Performance

And, away we go.  This blog has covered a lot of ground--the preliminaries of performance--warm ups and injury prevention, keeping them on the track instead of the hospital ward. 

Somewhere in August-Sept. 2007 I experimented with various warm ups for my horses.  The warm up idea involved both injury prevention and performance.  You warm up for both. And--permit me a short personal anecdote on this.  My theory had been--you warm up soft tissue AND BONES.  I fractured a small bone in my wrist from two falls over the past three months.  I am noticing that this bone in my wrist is initially sore in the weight room BUT after two or three sets the pain subsides.  If I go all out on this bone prior to warming it up, it fractures.  After appropriate warm up of that bone--think horse's legs--it holds together, pain gone.

My warm up section lacks a solid conclusory post and so, if interested, read the August-Sept 2007 posts.  It's a complex subject particularly regards practicality of performing warm ups at ur local race track.

I concluded, after various experiments the ideal warm up is:

2f (:15) + 1f (:14) + 1.5f (:13).  Walk-trot in between.  My horses were most ready to perform after this particular warm up.

Two years of injury prevention posts sum up as follows:  must do, minimally, 4f every 7 days at :12.5 sec/f or faster.

A couple of the important performance variables are thus in place on this blog.  I am fairly confident in them.  Next is a training schematic that gets us, presumably, max performance on race day.