Cooling Down After Exercise
Most riders understand the importance of warming their horses up gradually. But does the post-exercise cool-down receive the same attention? This blog article highlights the importance of cooling your horse down after exercise. It also outlines how our cooling wraps for horses can help.
The Importance of Warming Your Horse Up
As riders, we would never dream of jumping on our horses and shooting straight off into canter. A gentle warm up stimulates blood flow to the horse’s muscles, tendons, and ligaments. This increases their elasticity and ability to perform. We take the time to ease into the faster, more intense work.
Why do we do this? Most riders would know that we warm our horses up to help reduce the chance of injury. A warm up also gets our horses thinking forward and working into the contact. It just makes sense.
Why Cooling Your Horse Down After Exercise is Vital
How many of us put equal effort into our horse’s cool down regimen, stretching off tired muscles and cooling down overly hot legs?
The forces created during exercise can cause tiny tears in the tissues, known as micro trauma. Over time, this can amount to more severe soft tissue damage, which may result in an injury.
Furthermore, temperatures in the horse’s tendons can rise to damaging levels during exercise. This is especially common during fast work or jumping. Wearing exercise boots or bandages creates an insulating effect, which prevents heat from escaping and further increases the soft tissue temperatures. It may be important to try and cool the legs as quickly as possible after exercise to lower temperatures down from damaging levels.
Cooling a horse down with an appropriate regimen could be important. Exercise in any shape or form will create inflammation in the tissues. This is one of the factors that contributes to muscle soreness, tension and delayed recovery. Helping minimise inflammation by cooling tissues has been found in humans to help in recovery and there is no reason why this should not extend to the horse. If the inflammation is not allowed to recover and the body is not given time to repair, over a longer period of time, this may make the horse more susceptible to soft tissue injuries.
To really kickstart the recovery process, you can ice your horse’s legs with our cooling wraps for horses. Our ice boots are not just for use after an intense schooling session or cross country round. Even trot work can cause your horse’s soft tissues to heat up, especially if there are circles and lateral movements involved.
Cryochaps Cooling Wraps for Horses
Using Cryochaps to cool your horse’s legs after exercise could reduce swelling, minimise tissue breakdown and kickstart the healing process. By applying the cooling wraps to wet legs for just 10-15 minutes after exercise, you can aid recovery and help keep your horse’s legs in top condition.
Warm up slowly and cool off with Cryochaps cooling wraps for horses to help keep your horse in action. Our ice wraps for horses are available as a knee-to-fetlock ice boot or a versatile ice wrap.