Physiology Of Frequency: Intro

In 22 years of owing racing TBs I've seen lots of workout patterns. Here are a few.

1. Ivers, every 4 days.
2. Burch/Hirsch/Fitzimmons: every 3 days.
3. Pletcher: every 7 days with 2-3 weeks without speedwork after a race.
4. Nafzger with Street Sense: every 5 or 6 days.
5. QH Leading Trainer Ceasar Dominguez is quoted in Ross Staaden's book: how often do you breeze QHs--every 10 days. How often your TBs. Every 5 days--that's a QH trainer, lol.
6. Frankel used to religiously breeze 4f every 7 days. I notice these days a Frankel horse gets anywhere from 4--6F every 7 days.
7. D.W. (I never work horses) Lukas: 8-9 days.
8. Richard ("everybody knows what I do") Dutrow Jr.--every 6 days with 2 weeks off speed post race.
9. The trainer websites I looked at generally show breeze/races from 7 to 10 days or more. None of those trainers hardly every breezes more frequently than 7 days though you see an occasional 5 day out from the race.
10. And, there's your's truly, of course. I've never since the inception did speed work any less frequently than 3 or 4 days for months on end except for unusual reasons.

Through all this I've done a lot of reading, have developed a few theories, but must say that I've yet to see any study or any work including that of Tom Ivers explain what's going on here and what the ideal frequency or minimum frequency might be in terms of exercise physiology. Nor have I personally previously looked at this very closely as I've always been enmeshed in my little methods for the various reasons.

And so, on the blog I now propose to look at the physiology of frequency. Since we're without studies to my knowledge, there'll be lots of guess work, but there is in any scientific endeavor. My qualifications to write on this--I've taken a college exercise physiology course (U of Mo-Columbia Dept. of Physical Education 1975--Dr. John Roberts--the Mizzou sweat shirt in the photo above is pure coincidence!) I kept the text book for years and years. Believe I've read most of the training stuff available for horses. And the eyeballs, of course, direct experience.

So, I can speculate on the basics. Hopefully, if egregious errors appear on the planned posts, someone will correct them.

In starting on this, note that's I'm without preconceived notions. I think I understand what's desirable in terms of performance. But, considering frequency in terms of injury is a different animal. I've yet consider seriously finding that minimum point in terms of frequency that we must have for race appropriate fracture resistance. Initial questions, next post.

Training:
We were able to train in through the month of January. Who'd have thought. Only 4 days off due to weather for the whole month. That's big for us. We can still get wiped out by weather, but at this point we're in the ball game. Unless they change the forecast we'll be looking for a track to drive to by mid-Feb.
Thurs. 1/29: 1.25 miles walk-trot for each horse.
Fri. 1/30: Rod: 1.8 miles trot-gallop. 1/3 gallop. Art: .9 +.9 slow.
Sat: 1/31: Rod trot-galloped 2 miles. About 1/2 gallop. Best one to date says Nob. For the slow learner the light bulb switches to on. Art galloped 1 +1. The last one in 18s.