Each month we will endeavour to bring some general interest and informative articles to our players via our newsletter. This month's article is provided by our well known veterinarian and PANSW Board member, Ben Sykes.

Did you know?

Did you know that most fractures that occur in high performance horses (e.g. racehorses and polocrosse horses) are not the result of a single bad step or field conditions per se?  Instead, most horses that break legs during high speed activities have evidence of underlying disease that precedes the fracture.

Why?

Most catastrophic bone injury is the result of cyclical trauma and microfractures that ultimately break during a high load.  So hard fields may increase the risk of a fracture but in most cases they are “the straw the breaks the camel’s back”, not the primary cause.  The primary cause is cyclical loading of bone and in the same way that bending a paper clip back and forwards will ultimately break the paper clip, bending bone back and forward will do the same.  Contrary to popular belief, extended durations of trotting does not strengthen bones for high intensity exercise.  In fact, extended trotting, especially on hard flat surfaces, actually weakens bone through the creation of microfractures.  The only thing that strengthens bone for high intensity exercise is high intensity exercise and it is about quality, not quantity as bone needs as little as 36 cycles (strides) to activate the process of strengthening. 

What to do?

 How we train our horses has a big impact on their risk of catastrophic fracture.  Instead of long extended trot periods we should reduce the time spent trotting, build variation into our horses’ workload, and make sure to include short bursts of high speed work which increase over time as the horse’s overall fitness improves.