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>Email: bpeck@us.ibm.com
>
>A question for all of you with HRMs.
>
>Does allowing a horse to eat (grass hay) after a 25m CTR ride keep the
heart rate elevated? I don't mean extremely elevated, but this horse started
with a 44 pulse and after 25 fairly easy miles his pulse was 56 1/2 hr after
completion. (He was 48bpm at t
>he half way point) He walked in the last mile and the day was cool. A more
experienced rider said that next time, don't let him have any hay, eating
keeps the heart rate up.
>Barb
Hi there
Unfortunately I do not have my HRM for horses yet, should be on its way.
However from my experience with humans translated to horses I can make the
following remarks;
Eating, in general, raises the heart rate in humans (in my set up by approxi
10% to give you an example). Reason for that; in the human body the blood
pressure is aimed to be kept stable. Compare this with the oil pressure in
your car. When the pressure drops, your car is not likely to function well.
The biological mechanisms in your body are aimed to keep the blood pressure
as stable as necessary. This can be done by increasing/decreasing the heart
rate and pumping more/less blood out of the heart per minute because of
more/less heartbeats, by increasiing/decreasing the resistance of the bloof
vessels by narrowing/wideing of the vessels and by a heart pumping more/less
forcefully and so allowing for more/less blood to be pumped out at each
heart beat.
When you start to eat the blood vessels toward your guts become wider,
allowing more blood to be transported to the gut in order to absorb the food
and transport it around the body (rough sketch). This means that the
resistance of the blood vessels decreases. In order to compensate for that
and to keep the blood pressure up any of the above mechanisms start coming
into action. The balance of the compensating mechanisms DEPENDS on many,
many factors, which all have their specific influence and which can be
different each time. It is not a simple matter.
Some black and white examples of compensation:
The blood vessels to your muscles could be narrowed, but other mechanisms in
your body could prevent that because the exercise you just completed has
built up amounts of product in your body which counteract narrowing of those
vessels. or ....
Your heart starts pumping more forcefully, which can be quite a bit if you
are a well trained young athlete.
Your heart rate goes up to pump more blood around.
Of course it is a combination of these actions which does the trick. With
regard to the contribution of each of these factors, that does depend on a
lot of other factors such as health status, training status, metabolic
status, mental status of the person (or horse) involved.
This all means that if your horse is mentally stressed (which raises the
heart rate)after the ride because of whatever reason and he will calm down
by eating a little, it would be wise to let him have a bite to calm his
nerves. The increase in heart rate the eating may cause may be easily offset
by the decrease in heart rate you get because he calms down more efficiently.
If the horse settles down calmly after a ride and is happy and relaxed
without having a bite, then don't feed him anything as it is likely to rise
his heart rate.
Don't forget to let him have an appropriate amount of water. Dehydration
will increase the heart rate surely! (see it as not sufficient fluid in the
tubes, so a more powerfull pumping of the heart will not help in pumping out
more blood, simply because there isn't enough of it around).
Get to know your horse and read your horse on the day, a HRM is a tremendous
help to study your horse.
Hope you got the hang of this.
Monique Koning
New Zealand
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