Now we want to keep in mind at this point all of those resets that we have programed into the horse. So as we are beginning to increase the reps in our mini exercises, we know if the horse fatigues, we can go back to the back up and that's going to buy us 1 or 2 more reps.
Allow the horse a neurological reset when they are fatigued so we can end on a high note or the pole work if we're having trouble with even less of the steps behind because one side is potentially stronger than the other, will fatigue quicker than the other, and we can add those in as required during those micro exercises. And I leave them set up in the arena all the time, those poles, so I can walk over them beginning and middle of every single workout just to make sure we're good.
Now, to avoid injury, we want to limit discipline specific training. We want to train in intervals. We want to vary intensity of the workouts from day to day, and also vary the duration and intensity. And this needs to be balanced, that sort of duration and intensity in order to have a truly safely fit horse. Now, this process, if you go through it, it's going to make a better foundation for your horse.
So, you know, in that early spring, if you start to show in summer and your workload is very high and you have goals that sort of peak in that late summer time, you want to be on all of this very early and be very aware of what's going on in the horses.