The List And Appropriate Training

Assuming our good owner of the 10 unraced two year olds knows a thing or two about training an athlete, is there a way to communicate this to the trainer and get compliance given "the list"?

To review, here again is "the list":

1. Does the trainer make the mental connection between performance and the training program?
2. Does the trainer have the ability--mental, intuitive, attention to detail, etc.--to carry out the program?
3. Duplicating a rational training program has its inexplicable difficulties.
4. Track experience militates against "programs". Do they ever work in terms of wins?
4. Does the trainer have the motivation, given their emphasis is more on earning a living than creating an athlete.
5. The numbers game and short shelf life of the race horse.
6. Owner proclivity and lack of knowledge.
7. Riders

Much more could be added to this list under category "misc". but the list seems long enough to make the point that an effective injury preventing, performance enhancing training program is difficult in its conception and execution. In human athletics these programs are for the few, and likely in horse racing for the fewer yet. I always smile remembering the maxim of 8 time Mr. Olympia Ronnie Coleman that "everybody wants to be a body builder but nobody wants to lift no damn ass weights". The 2011 Mr. Olympia training is on Utube, and u'd be unable to find Ronnie Coleman training there with a search warrant.

And likely here lies the point for the owner trying to get a horse appropriately trained. What seems so logical on the surface--that most of these trainers can be so easily out-trained with an intelligent training program--digging a little deeper one quickly runs into a parallel logic that militates exactly the other way. There is a reason these dudes and dudettes do what they do, and when our good new and very bright eyed owner fails by inexperience to understand the strength of that underlying logic what are the odds that this trainer of the two year olds is going to do anything but smile, nod in assent, and then do exactly what this trainer has always done.
Back in the old days of Elizabethan England, Queen Elizabeth I used this same technique as our trainer to get along with her parliaments--she'd tell 'em she'd comply with all their requests and then turn around and do what ever she pleased. She was, after all, the Queen.

There would be a trainer or two out there receptive to exercise physiology, although in 25 years I've yet to encounter this rare species. My opinion is that there is only one way to get the attention of these sorts--and that is (?)(?)(?)--you have to produce a horse in this manner of exercise science that actually succeeds on the race track. All athletics including horse racing--by human nature is a copy cat thing--when they see that Preston Burch horse smoking by their exquisitely bred $500,000 auction horse, that is the point where exercise science will get some attention, and, by extrapolation, only at that significant point. Will happen. It's a matter of when.

Burch is both ancient history and the wave of the future. A very nice review of Burch here:

http://thoroedge.wordpress.com/

Training: Tues. 9/20: Off