Rehabbing the injured horse
Movement is medicine.
Once you get through the initial acute inflammation stage of an injury and have worked with your vet to decide on a treatment plan, gentle movement to meet your horses needs help the healing process along.
Depending on the type of injury will depend on how long to reintroduce the movement, what type and how much. Some injuries won’t need too long of a spell, while others may need a good couple of months.
A lot of the injuries I’ve worked with in my training career have been old injuries that are from their racing career (lots of standardbreds and thoroughbreds). A couple have been paddock injuries especially as foals. A handful have happened while being ridden (at least with these injuries you know what happened). Quite a few have been due to poor training and breaking, being put in a frame too young, not been shown how to move freely and not being able to develop freely within the frame.
I’ve only worked with a couple of freshly injured horses. With fresh injuries, working with your vet and giving the adequate spelling for the type of injury is key. Don’t do any bodywork on fresh injuries and acute inflammation. It is more likely to do more damage than good.
With old injuries, gentle stress on the horses body that improves their posture, engages their core and increases their freedom of movement - in combination with a good body worker - is key to your horse thriving.
When we exercise our horses we are creating an environmental stress that the horses body is adapting to. If it's too much stress, the horse’s body will adapt negatively to protect the body. Just the right amount of stress can encourage the body to adapt in a positive way where they are more functional and expressive in their movement.
Horses with old injuries need even less stress (lower impact work) to ensure the adaptive process improves their functional movement.
Whenever you introduce a new movement, old injuries will generally temporarily flare so you want to provide adequate support, rest and spelling to allow their body to adapt to the new workload. Topical treatments can also help in this instance. If they are coming back into work after a spell, especially more than a couple weeks, they need to be brought back into work slowly to reduce impact injury.
If I am dealing with a horse that has behavioural issues like bucking, rearing, biting and sometimes bolting, I do assume there is an underlying physical issue or old injury that needs to be addressed and managed - no matter how many vets and body workers tell me they can find nothing. If they have ever raced, trained to race or trained by a professional, I assume they have some level of injury or musculoskeletal trauma. If they are over 15 I assume they have some level of arthritis.
If you are managing an injury or bringing a horse with an old injury back into work you need to ensure:
The level of concussion on their body is minimised. This includes jumping and the types of surfaces they are ridden on.
The amount of stress on their body errs on the side of caution. It could mean a good period of time of in hand work on the ground before you even consider riding, or a good period of time just walking.
The type of exercises you do improve and engage the horses overall posture and musculoskeletal health.