Serenity Equine Therapy

12/04/2025

This boy is looking so good after his 4 trim! His wedge is steadily growing out in his front feet. I only snapped photos of the front left and the back left foot this time as I was on a time limit before I had to go pick my son up from school.

12/03/2025

Shorten those trim cycles so this doesn’t happen!

Snow and ice change far more than the surface your horse stands on. They change the shape of the hoof, the way the limb loads, and the confidence a horse feels in their own body. Understanding this gives us a clearer picture of how winter footing influences movement, balance, and comfort.

Horses stabilise themselves through small adjustments in the foot and lower limb. The hoof is designed to land, flatten, absorb shock, and give clear feedback about the ground. This feedback keeps them balanced and confident.

Snowballs interrupt this system.
When snow packs into the sole it forms a hard rounded block that lifts the hoof off the ground. This takes away natural traction and removes the frog from contact with the ground. It alters limb angles, changes breakover, and increases the effort needed for every step.

Healthy horses are built to handle winter conditions, but packed snow creates a mechanical problem they cannot solve on their own. Snow compacts differently depending on hoof shape, moisture levels, trim cycle, and the type of snow. Some horses build snowballs quickly while others rarely do.

Problems increase when the snow hardens.
A soft snowball can still cause instability. A frozen one can feel like a rock glued to the hoof. This changes weight bearing and increases strain on joints and tendons with every step.

The best time to help is before the snowball forms.
Pick the feet often.
Check hooves at the gate or before coming in so they don’t slide.

Prevention depends on the individual horse and the conditions.

• Regular trims help reduce how tightly snow packs
• The shape and balance of the hoof can influence how easily snow packs, so a well-balanced trim can reduce snowball formation.
• Horses who wear shoes may benefit from snowball pads or specific pads for snow
• Vets and some studies recommend using safe non-stick coatings like petroleum jelly (Vaseline) or some cooking oil sprays (such as Pam)

One thing that consistently comes up in research is avoiding harsh chemicals like motor oil or WD forty. These can irritate skin and hoof tissue and are not recommended.

Winter adds challenges that some horses cannot change on their own. A few small checks help keep their movement comfortable, confident, and supported. As always it’s about paying attention to the individual horse infront of you.

12/02/2025

🙌🙌

Chronic Back Pain Interrupts Myofascial Force Transmission

The myofascial system is a continuous, body-wide network of fascia and muscle that distributes tension, load, and movement forces from one region to another. When it’s healthy, forces generated in the hips, limbs, or trunk travel efficiently through this network, allowing coordinated movement, balanced posture, and elastic energy return.

But chronic back pain changes all of that.
Pain doesn’t stay local — it disrupts the way the entire myofascial web transmits and organizes force.

How Chronic Back Pain Disrupts the Myofascial System

1. Protective Muscle Guarding

Long-term pain triggers automatic bracing: muscles tighten to protect the painful region.

This creates:

• local rigidity

• reduced fascial glide

• blocked or diverted force flow through the kinetic chain

Even small zones of guarding can act like “stiff knots” in an otherwise flexible web.

2. Fascial Densification & Adhesions

Chronic irritation, inflammation, or immobility can cause fascia to thicken, dehydrate, or bind to surrounding structures.

Dense or sticky fascia resists tension and disrupts the smooth transmission of mechanical forces along fascial lines.

Instead of distributing load, the system begins to catch and hold it.

3. Neuromuscular Inhibition

Pain changes motor control patterns, especially in deep stabilizers like:

• multifidus

• transverse abdominis

• pelvic stabilizers

When these muscles become inhibited or delayed, the body can’t efficiently organize or pass forces through the trunk. Larger, superficial muscles overwork to compensate — adding more imbalance to the system.

4. Loss of Elastic Energy Transfer

Healthy fascia behaves like a spring: it stores and releases elastic energy with every step, turn, and lift.

Chronic tension or densification reduces this recoil capacity, leading to:

• heavier, more effortful movement

• faster fatigue

• poor energy return

The body has to muscle its way through movements instead of relying on stored elastic energy.

5. Asymmetrical Load Distribution

Pain changes movement patterns.
We shift, lean, shorten strides, or unconsciously avoid certain ranges.

Over time, these compensations distort:

• fascial tension lines

• joint loading

• force vectors

This often causes secondary areas of pain or dysfunction far from the original site.

Clinical Implications

Chronic back pain can lead to:

• reduced performance and coordination

• increased injury risk elsewhere due to compensation

• slower recovery and decreased tissue adaptability

• impaired balance and postural control

The issue is not only the pain — it’s the altered force economy of the entire body.

