Warming Up

I continue to be confounded and dumbfounded by the warm up methods for racing and training. It seems that the country is without anybody that understands or appreciates the role of appropriate warm up in either injury prevention or racing performance.

Let's take racing as an example. The horse generally is cantered beside a pony for two or three furlongs. The lucky one's might get a second heat of this. There's a furlong or two of trot, lots of walk, and then the horse is expected to bang full speed out of the gate.

This passes as a North American "Warmup". I recently had watched a Japanese turf race in awe of what these horses do compared to this side of the Pacific in their warm up routine. Never mind how the Japs train, at least they know their horses are ready when they come out of the gate.

Wish I had the ability to save the clip. It is really amazing. The warm up was done devoid of ponies with each jock exercising his horse in staggered distances some on the inside rail some on the outside. Most of the horses did at least some significant two minute clip, and every horse warmed up to the race just exactly as you'd expect physiologically for maximum performance. None of the horses ran off or was out of control, though I feel sure that happens on occasion. This field by my eyes dashed out of the gate much more in control and comfortably than you normally see here.

Let's make one thing clear at the outset. If you have two equally trained and talented horses, the warm up will separate the performance. I have watched this countless times on a riderless basis in my own backyard with horses sprinting around in circles. Each and every time I will get the weakest performance with the first sprint, the second is a little stronger, and the third is the best. The fourth might equal the third, and by the time they get to five they start tailing off.

The point is that racing performance never can be at max efficiency without some speed in the warm up. I am so sure of this that I will declare it an immutable law. If you want the best from your horse, do some speed work in the warmup. If any reader disbelieve this premise, conduct your own experiment with it, and you'll confirm this to your satisfaction.

But, the other factor in the warm up is what so completely amazes me about the way warmups are done on our race tracks both in the morning and afternoon. Lack of appropriate warm up will injure horses. This bears repeating: lack of appropriate warm up WILL injure horses.

The word "appropriate" as it relates to warm up consists of far more than you might expect with casual reading. I'll elaborate in the next posts.

Today's Training:
We're back at it, the patch is holding. Left the office early today with incoming rain, and sure enough it arrived 1.5 hours early just as I was pulling into the farm. Luckily the horses were in the running paddock, and we got in some decent riderless conditioning work for Art before it started pouring. This is only strenghtening after the long layoff, but, at least we got it in.