Bodywork for Horses

After having my own success with bodywork, I have become particularly interested in it as it applies to horses.  George’s spine became crooked after years of bearing all of his weight on his left front/right hind diagonal.  Frankie’s left shoulder is rotated forward and he has tightness in the muscles around the left side of his cervical spine where he had his injury.

Shortly after adopting Frankie, I noticed that he always seemed sore all over his entire body.  I tried various things from light therapy to treating him for a possible magnesium deficiency, but nothing helped.  In the fall of 2006 I took him to a natural horsemanship clinic and the instructor noticed that his hind footfalls sounded uneven and he seemed very tight in his entire body.  She strongly urged me to begin massage therapy with him which I did.  I contacted an equine massage therapist who began working on Frankie in December 2006.  Frankie was very sore and reactive so progress was initially slow, but with time came obvious improvement.  Several months later the massage therapist began working on George who consequently  showed dramatic improvements despite being 20 years old at the time.

Probably the most fascinating book I have read on equine bodywork is Release the Potential by Doris Halstead.  The most valuable thing that it offered me was information on how to assess my horse’s alignment and symmetry, as well as my own, and how the two are related.  As Doris states in her book, “Your horse can only be as straight as you are.” Her techniques for both horse and rider are easy to learn and apply and my massage therapist has used them with great success on both George and Frankie.

Doris also conducts consultations via the internet.  You can read George’s consultation here by scrolling down towards the bottom of the page.

In the winter of 2010 when Frankie was just turning 7 years old, I had an Ortho Bionomy practitioner work on him with some amazing results. He was able to let go of some habitual holding patterns in his body that had not been helped through his prior equine massage sessions.

One thing that I learned about first hand is the extent that asymmetries in our bodies can cause or support asymmetries in our horses’ bodies, so it is of the utmost importance that both horse and rider are assessed and treated through professional bodywork and/or movement re-education whenever excessive asymmetries are present.