Pole clinic

🌟🌟Unpopular opinion🌟🌟  So . . . What’s my beef 🍖 🐄 with pole work clinics?

I love pole work, I’m a massive fan of it, but as I know I have mentioned to many of my clients before, I am just not a fan of this whole pole clinic craze that every man and his 🐕‍🦺 seems to be running at the moment without, it seems, little knowledge of the biomechanics involved.

Ground poles & raised poles are great as part of a training, conditioning or rehabilitation programme to:

• Train proprioception, coordination, skill, balance and dynamic stability 

• Improve/restore joint range of motion

• Develop core strength & activate or strengthen back muscles

• Strengthen propulsive muscles

• Provide variety within training

Stepping over a pole is a complex motor skill requiring neuromotor control and proprioceptive stimuli. Visual perception of the position and size of the obstacle is relayed to the neuromotor control centre to make decisions which command the peripheral nervous system to make an appropriate muscular response.

However, not every pole work exercise is suitable for every horse’s individual needs and if performed incorrectly can set them back in their training or rehab. There aren’t really any generic one size fits all pole work exercises. If you set any array of poles out and put a horse in front of it they will virtually always find a way to get to the other side. Do we conclude it was an appropriate exercise just because the horse managed to make it to the other side without falling in a heap? NO!

When I watch horses navigate pole exercises I set, I am constantly evaluating and re-evaluating on each pass the strategies they use to get to the other side, as for the pole exercise to be of benefit they must be using functionally correct movement patterns otherwise we may as well not bother.

What am I looking for: 

> Maintaining a soft top line

> Suppleness 

> Engaged core

> Lift in the thoracic sling

> Limb flexion in the correct part of the swing phase

> Straightness

Horses that find the exercise too difficult will use other strategies to navigate the pole set:

> Raising their head and neck, putting the spine into extension, losing good dynamic posture

> Unable to maintain balance so looses straightness

> Rushing

> Flexing the hindlimb further in retraction

> Performing a passage like motion

> Circumducting the hind limb

In both ground work and ridden work (when appropriate), I watch my clients horses over various pole exercises to evaluate what strategies the horse uses. I can then change the difficulty level up or down or change the whole exercise if needed.  Doing pole work badly is worse than not doing it at all because you will be further ingraining a poor movement pattern, you can be doing more harm than good. 

I also like to coach ground work so then I can teach owners what to look for in a quality movement & poor movement so they know when a pole exercise, lateral exercise, rehabilitation exercise, etc. is good/bad for their horse or when their horse is becoming fatigued with the exercise. One horses weakness is another horses strength area, the way one horse passed over the poles is different to the next one so in a clinic type situation (where there are usually about 4 horses but I have seen up to 6 in some!) the exercise, distances, arrangements would need to be altered every 2 minutes for each individuals movement pattern. This just isn’t feasible so most coaches will just leave them all to do the same exercise, for some it might be perfect but for others in the group far from it, which can be of real detriment😔 A pole clinic can seem like a cheaper way to get tuition, to get your horse out and about, to experience work in a group situation and to have social time with your friends, but not if you are doing them all the time and taking some of the exercises home to repeat when you have no idea if they are the right exercises for your individual horse. There is no way all 6 horses in one group have the exact same needs when it comes to any exercise but especially pole work, so at least a few horses within the group are not doing the right exercises their horse needs. If you then take some of these inappropriate exercises home with you and repeat them on a regular basis this further enhances their weaknesses, poor posture, poor movement which ultimately leads to injury.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen some really bad examples of inappropriate pole exercises recently, ultimately to the detriment of the horse. One example was being called a passage pole clinic where the coach was setting the poles on purpose to make the horse struggle so they would have to get this passage like movement. This is fine if you have a horse that is at the correct training level to be doing passage, but not one of the participants (horse or rider) was at this level. If this exercise was repeated too often in a horse that has not been progressively conditioned to this level of work (& I mean over years not weeks), it will cause injury very quickly 😭

If you want any more information or to discuss further, feel free to contact me.