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Just wanted to share this.
I recently read an article by a guy called Bill Pressey and was very intrigued. For anyone wanting to find out just what methods trainers are employing with their horses in training – i.e. heart rate monitors, treadmills etc to aid work he’s your man. He’s an experienced fitness scientist who monitors the training of racehorses for his clients. Very interesting to get ‘behind the curtain’ so to speak, as you don’t really hear about methods of training horses for peak fitness.
Admittedly it was written in March but he did a blog which may be interesting to some of you out there.
http://horsetrainingscience.blogspot.com/
He also writes for European Trainer magazine. I’m not his manager of anything, I just thought it was interesting stuff.
Thanks for that. I agree: very interesting. I hope to write something about this subject myself some time.
I think the whole area of training racehorses is criminally under-reported – though perhaps it’s just that so few trainers are willing to discuss their approaches.
Years ago I used to coach a number of athletes. The athletes were of junior international standard nothing higher than that. Anyway, I was given the chance to attend courses/seminars and meet people from a variety of sporting backgrounds – some of whom would be known to followers of a number of sports in the UK.
Sharing ideas with people was fantastic. The cycling and rowing coaches were extremely professional and considered and were impressive speakers and listeners. There were only a handful of reps from football (this was the 1990s) and they were light years behind every other sport in terms of how to prepare athletes for competition. There were some extremely thoughtful people from football but the tales they told about how difficult it was to persuade footballers to train as athletes was astonishing.
However, if I thought football was very secretive then it’s nothing compared to horse-racing. You see regular references to Nicholls’ hill at Ditcheat and Martin Pipe’s training methods but there’s very little scientific theory explained and the impression I have had is that the journalists haven’t really understood some of the basic principles of training in any sport.
I’d be really interested to listen to a trainer talk about how he/she prepares horses to race throughout a season. It would be fascinating to listen to someone from ‘our’ sport talk about the benefits of slow work to horses, the advantages of tapering, what type of interval sessions could be used on a horse, can they be the same as those used by middle and long distance runners?
We are told all too often about how horses are equine athletes..yet they’re not trained like athletes. Without wishing to sound like John Francome, you do have to ask yourself about the suitability of horses preparing for sprint distances by walking around a paddock very slowly and then trotting/cantering slowly down to the start before running close to ‘flat-out’ for a distance of 1000 metres or so.
No other athlete prepares for an event like that. I’d just like to know what the theories/principles are behind the training of racehorses.
I totally agree. It’s staggeringly still very much unknown to the wider racing public (I’m sure because trainers like to ‘keep their cards close to their chest’)….the subject of priming horses for races isn’t something that I want to know to give me a punting edge, I’d just like to know more from a sporting point of view, to help understand training methods and so on.
The article that I read that inspired this post was Bill Pressey’s feature in the Autumn 2009 edition of European Trainer magazine. They are selling all their back copies for £2 from their website and are worth a look.
People presume that as UK trainers are called trainers they train horses with some expertise and scientific knowledge. They may do that to a limited extent in USA and Australia but apart from Martin Pipe and his few disciples they are woefully ignorant of anything coming out of Kentucky. One or two vets may know but don’t offer up "new ideas" that won’t get listened to or paid for. Even a stopwatch on the gallops is a step too far. John Francome may have taken the biscuit when he explained to the C4 audience that sprinters only use anaerobic energy which to him means they do not breath at all over the whole 5 furlongs.
Quite comical.
This Bill Pressey is really refreshing in the way he describes such basic things as monitoring heartbeats per minute and what irregularities in that may tell us about the horses ability to perform to the best of its ability. He even says "I am not a horseman, I am an equine exercise physiologist" and his passion for the subject is evident. I only wish there were more of his stuff available via search engines but as of yet it’s scant.
He did link to an interesting pdf from a book by ex-trainer Bill O’Gorman regarding training programmes for horses:http://www.racinghorsesbook.com/reference_tables.htm
Maybe slightly out-dated but worth having a glance at.
Just on the issue of the inappropriateness of the training methods in horseracing referred to above, I was under the impression that it is a trade off between what would be ideal and what is achievable. Horses, unlike humans, pick up injuries all the time. If they didn’t, I imagine training regimes would be far more exacting.
I am hoping to blog a piece about the methods of a UK-based trainer who uses heart monitors, treadmills, weighing, sectionals, bloods etc. but am not sure if he will be prepared to spill the beans.
Let us know when you’ve done that, I’d very much like to read it.
The aforementioned Mr Pressey talks about how just timing a gallop may very well look good on the stopwatch, and to the eye, but just as much emphasis should be paid to how quickly that horse’s bpm returns to what is usual for that individual. Also how even a 10% variation on the horse’s day-to-day bpm can be an indicator of illness.
