Spacing Works For Injury Prevention

How often does the horse need to breeze or race for injury prevention? Please keep in mind in planning breezes and races the conventional trainer deals with these variables:

speed
distance
frequency

The infinite possibilities of these variable in combo make any generalization difficult. Nevertheless we proceed, but with certain implicit assumptions.

First, we're measuring bone injury and fracture, though the analysis will extend to soft tissue injury as well but with the parameters shifted here or there. And, we presume our conventional trainer will obtain sufficient distance (4f) and speed (:12.5/f) for bone remodelling even while we know that many of them consistently fail these basic guide posts established in prior posts on this blog.

For fracture resistance the horse must over time achieve some variation of at least 4f breezes at :12.5/f speed, and add that this may be insufficient for soft tissue preservation such as preventing bows, suspensories, bleeding lesions, etc.

Presuming the trainer understands the speed and distance parameters, how often must the horse be sent to prevent the various fractures that might occur, and this would include developing stress fractures, to chips, to the catastrophic fracture that this sport dam well better start preventing?

The thought that comes to mind: how do we analyze this? Have there been any studies? Does anyone really know how often a horse needs to breeze or race, short term and long term, to maintain its bone structure? It's completely unbelievable that probably Rick Arthur himself could make an educated guess, at best. We are without studies of this crucial aspect of training thoroughbred race horses of which I'm aware.

The next posts will deal with this issue, probably in the usual roundabout way of the blog. Hopefully I'll be able to come up with some conclusions. I've yet to fully think through how I'll proceed.

Training:
Decision made to give Rod yet another day off on a rainy day. The winter weather partly redeemed itself by giving us a decent March compared to e.g. 2007, and hopefully a good April. Rod thus is off 3 days out of last 4. Decided this immature youngster needed a break after steady training since first of February. Art gets another day off with his chest inj., but should be ready by tomorrow.