How Much Track Work For Injury Prevention

Has the question been answered in any quantifiable sort of way? I pose the question whether there exists a cause and effect relationship between the number of times the horse is sent to the track and all the typical hard and soft tissue injuries?

You'll find precious little on this at Google, but, there is one study I'm recalling which would be the Maryland Shin Study of quite a few years back that recommended after considerable research that young horses see some speed work on track at least every three or four days. This concludes of course both amount of track time and quality of track time since needless to point out there are numerous injury causing variables.

But let us try to isolate this one. Is there a point at which we might definitely predict injury due to the number of days a week or month the horse sees the track?

It would seem so. But we'd have to start on the opposite end of the spectrum from D.W. Lukas's 22 days/month and consider those conventional trainers who send their horses to gallop one or two days a week, and spend an hour a day on the walker. I am without any doubt whatsoever, unnecessary to see any studies, that you're unable to keep your horse healthy at that level of track time regardless of the quality of those sporadic gallops, and if you have a trainer engaging in this sort of nonsense that you'd best be planning your horse's next career because it'll start sooner instead of later.

Can we indeed hone down and identify the exact point in terms of number of days per week on track that we'd start to get in trouble, next post.

Training: The bad weather around here began about three weeks ago when we suddenly morphed from 75 degree days in mid-November to 30s and 40s with a fair amount of rain. And then this week the ice storms. But, there's been a difference so far from the weather disaster of a year ago that covered about five months. Less water, it's much warmer, and, much to warm the RR heart, temperatures in the 50s shortly ahead. Since July 1 I'm unable to complain too much about the weather despite this weeks storms, and I write that knocking on wood as we're just starting into the winter. We'll start again Friday six days after last serious work. With a little weather luck, the plan would be to hit Eureka with the youngsters by late January, although I realize that is very optimistic on several counts.