Rehabilitation of a young National Hunt racehorse

        The horse in this video arrived to us about a month ago now with a healing fractured pelvis. So basically, he had a pelvic fracture which wasn’t 100% healed and when he arrived here, he was very sore in his hind quarters and there was a real lack of muscle. I would think he was in quite a bit of pain, and because of this he wasn’t able to build muscle as he could and hence he was really, really weak.

            So, what we are doing here is putting on the light blue stretchy band behind him. It is used a lot now in humans for strengthening and what it does here is that as his hind leg goes behind him you will see that there is a bit of resistance on the band and therefore it really helps build his muscle up. So I’m seeing, pretty much on a daily basis, his muscle really coming in his hind quarters and him strengthening up. This young horse will never be as good as he could be if he doesn’t get a good top line and muscle with core strength. As we know, muscle protects bone. So he is on the walker every day with this band, and it is working really well to get the extra strength in the hind quarters. 

He is such a lovely horse so we need to do all we can for him. He had a scan of his pelvis when he arrived, and he will have a further scan after 6 weeks and before we do any more work. He is currently turned out in the field to get the best of the Spring grass and on the walker every day. We are really fortunate here at Simon Earle Racing to have top vets advise us. We had advice from Ian Wright at Newmarket Equine Hospital and our racing vets, Summerhill Equine, are excellent at getting second opinions so his initial scan/xrays went off to Ian and as it is a healing fracture we are allowed to turn out, and we are allowed to do walker work for 4-6 weeks before rescanning. This is excellent advice, and I can tell you that the pain this horse was experiencing in his hind quarters was gone in two weeks. It was remarkable how quickly that pain went. And I think we should really see an improved horse as he had been hanging quite a bit in his races. The improvement will come as long as we do the basics right.