Reviewing The Role Of Calcification

Trainers considering bone remodeling will be thinking "calcification" and some vague notion that over time the bones of the horse in training will grow in strength and size. Bone growth and strength are thoughts synonymous with bone calcification.

Such is error, in my view, though exercising bones do increase in strength and fracture resistance (FR) even as trainers fail to understand causes. The injury problem for the horse begins, unfortunately, with shallow thinking and incorrect analysis, and so, on we go.

What role does the calcification process play in bone strength, and may exercise, correctly applied, stimulate ideal or optimal calcification?

First review what calcification is and what it does.

Calcification/ossification lays down the new brickwork. We're calling the individual bricks Type 1 Collagen Bone Fibrils. Calcification in bone then is the process by which new born fibrils replace aging or damaged fibrils. The emphasis is on "replace" instead of production of additional fibrils or larger fibrils, or fibrils somehow different in character or scope because the horse is in training.

We're supposing then that calcification produces new born fibrils in roughly the same numbers, patterns, density, shape and make up as bone fibrils have been lain down since the first skeletal organisms began showing up 400 million years ago. I've posed the question--does calcification change because we suddenly decide to race a horse, and answer this in the negative.

Calcification then, or, as we may term it, new born fibril production, is limited to it's primordial physical/chemical processes. The size, shape and numbers, etc. of the new borns is limited by their nature and function in the lattice. Calcification is already optimized before the horse ever lifts a foot, and has in fact been changing the cartilaginous skeleton of the horse fetus into calcium salt matrix since conception.

Thus, what calcification can build in the exercising animal has specific limits. We go back to the brick analogy. A brick is a brick within a framework of bricks. Unless we increase the size of the brickwork, new bricks will be the same as damaged bricks they replace. The blog has previously dealt with the limits of bone growth in terms of form and function. The cannon e.g. does have some small, significant growth in diameter, but this happens early in training, and specific form and function thereafter limit further growth. Ox cannons make for slow oxen.

Does calcification accomplish anything for our running horse?

E.g. does exercise possibly accelerates the rate or speed by which calcification repairs and replaces fibrils? Within on individual fibril might calcification increase the number of mineral platelets (see image--purple dots). Might somehow a new born in an exercised horse have different characteristics than the non-exercised horse?

Possibilities for this include:

early optimal orientation of the newborn fibril in space.

fibrils born already adhered to their neighbors (without inter fibril nano spaces).

increase of mineral platelets within the fibrils.

Training:

Fri. July 23--off as we expect incoming weather, and will work early in the morning before rain.

Sat. July 24--5x3f riderless progressively faster. Nice work. We beat the weather. + 4 times up and down the hill with some gallop.

Sun. 7/25: 4 inches of rain in the buckets. Off.

Mon. 7/26: Riderless at their own speed for 10 min. in mud. Rod is foot sore. Either developing abscess or toe a little short from Saturday's shoeing. Call tack work after 5 min. walk as he trots gingerly. Probably should have backed off the riderless work also considering road founder possibilities in this situation. Will see tomorrow if horse is ok.