Evaluating Injuries for Equine Massage

Video Transcript

"When you are working on your horse, before you begin to work on them, you need to, as I've said earlier, assess their physical condition. If your horse has an injury of any kind, they can benefit from massage but you need to be very careful with that. If they have strains or pulled tendons, pulled ligaments, anything going on with the fore leg. If they have tightness back here which is a form of injury in itself. You want to just really proceed with caution. If you are inexperienced at doing this or not being really conscious when you're working on your horse you can actually do more harm than good. You don't want to go rushing in, apply a lot of pressure and not be paying attention. Your horse is not going to thank you for it and if you're working on them for a therapeutic reason, like treating an injury, you just want to be very careful with that. You definitely don't want to add to their injury by creating another injury somewhere else."