Back pain. If you’ve ever experienced it, you know how debilitating it can be. It can affect everything you do, even the smallest movements, and can appear without warning or with no obvious cause. At any point in your life, whether old or young, the wrong movement at the wrong time can set things off. Sometimes, it is nearly impossible to find any position, even sitting or lying down, that eases the discomfort.
The human spine is an amazing system, allowing us to twist, bend, turn and move our bodies in all the ways we need to work, play and get through life. Our bodies have a natural girdle made up of muscle, tendons and ligaments that form a protective cylinder around the spine to protect it and to keep everything in alignment, and this is what allows us to move as we do. If all of these protective tissues are kept strong, balanced and supple, then the chances are good that you will live a life relatively free of back pain.
You may have been surprised if you visited your doctor or a good physical therapist when the recommended therapy to relieve your back issues focused on targeted exercises for areas in the body that seem unrelated to the specific pain. Maybe you need to strengthen your abdominal muscles or restore the balance between hamstring muscles that are too tight and quadriceps that are too weak. Maybe you have an issue with your posture or the general strength of your core muscle groups. Maybe you have a few too many pounds in the wrong places which is putting strain on the very muscle groups designed to hold the spine in place, pulling the spine out of alignment and causing pain.
Barring a major injury to you back or a severe disc problem, your recovery and long-term maintenance plan will be about strengthening and balancing the natural protective girdle that supports your spine, probably some lifestyle changes, and building muscle memory to help you move in more back-friendly ways.
This has always made me wonder about my horse’s back. Whereas the human spine is vertical with the vertebrae stacked on top of each other, perfect for our two-legged movement, the horse has a horizontal spine for its four-legged movement. The best image I can give for this structure is a fence where you have fence posts with the fencing material strung between the posts. The forequarters and hindquarters are like the fence posts, the spine like the fencing material connected to the posts. Strong ligament material connects the skeletal structures and the whole system is covered with muscle and other connective tissues, and this is what allows the horse’s spine to carry his weight and move as he does.
The challenge of the health of a horse’s back is that much his weight essentially hangs off of his spine. Gravity can be unkind to this sort of arrangement. If you look at any fence you will probably see the material between the fence post is probably sagging a bit. Maybe the fence posts start to weaken a bit in the soil or it’s just the weight of the rails or the wire, but eventually things start to drop without constant tightening of the materials.
Every horse is naturally fighting a horizontal spine and the forces that will cause it to drop, increasing the potential for back pain as the vertebrae start to impinge on one another and sensitive tissue and nerves are pinched. We then add to this by dropping our weight and the weight of our saddles and tack right in the middle of the horse’s back. To get an idea what the horses must adjust to, get down on your hands and knees and have a friend put a 40 lb. feed bag on the small of your back. It won’t take long before you’re working hard to keep you back up and straight as you fight the weight causing your back to drop and sag.
I’m seeing more articles and studies in medical journals and various horse magazines about the back and what can go wrong. Often back problems are slow progression issues that are easy to miss or write off as a short-term behavioral problem. Maybe he doesn’t walk out as well or doesn’t like to change or hold gaits. Maybe he has trouble changing leads or he can’t hold a lead or the correct frame on a circle. Maybe he can leg yield nicely in one direction but not the other. If the pain gets worse, the horse might act out in other ways, but as an animal known for its stoicism a horse will hide things for a long time before he’s had enough. These are often the kinds of issues that are mistakenly seen as training issues or a horse being disrespectful, but things may be much more serious.
There are some common threads throughout many of these studies I’ve read. In some cases, genetics may be involved. Overall conformation as well. But more obvious are the effects of what we do with our horses. If a horse is started too young or ridden too hard or for too long before he is fully developed and conditioned, he is at real risk for back problems. No horse, regardless of breed, should be doing serious work under saddle before the age of five, yet many horses are still being started and ridden at two or younger. It’s also clear that certain riding disciplines, poor riding technique, ill-fitting tack, carrying too much weight for the size of the horse and obesity all can play a role in the health of the horse’s back.
But here’s the rub for a rider. The back on a horse is the single hardest part of the horse to condition and strengthen, and just riding will not get it done. Just like a person with a back issue is given targeted exercises to strengthen and balance the natural body structures to keep the spine healthy and pain-free, a horse needs the same kind of targeted training to keep his back in condition for carrying the weight of a rider. After 30 years of working with riders and their horses, I don’t feel enough riders even think about this, believing that just the act of riding takes care of keeping the horse’s back strong enough to do its job. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
If you’re a horse owner, what can you do to help your horse maintain a back strong enough to do his work for you and to stay pain-free? There’s a lot, much just plain common sense and some requiring a bit of education and practice. Start by paying close attention to the foundation of all good health, nutrition, and weight management. Don’t fall prey to the ridiculous notion that you can “feed the top line.” Yes, you need the nutritional building blocks necessary to develop strong muscles, good bones, etc. but no food source or supplement goes right to a specific body part. Keeping the back straight and strong is about the right kind of exercise.
Be aware of the rider to horse weight ratio. A horse shouldn’t be asked to carry more than 20% of its body weight. The weight of the rider, saddle, pad and anything attached to the saddle should not be more than 20% of the weight of your horse. If that equation is way off for you and your horse, think of what you can do to make it better. Obviously, making sure your tack fits is part of this.
Maybe think of taking some riding lessons, no matter how long you’ve been riding horses. I’ve seen very few riders over the years who could ride a horse correctly in the right frame for a long enough period of time where it is actually helping the horse’s back. Lessons could help you be better balanced and point out what adjustments you need to make to be a more comfortable rider for your horse. Get strong enough so you can two-point your warm-up off of your horse’s back. It’s a lot more than just sitting up there.
Vary the kind of riding you do. Endless miles on the trail are doing your horse’s back no favors and are probably slowly doing long-term harm. Likewise, endless circles in an arena are not going to help your horse either. Think of the human athlete approaches of cross-training and all -around fitness. Ask your horse to move in different ways so he keeps his spine strong and supple. And remember one of the most important lessons from human sports medicine – if your horse has been off work for a period of time, due to injury, weather, your schedule, whatever – it will take twice as much time for him to regain the strength and suppleness he had before. Be smart about starting up after any period without exercise. Don’t just throw a saddle on him and hit the trail for hours if he’s been sitting around for a month.
This is hard for any rider to accept, but to give your horse the best chance of maintaining a strong, pain-free back over time, you need to get off him and do targeted work on the ground. Think of it as a Pilates program for your horse that targets all the core structures that will keep his back healthy and his movements fluid. This is specific core and back health work that is best done from the ground without the weight of the rider. The exercises are fun and easy to learn, but it does mean you have to find the time to work them into your schedule with your horse, and they should become part of your regular routine. Although many can be duplicated from horseback, when done poorly under saddle they are of little value.
Your horse may never develop an obvious back issue, but it’s more likely that he already has one to some degree and will simply never tell you about it. His “design” almost makes it inevitable. I believe all riders need to accept this and do as much for our horses’ backs as we do for our own. Targeted preventative conditioning must become part of our relationship with our horses. It’s the right thing to do for them, and it pays big dividends for us as well.
Scott Thomson lives in Silver City and teaches natural horsemanship and foundation training. You can contact him at hsthomson@msn.com or 575-388-1830.
