How Often: The Dividing Line

If you watch the majority of our trainers in action you quickly understand THE huge concern of the racehorse owner is or ought to be the "frequency" of on track galloping. How infrequently most racing horses gallop and the reasons, I'll get into next post. For this one let's attempt to identify the dividing line between just enough track work and too little in terms of injury causation.

Preston Burch does 10 breezes(or races) a month (a huge number relatively speaking), and leaves it to the trainer to decide what's appropriate the other 20 days. D.W. Lukas in race prep goes 22 days, and while racing 17. I've identified Lukas's work as the model and epitome of the conventional type trainer.

The only available study, the Maryland Shin Study seems to suggest track work at least every three days as a bare minimum, and that would be Burch's 10 times a month at speed, but otherwise there are no studies and so we're left here with extrapolation and intuition.

In considering whether it's 10 gallops a month, 15 or 20 that we need, let's again note we're speaking here of injury prevention instead of performance and in terms of injuries we have both hard and soft tissue and tissues in between to consider. In fact the training parameters for muscle, tendon and ligament injuries differ sharply from bones. I've already noted that the soft tissue stuff detrains much more rapidly than the bone structure.

I'd conclude that the 10 days a month of Burch and the Maryland Shin Study would be an absolute minimum. That is the dividing line as far as I'm concerned. Any trainer sending a horse to the track less than 10 days a month is going to injure the horse, probably in short order. And, please note, since less than 10 days a month will produce a quick injury it's likely to be a soft tissue injury such as a bowed tendon, pulled suspensary, or a Green Monkey gluteal pull.

Additionally, I'd say that 10 days a month unless it's done with Burch style training is insufficient for long term bone remodeling and racing soundness, and so we have the phenomena of horses receiving decent race preps (I've noted that most conventional trainers do accomplish that), but than the horse is drastically backed off the galloping once racing begins which results over time, say a period of six months, in bones gradually degrading until there is a fracture, or the more frequent and sooner injury which would be a chip. The RR conclusion is that you will fail to get away with 10 days a month slow galloping, cantering, loping with the occasional breeze over the long haul. Bodily structures of the horse simply require more exercise than 10 days a month.

So, where is the dividing line for the conventional trainer. I think Lukas with what he does on track probably is very near the bare minimum of 17 days per month for the racing horse, and you might even lower that to 15 days. Can you keep the horse sound in conventional training with just 15 days monthly galloping? My answer: probably. 14 days I'd start to worry.

Training: 23 degrees overnight and the ground this morning was chunky ice over solid bumpy ground. No way with 3 inches of snow coming in tonight. RR getting antsy.