Frequency of Speed Work

Principle #5  Avoid skipping steps.  60 days of "gallop", a couple of fast 3fs out of the gate, she's good to go, right?  The "traditional" race horse prep here in the mid west.  Or, used to be.   Unknown to me what the traditional is anymore, although am hoping to find out soon.

Next day, oops.  Pulled suspensory.  That's racing luck.  Or, it rains over night.  Track rated "heavy".  Need to do that fast gallop to stay on schedule for the race even though our horse is unacclimated to anything except a "fast" track, totally.  Next day.  ooops.  check ligament.

Injury prevention and rational training requires going step by step.  The rule here is "when in doubt, back off".  What about training for performance?  Does it hurt to skip a step or two here and there in terms of what we'll get out of the horse on race day--i.e. we do steps 1 and 2 and for whatever reason skip to step 5.?  This is Michael Matz training--5f a couple of times before the Belmont and 1.5 miles all out on race day. Injury prevention insanity.

Injury causation aside, would think skipping steps in terms of performance is more a psychological than actual.  Horses prove time and again they can run fairly well on highly questionable training.  O'Gorman calls this the "inexplicable" performance, and so do I, even if its likely by thinking really hard on the subject an explanation could be provided.  Probably a combo of things involving the relative ease of the bounding exercise for short distances combined with the horse spleen, flight instincts and a few other things.  Horses seem to be able to go 4-6f  fairly fast before they crash on very light training.

Interestingly, I'd guess the if the horse can get away with skipping a step today and avoids injury, that's a faster way to get we're ur going.  Worth the injury risk?  Let's remember we're training not egg shells, but egg membranes.

Onto the subject--how often to do fast work, and my observation that it can be done every 3 or 4 days for weeks and months on end.  That's other than to say this frequent a work schedule is the ideal for performance.

I'm able to relate that every 3 day speed work gets the horse into amazingly good condition and does so swiftly.  The improvement is quick and noticeable.  Yet, I'd noted in the injury posts on this blog that I highly suspect u're able to do every three day speed work for a long period of time and escape injuries.  For numerous reasons posted then, the 3 day interval is probably doing too much and playing russian roulette with ur horse.

Discuss the 4 day interval next.