What is Equine Musculoskeletal Unwinding?
The equine body holds patterns of pain which can turn into unwanted learned behaviours. During and after a treatment, the body begins to shift skeletal, muscular and organs resulting in a balanced body. Many conformational issues are postural issues and once corrected create positive behavioural issues.
Equine Musculoskeletal Unwinding is another modality that looks for the primary dysfunction of the presenting symptoms. It helps to reset the body’s system to restore structural integrity and promote self-healing.
It is all soft work but very effective in correcting gait abnormalities, saddle fitting issues, and mysterious lameness issues. As well as helping the horse to get more wind and thus more stamina as the body can take in more oxygen as well as having more drive and push from the hind end. Soft gentle moves to manually release and keep the skeleton in proper form and function is where we start thus helping the body to load the joints and hoof correctly. Also, deep muscle unwinding from the inside out has the horse presenting a body 2″ taller, 4″ longer and they look as if they have gained 20 pounds after a 1-hour session. As well as helping to balance Chakras and Acupressure Meridians.
We want to find and release the deep Musculoskeletal and Cranial energetic blocks in your horse; which will help your horse come back to being a happy, comfortable, balanced and a fluid mover under saddle. This is deep physical body unwinding releasing stuck skeletal issues as well as tight muscle issues not allowing the joints to load correctly causing mysterious lameness issues.
Other body work that can be combined in a session with Musculoskeletal Unwinding is Bowen Therapy and Craniosacral.
What to expect from an Equine Craniosacral session:
Practitioners will first assess a horse’s movements, posture, and soft tissue; then will place highly sensitive hand and finger pressure to specific points, which may be anywhere on the horse’s body, to suit the individual needs of each horse at that particular moment and time.
Whilst specific attention is given to the Cranium, and Sacrum; treatment is not limited to these areas due to how the body is connected.
Craniosacral Therapy works by facilitating the body’s own natural healing to remove/lessen the negative effects that stress puts on the Central Nervous System. The Craniosacral system is comprised of protective membranes and CSF (Cerebrospinal fluid) which surrounds the brain and spinal cord. Bones in the body are also part of this system as it is what the membranes attach to, this is what connects from the head to the tail.
Craniosacral Therapy is an excellent and extremely effective alternative to more conventional therapies. There is no physical manipulation of bones or tissues; it is an energy-based treatment using a light touch on specific parts of the body. It allows the body to readjust at its own pace. If you think about it in the sense that you as a rider, if you hurt your ankle you tend to adjust the way you walk to limit the pain and discomfort. In doing this other muscles in the body need to compensate for the new gait and therefore other issues/pain can arise and surrounding fascia can become tight. Horses are the exact same, they may show it by coming up lame, refusing to jump, not doing or fighting to do something they were able to do before. Issues which are often seen as conformation issues have been shown to be postural issues. Treatment addresses restrictions in the motion of the cranial vault, spine, pelvis region and all fascial connections, including extremities.
Any horse can benefit from Craniosacral work as all horses experience regular pressures to the cranium throughout their lives.
Some issues it can help with include but are not limited to:
Saddle fit issues
Headshaking
Cribbing
Head trauma and injuries
Behavior problems
Low back and stifle/hock joint problems
Biomechanical issues
Respiratory Issues
Bucking
Lameness
Difficulty in making transitions, holding the canter and leads
Feels flat in work
Stress
Girth issues