Progress

On the last day of my winter break whilst I was riding Basse I suddenly thought about how much this horse has progressed in his rehab. We got the clear ahead to start doing trot work in mid October and although he is still not perfect, now only a few months later he is doing a lot better than most people expected 👍🏻

We have good trot on the left rein (bad rein) and a better trot on the right rein. Basse is able to do shoulder in and leg yields in walk and trot, he can trot 12m circles without struggling and we have a very nice right canter. That has all been achieved in 3 months! Okay so our left canter is a bit wild and some days I feel like I’m riding a just broken in baby horse who doesn’t know where his legs are meant to go, but overall I have a happy and sound horse who enjoys his work!

This has been achieved by not only working him very carefully and giving him lots of rest days as to not to push his leg too hard too quickly, but also through the use of our fantastic equine message therapist. Nelli from Elainpalvelu Parempi Arki has been to treat him every 3-4 weeks to try and help him feel as good as possible and to open up his shoulders. With such a difficult leg injury like his, it was easy to see how he had coped and tried to compensate by using his body and muscles differently to get weight off the leg with the injury. On both of his shoulders he had developed huge ‘lumps’ from where he hadn’t moved his shoulders like normal, and in order to avoid putting pressure on the poorly leg the lump on the shoulder on the side was twice as large. These have now both totally disappeared after 4 months of hard work by Nelli so that now when she comes she can work on the actual muscles around the shoulders and not just these lumps. Now that he looks like a normal horse, we also have a chiropractor coming to having a look at him at the end of this month to see if she can help too! I think his shoulders maybe 'out of place’ and need to be realigned which would help him move better? Anyway, the point of my rambling was that I wanted to point out how important it is to have your horses looked over by massage therapists/practitioners/chiropractors on a regular basis in order to help them feel as good as possible. I’m 100% convinced that Basse would not have progressed as well as he has without the hard work that Nelli has put in treating him.

These pictures make me smile and make me want to email them to the vet who near the end of summer suggested seriously considering what to do with him and that she would PTS. 

I can’t wait for spring so that I get to start hacking him out in the woods and then also taking him to the gallops for a bit of fun! I think by then his leg should be strong enough to cope with more canter work.  P.S please excuse the pink, I so need a mare in my life that I can dress up in pink but until then my boys have both got to deal with being pinkified.

Do you feel like you've made a lot of progress with your horse recently?