Horse Movement by Gail Williams

Author:Gail Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908809681
Publisher: Crowood

Figure 5.15 Thirty minutes posttreatment the muscles are relaxing and rehydrating.

Figure 5.16 Seventy-five minutes post-treatment the muscles continue to relax and rehydrate.

Fig. 5.17 Now, 120 minutes post-treatment, the muscles are almost fully recovered.

Soft tissue manipulation and mobilisation was applied by the veterinary physiotherapist, and imaging repeated after 30 minutes, 75 minutes and 120 minutes post-treatment. Within 30 minutes post-treatment we can see that the muscles are beginning to relax and rehydrate, thus becoming cooler as the inflammatory mediators are reduced (Figure 5.15). At 75 minutes post-treatment the muscles have continued to release and rehydrate and the thermal patterns on the left and right are nearly symmetrical (Figure 5.16). At 120 minutes post-treatment the horse’s muscles are now almost fully recovered (Figure 5.17). All these images were confirmed by palpation of the muscles by the treating physiotherapist.

The reason why this slow release takes place is because the muscles and the fasciae need to rehydrate and the inflammatory mediators need to be removed from the fibres. It is notable that after this type of treatment, the horse needs to rest and drink large amounts of water to enable complete resolution of the muscle spasm and rehydration. When a muscle is in spasm, not only do the fibres shorten, but the fascia contracts and the intercellular fluid is squeezed out. Therefore the fluid needs to be replaced to fully allow the fibres to lengthen and the fascia to expand to allow the rehydration process. It has been demonstrated that it can take up to four hours post-muscle release for the fascia to fully rehydrate, and the muscle to begin to return to full athletic function.1

Your physiotherapist will normally recommend 24 hours of rest and turnout before returning to ridden work to allow the body to flush the inflammatory mediators from the muscle into the lymphatic system.

Therefore the take-home message from this is that if you address muscle injury as soon as possible post-trauma, then it can be resolved and prevented from becoming a chronic condition leading to dysfunction of muscular chains and poor posture resulting in pain and loss of athletic function. Indeed at a subsequent physiotherapy assessment the horse in Figure 5.14 had fully recovered and was back to pre-injury performance levels.

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