Therapeutic Approaches That Help Restore Force Transmission

• Myofascial Release & Soft Tissue Work

Restores glide, hydration, and elasticity across restricted fascial layers.

• Movement Re-Education

Corrects compensatory patterns and restores efficient sequencing through the kinetic chain.

• Progressive Load Training

Gradually re-establishes healthy force distribution and rebuilds stabilizer engagement.

• Vagus Nerve Stimulation

Downregulates chronic tension and helps reduce protective guarding.

The Bigger Picture

Chronic pain is never isolated.
Wherever it start, it changes how the entire myofascial system behaves.

Pain alters tension, timing, and load distribution throughout the web — and that ripple effect continues until the system is rebalanced.

https://koperequine.com/understanding-fascial-adhesions-causes-effects-and-reducing-the-risk-of-developing/

11/27/2025

Gelding I’m helping rehab who had a bout of laminitis this summer. Oct 6, 2025 and Nov 12, 2025.
Lots of changes. I love seeing the new healthy hoof capsule growing down from the coronet band. The gelding has had three trims over the course of seven weeks. We wanted to make sure to take it slow so that this gelding didn’t end up with sore feet along with a sore body. I’m happy to see that there are positive changes so far. The owner was making sure to keep the gelding on a low sugar diet and providing adequate exercise to promote blood flow through the feet and body so that the new hoof growth could grow with some integrity. I will be seeing the gelding next week for his next trim. 

11/27/2025

Rangers glow up! Check previous posts. He is still growing out a small laminar wedge and still rebalancing his body. Happy with his improvements! Dates on photos.

11/25/2025

Love this!

Fascia remembers what muscles forget:

In manual therapy, bodywork, and movement science fascia’s unique mechanical and cellular properties allow it to retain tension patterns and adapt to stress long after the muscles themselves have relaxed or released.

1. Muscles vs. Fascia in Holding Tension
• Muscles actively contract and relax under nerve signals. When the signal stops, a healthy muscle can usually let go quite quickly.
• Fascia is the web of connective tissue that wraps, connects, and transmits force between muscles and other structures. Repeated load, poor posture, or injury can make it densified, “stuck,” or adhesed. This can restrict motion even if the muscles aren’t actively tight.

2. “Memory” as a Mechanical Pattern

Fascial layers adapt to the stresses placed on them. Repeated movement patterns, trauma, or surgery can lead to fascial remodeling — thicker collagen fibers, altered alignment, and increased stiffness. This is a kind of mechanical memory:
• If a horse (or human) compensates for an old injury, fascia can remodel around the altered movement.
• Later, even if the muscle injury heals and nerve signals stop, the fascial restrictions can persist and continue influencing movement.

3. Neurological Component

Fascia is richly supplied with sensory receptors — sometimes even more than muscle tissue. These receptors constantly feed information about tension, position, and pain to the nervous system. When the nervous system “learns” a protective pattern, fascia can help reinforce it, like a groove worn into a record, making the pattern habitual or hard to change.

4. Implications for Therapy

This is why techniques like myofascial release, gentle stretching, and movement retraining are so effective:
• They address not just muscle contractility but also the viscoelastic and sensory properties of fascia.
• By restoring hydration, sliding, and alignment of fascial layers, you can “reset” stored tension so muscles can function normally again.

In Short

Muscles act. Fascia adapts.
Muscles may relax quickly, but fascia remodels slowly and holds onto patterns until it’s specifically mobilized.
That’s the real meaning of “fascia remembers what muscles forget.”

https://koperequine.com/where-horses-feel-it-most-common-soreness-zones-in-muscles-and-fascia/

11/23/2025

Oh gosh what a fabulous clinic! The four ladies that came out today braved the weather and worked hard on learning to massage and stretch Hobo and Cody!

The boys were in their glory!
Thank you for your amazing participation!
Can’t wait to host more clinics starting in the new year!

I have a wait list so if your interested pm and I’ll add you to the list!
Massage, saddlefit, nervous system regulation, animal communication, muscle testing, energy healing and more!!

Stay tuned for clinic updates towards the end of December! Hoping to host 1-2 clinics each month at my property SW of Sundre. 🙏🙌♥️🤩

11/22/2025

Had the pleasure of working on this beautiful boy. His owner has only owned him for I believe just over a year and he has come a long way. She’s steadily been working on teaching him how to relax while also training him to become an endurance horse. We originally met because of a Saddle fitting issue that we were able to improve with a different Saddle.
Before meeting me, this boy had never had a bodywork session before and because of his trust issues it’s been a journey helping him understand what is happening when I work on him so that he is able to absorb and process what I am doing.
These photos were from our second session.
 I am very pleased with his progress. I have since worked on him again, one week after this session and he has improved even more so, especially in his neck and his back.
His temperament has also improved a lot with the Saddle change and the consistent bodywork sessions.

