This month I am writing a series of Kissing Spine articles, because it's a specialist area of my work, and I want to share more about it so that more horse owners can understand what is potentially happening with their horse and ask more questions, maybe even get diagnosed and treated, so that we can all increase horse welfare and improve their quality of life. 

This weeks blog is around the anatomy of what is actually happening in the horses spine when 'Kissing Spine' is...

I talk a lot about horses posture, because it's important to understand, be able to assess, and be able to make positive change towards. And our horses posture can actually tell us quite a lot about what might be going on in their body. So assessing your horses posture regularly is a useful skillset to develop, whether you work with horses or you are a 1 horse owner. 

I like to compare human posture and horse posture to make it more easy to understand! 

In humans, poor posture is a...

'Correct movement' is something that I talk about a lot, it's really important for our horses welfare, and to help prevent future injury and breakdown, that we learn what 'correct' movement is, how to develop correct movement, and the specific reasons we should focus on this with our horses. 

As an Equine Physiotherapist and Rehabilitation Specialist, with over 10 years experience of working exclusively with horses, one of the big pieces that I teach in my work is around horse...

Would you like to know some of my favourite 'go-to' exercises that I use with my own horse and clients horses, that I find the most effective for mobilising and switching on the important postural muscles in the horse body?! 

I have been working professionally with horses for over 10 years now, and have amassed massive amounts of knowledge and experience around horse movement and rehabilitation. And if you have followed me for a while, you will know that I love to share important...

I start a lot of my talks with a quick few sentences about the evolution of the horse, because it's a part of horse ownership that doesn't get talked about that much, and it's REALLY important to consider - we can really learn a lot about our horses and their issues, by studying their evolution. 

Horses 'in the wild' might seem like a totally different horse to our modern day, domesticated horses, but they are still the same 'variation', the same animal, as they have been over the last 1...

Whether handling, exercising, riding, rehabbing, whatever we are doing with our horses…giving them time to process is super important, and it’s easy to miss out if we are in a rush for example.

I spend time with horses on the ground a lot these days, in rehab as well as with my own horse in his in hand work that we do, and actually it’s a lot easier to work all of this out with them from the ground because we can see their facial expression, and sometimes even see the...

Exercise Rehabilitation might sound like a scary phrase (!) especially when we are doing post injury rehab, BUT we can use exercise rehabilitation in all sorts of positive ways, for all sorts of issues whether injury related or not, and we can use it in the 'improvement' phase too which is where I work a lot...posture and movement improvement is my piece! 

So we can think of exercise rehabilitation as a way of getting from A to B so to speak, with our horses. And it's all about planning,...

Massage is part of my treatment sessions for the horses that I work with, alongside other techniques (I'm qualified in a number of modalities!) and it’s the part that horses really do enjoy!

I tailor my sessions based on what the horse needs on that day, whether they are on box rest, a senior horse, whether it’s an injury treatment session or rehabilitation work, or a competition horse or happy hacker!

But generally I use massage within sessions a lot! And always find that the...

Did you know that your horse is either left or right handed? All horses are 'one sided', crooked, stiffer on one rein, whatever we want to call it...they are all crooked to one degree or another. And it affects the whole body unfortunately.

One sidedness is present in our horses bodies throughout their life, and it means that they can do movements in one direction better than the other. They prefer to take their weight on one hindlimb/diagonal pair more than the opposite hindlimb/diagonal...