Just on the issue of the inappropriateness of the training methods in horseracing referred to above, I was under the impression that it is a trade off between what would be ideal and what is achievable. Horses, unlike humans, pick up injuries all the time. If they didn’t, I imagine training regimes would be far more exacting.
I am hoping to blog a piece about the methods of a UK-based trainer who uses heart monitors, treadmills, weighing, sectionals, bloods etc. but am not sure if he will be prepared to spill the beans.
AOB and Cumani, at least, use GPS plus on board heart monitors. Perhaps David Pipe has also continued with the advanced methods of his Dad.
That trade off is why the help of scientific instrumentation is so important. The warm down and recovery period is equally important as the exercise phase. Too little training can injure a horse as much or more as too much training. In USA horses are often stuck in the barn most of the week and have only the one work out. They get far more injuries.
Bones have to be stressed and rested regularly for them to grow strong.Part of the problem is the way in which different body systems or components respond to training. With appropriate loading or “stress”, the locomotion muscles and the heart have a tremendous capacity to adapt to repeated bouts of exercise…or training. However, the intensity and volume (amount) of exercise required to get these systems to adapt is high compared for example to the amount of loading required for healthy bone development. Thus there is a potential imbalance. The heart and locomotory muscles need relatively long durations of exercise at high intensities to cause them to adapt, but this amount of exercise loading is often in excess of what joints, bones and tendons need or are built to cope with.
During training, the period where there is a high risk of injury is also the period when there is the greatest need for “stress” to increase fitness and performance. Eventually there is some balance achieved between muscle fitness, performance and musculoskeletal injury – the green zone. However, there is one body system – the respiratory system – that never attains this balance and for which exercise almost appears to be contra-indicated.
The respiratory system of the horse does not respond to training. The amount of air an unfit/untrained horse moves in and out with each breath with each stride at the walk, trot, canter and gallop does not change when that horse is fit/trained. This is a key limiter on what can be achieved.
..In USA horses are often stuck in the barn most of the week and have only the one work out. They get far more injuries.
Mr Pressey has quoted that some horses in America can get as little as 9mins of training per day owing to the limited facilities – i.e. trainers having to be off the track by 10am.
He also expressed the opinion that Australia is one of the top countries for utilising technology and that the US is one of the worst.The respiratory system of the horse does not respond to training
Robert
Can you provide links to academic articles which support this?
Thanks.
There is a racing breeding lecture at Cheltenahm Science week if anyone is interested. "Perfect Race Horse Wed 9th June 4.30pm £8"
Am I correct in thinking that Mark Johnston is a qualified vet and therefore must have a significant edge on most trainers?
Am I correct in thinking that Mark Johnston is a qualified vet and therefore must have a significant edge on most trainers?
Yes and so is Dermot Weld.
Vets do know about ailments and their expert cures but not necessarily anything about training science or mechanics of horse locomotion. Martin Pipe had no such training but read everything he could on the subjects and talked to the very best in the business in all types of horse events. He had the biggest UK edge of all time.ReasonOverFaith
Any basic book on horse physiology will explain this.Robert
Forgive me, but I’m still unclear.
Are you saying that a horse can’t improve its basic aerobic or indeed anaerobic fitness? If a horse is timed at covering 5F in 60s and records an average heart-rate of 140, then after a two week period of training the horse covers 5F in 60 seconds registering a heart rate of 132 does this not show an improvement in the horse’s fitness/lung capacity/ VO2 score / cardiovascular efficiency?
My – likely flawed – understanding is that lung capacity does not increase with increased ‘fitness’ (not unique to horses) but the blood’s abilty to utilise inhaled oxygen does due to the increase in red blood corpuscles and hence haemoglobin due to the body’s demand for it
And, as you say Reasonoverfaith, cardiovascular ‘pumping’ efficiency increases hand-in-hand with cell count which helps transmit oxygen more quickly to hard-working muscles, hence delays the onset of anaerobic stress
It’s akin to folk who live at high altitudes having a higher red cell count due to the rarefied air
Very much IMO
Robert
Forgive me, but I’m still unclear.
Are you saying that a horse can’t improve its basic aerobic or indeed anaerobic fitness? If a horse is timed at covering 5F in 60s and records an average heart-rate of 140, then after a two week period of training the horse covers 5F in 60 seconds registering a heart rate of 132 does this not show an improvement in the horse’s fitness/lung capacity/ VO2 score / cardiovascular efficiency?
RoF,
Drone has commented.
You seem to be confusing "respiratory system" (how a horse takes in, absorbs and expels air) with what it does with the oxygen, fuel etc once inside the blood (cardiovascular/ muscle system). You can improve the latter by training but not the former."The respiratory system of the horse does not respond to training. The amount of air an unfit/untrained horse moves in and out with each breath with each stride at the walk, trot, canter and gallop does not change when that horse is fit/trained. This is a key limiter on what can be achieved."
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