11/22/2025

Gorgeous view I got to see leaving a clients today! Feeling blessed 😇

11/20/2025

I had to emotionally prepare myself to edit these photos and be able to post them.
As much as I wanted to fully balance the feet it would have crippled the horse more than it already is. The deep digital flexour tendon and extensor tendons were so stressed and shortened that they need time to stretch out again.
Everything is connected.
This horse was so happy after the trim, the light was back in their eyes and they definitely felt more lively. It was a beautiful sight to see.
The owner had tried a couple different farriers and even had vet help… founder or even just hoof rehab is hard. It requires a full understanding of how an each part of the foot works and what its job is. Being able to read the foot and notice the different pathologies and understand why they are there is difficult. Experimentation I find is so valuable.
I’ve been blessed with rescue horses and clients who have allowed me to practice honing my skills so when it comes to tragedies like this I can hopefully make some progress in the right direction.

In all honesty, I was fretting meeting this horse and wondering if I’d be able to help it. I’ve been blessed with some pretty intense horses this year when it comes to body and hoof imbalances and I am so grateful that they have helped me learn what works and what doesn’t and how I can be better.

The studying never stops and neither does the practice.
Healing horses is my passion and I want to be able to show up as fully as I can for each and every one and provide the most relief I can. I also want owners to know that every one of your horses that you allow me to work on is treated with the utmost care and love as though they are my own.

11/20/2025

If horses labelled our unwanted, “mean” or “aggressive” behaviours towards them as naughty like humans do to them, how often would they be able to justify punishing us in the way people justify punishing them?

A horse expressing dislike for something is often used a reason to punish them.

They can’t say no, they can’t even show facial expressions that allude to a “no” or a lack of desire to participate, without being punished for it.

We rob them of the necessary ability to communicate when they’re uncomfortable with something or don’t want to do something and then are surprised when we get behavioural responses that seemingly “appear out of nowhere” meanwhile, we’ve punished away all of the warning signs by not allowing for communication.

This unequal power dynamic means that humans can escalate to high levels of aggression and force towards horses and not be held accountable for it, but horses can’t lack compliance, have a bad day or communicate to their humans that they’re not okay with something.

It’s a very dangerous dynamic to have because it justifies abuses on an industry wide scale and makes it easy for people to justify the level of force they use, whether it’s fair or not.

It results in horses being punished for their expressions of fear or pain, too, when such behaviours could’ve been taken as warning signs to address an issue before it becomes a major problem.

We all have bad days. Even humans, as developed as our brains are, lose our patience or take out our fear, pain, anxiety or discomfort on one another due to not knowing how to properly express it.

How unreasonable is it that we’re expecting flight animals to do our bidding, while they’re not aware of the reasons they’re being asked to, all without ever saying a no or reacting in an instinctual manner simply because we don’t like the expression of their flight instinct?

Horses are very passive animals.

When they do make “cranky” or “grumpy” faces, in a healthy environment where they’re listened to, it’s often just as a warning or to increase distance.

Choosing aggression is often borne out of lack of choice and extreme frustration.

On an industry wide scale, I so often see humans punishing horses for behaviours that the human causes due to their continued pressure and lack of ability to recognize the many early warning signs of overwhelm.

We owe horses the same type of compassion and patience they give to us.

Communication is not a crime just because it’s an emotion people do not want to see.

It isn’t a partnership if your horse is only allowed to ever communicate the things you want to hear but never allowed to communicate displeasure or say no.

If people insist on this incredibly unequal dynamic, at least call it what it is: a dictatorship, don’t pretend it’s anything that resembles a partnership.

Partners listen to each other. There is mutual communication.

A dictator is fixated on serving their own interests even when it means trampling the wellbeing of others in the process.

11/19/2025

Some hooves I had the pleasure of helping today. I have before and afters of all 4 feet once I removed the shoes. These shoes were put on 8 weeks ago…
Unfortunately these types of feet are becoming more common in my surrounding area. 🥺
Owner and I worked on a protocol for the horse and if all goes to plan I’m hoping this horse can recover to at least pasture sound. The horse is only 10 years old.
Should be seeing this horse again in 3 weeks. In the meantime the owner is going to work on bringing the heels down a few millimetres each week so we allow time for the horses muscles and tendons to adjust to the new hoof positions.

Side note- the horse felt so much more comfortable after the trim and was standing more square and not resting each front leg constantly switching. The horse let out so many deep sighs, licking and chewing, dropping of the head, closing the eyes and even farting a lot!
The facial expressions from before were that of pain and tension and by the end the horse looked like I had drugged it! So relaxed and happy.