How Conventional Training Injures Horses

Somewhere on the blog, I was unable to find it, I had looked at the D.W. Lukas training charts of his whole S.Cal. shedrow, about 40 horses, and took from the charts what each horse does on the average. It was something like this over a 30 day period.

g g g w g g w g b w w w g g g w g g r w w w g g g g g g b w w

Lukas horses, almost without fail, gallop, race, or breeze from 17 to 22 times a month, and generally breeze or race every 9 or 10 days. This pattern in Lukas's charts repeats itself with almost every horse for months in late 1988 (believe it was).

The breezes generally are 4-5f in :50 or 1:02 or thereabouts. The gallops are 1 1/4 miles to 1 1/2 miles generally at :19 to :17 and sometimes :16 speed.

This sort of training schematic I call conventional training, and it probably takes conventional training as far as it can go. Most conventional trainers, believe you'll find them doing a lot less with their horses, certainly in terms of frequency of track work and breezing.

I further extrapolated that Lukas permanently injures about 1/3 of his shedrow every nine months. Please note these are rough approximations with some guessing from Lukas's own charts. I surmised the estimates fairly accurate.

And, please note, this is other than Todd Pletcher or Steve Asmussen training. Those trainers breeze more frequently, and my thinking is they've started to go beyond conventional training with most of their horses. In other words, Pletcher and Asmussen do more than Lukas in terms of frequency and volume. I'm just guessing there because I am without any charts for those two, but, again, probably near accurate.

So, how does Lukas's training kill off 1/3 of his shedrow every nine months. The specifics starting next post.

Training: My comment on this blog January 29, 2007 "Off. Frigid conditions." This year, yesterday 60 degrees and today at 3 p.m. in this peep out my office window, its 12 degrees, wind chill of -11, and new snow. That's the old abandoned U.S. Court House in downtown KCMo in the background.

We trained today, though. I chased 'em around the big field and even got a couple of sprints out of somebody, unable to tell who. Light training day. Skipped the tack work due to conditions. As usual in the big field I got more exercise than they did, but, that would be a plus. Tomorrow, fast riderless stuff in the Astride Paddock. The snow does give a nice cushion to the hard ground.