JUNE 2006 • VOLUME 10 • ©HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine

Ballistic Stretching and Muscle Tonus

Stretching muscles under tension - Ballistic!

hose in favour of the deep method like to think/talk of it as a stretch. Stretching is a positive word, in this day and age. Stretching has proved to be beneficial for both improving athletic results and preventing unsoundness, and has been developed to its advanced form quite recently. In the aspect of stretching muscles for athletic improvement, humans, horses, cats and dogs are the same.

The sport horse is a large muscular animal with enormous athletic potential. Dressage, both as a means of training, and showing of said training in the test, demands the utmost of the animal. Not only muscular strength, but also suppleness, balance, agility, co-ordination, proprioception and grace. A horse with tense, shortened muscles, muscular imbalance, or even worse, pain or injury cannot do his best in training or testing. And one of the most basic and effective therapies for tension, cramp, imbalance and poor proprioception is stretching.

You can't compare equine and human anatomy straight across. We have similar bone structure, but different use of the structure. The most apparent one being that the human is a biped and the horse is a quadruped. But the horse has the same kind of muscles as the human. The function of the human M. Rhomboideus may not be compared to the function of the same muscle in the horse, but the basic general function of muscle tissue is the same.

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