Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

 I, too, have experienced the "stagnant back" when gaiting for a long time.
It's nice to have a horse that can mix up the gaits a bit. I think it's good
for the horse and the rider both. The foxtrotter is a trotting horse as well
as a gaiting horse, and as such, many of them can switch between gaits, allowing
the horse and the rider to use other muscle groups. 
  To bore you folks further, there is an important neurologic relationship
between our joints and the muscles that drive them. All of the joints in
our body are richly supplied with nerve endings which supply information
back to the spinal cord and brain, as well as the muscles themselves. When
you ride a gaited horse (or sit at a desk too long, for that matter) these
nerve endings "quiet down" and don't provide as much information as they
could to the muscles nearby. This contributes to the "stiff" feeling we have
sometimes when getting up from bed in the morning, rising from a chair after
a few hours of sitting, or gaiting for a long time on a horse. So, when we
change gaits, or get up from a chair and move around, we engage different
joint systems, which is just as influential as moving the different
muscles themselves. This is one of the reasons that athletic trainers will
teach you to use a full range of motion when lifting weights. Yes, it stimulates
more muscle, but also wakens more nerve endings in the joint, which then
talk to the muscle and help in the strength building process. Anyone who
has experienced restricted mobility in a joint (from injury, surgery, joint
replacement, arthritis) will often notice that the muscles that move that
joint lose size and strength even after aggressive therapy. One of the reasons
for this is that if the joint nerve endings can't be fully stimulated, the
associated muscles can't either.
   That's it for today. There will be a quiz on this material on Wednesday.
Class dismissed.   
     Bruce Weary