How do you maximise Equine health and performance?

QUANTIFY TRAINING WORKLOAD In association with Arioneo

One of the primary goals of any trainer is to establish a suitably high workload to develop the desired qualities, while controlling the amount of exhaustion caused by the training. Indeed, an excessive amount of fatigue might lead to the threshold associated with injury. Therefore, measuring a horse's training helps to develop competitiveness while respecting the physical and mental integrity of the horse.

How to adapt an untrained racehorse’s training?

An undertrained horse has never been trained with a workload for what is required during a race as their body would be unable to keep up with the effort. To detect an under-trained horse, the analysis of physiological parameters coupled with the analysis of sports parameters provides a good key to analysis. Indeed, a horse for which exercise has been easy will not reach its maximum heart rate (HR) and its HR curve will drop immediately after the rider stops exercising.

CONCRETE EXAMPLE

In the following example, Monsieur Arion is a Group horse that arrived in October 2020 at his new trainer’s stable. As an Equimetre user, he was able to track Monsieur Arion’s training from the minute he arrived to begin developing his database.

After winning many races, Monsieur Arion’s trainer discovered that his blood results were low after a race. As a result, training was put on hold for a while.

Monsieur Arion continued training after his recovery, but he never achieved the fitness he had before to his racing success.

Here we can see the decrease in fitness level.

Indeed, based on the statistics shown above, Monsieur Arion’s recovery ability has worsened slightly for a same degree of training: his heart rate after exercise is 166 BPM, up from 114 BPM when he came in October. This is also true for his recovery 5 minutes after the effort ends.

 The trainer was also able to evaluate the differing fitness data. By interviewing Monsieur Arion’s previous trainer, he was able to confirm that his training intensity had decreased because of their different training approaches. He decided to increase the training workload by increasing the distance and intensity.

We can see on the data below that thanks to this training individualisation, Monsieur Arion’s fitness has improved: heart rate 5mins after the effort has decreased.

Here we can see the fitness improvement, with better recovery parameters.

With this method, Monsieur Arion’s fitness improved, and it led to another GR 1 victory.  

About Equimetre – Racehorse Monitoring system

Developed specifically for racing professionals, the sensor and the analysis platform allow trainers to collect and analyze their horses’ data simply and quickly.