Learning to push the limits through pain.

As I recover from my horse accident and focus on physical therapy (PT) to regain strength and stamina, I'm realizing the correlation my own exercises and those of dressage horses. Sounds intuitive, but I think until you've personally been through an injury, it's difficult to imagine how much it takes from your body and then how much it takes to recover! My dad (he had a doctorate in sports medicine) once said to me, "As soon as you stop daily exercise, you begin to loose muscle." Scary thought!

What I've learned so far is, once given the doctor's OK to do PT, I the needed to retrain my brain to work certain muscles that have been "disturbed" through surgery. My biggest challenge so far has been climbing stairs. The brain "says", don't climb that stair, it will hurt. And yes, my muscles do hurt climbing stairs, but I'm doing it anyways. After about a week of slowly climbing stairs, I've had to push myself to climb them with a normal stride. Not easy, but I'm getting stronger!

I've also learned that's it's actual good to get a little muscle burn, as that means deeper muscles are getting worked. But burning muscles also require at least 30 seconds of rest before the next set of exercises are started. Finally, at the end of the session, ice the injured muscles for at least 10 minutes. It really works in the healing process!

What does this mean for riding? Well, go ahead and challenge the horse in a more difficult exercise, he may struggle, just help him through it. Give him a short walk break between movements and finally cold hose his legs after every workout. It really will make a difference.