Pioneer Equestrian Coaching

19/11/2025

Yup….

The “Stifle Lameness” That Wasn’t: A Story About Referred Pain

I once had a client who told me about a horse that developed an odd, on-again off-again hind-end lameness that no one could quite pin down. Some days the horse looked off behind, as if his stifle was sore; other days he moved completely normally. Nothing about it followed the usual patterns. Things that should have made a stifle issue worse didn’t seem to, and things that “should have” helped it, didn’t.

We were all very confused.

One day, the vet happened to be on the property with a brand-new scope and offered to scope several horses for gastric ulcers — partly to familiarize themselves with the equipment. When they scoped this particular horse, they found significant stomach ulcers.

The horse was placed on a veterinarian-directed ulcer-care plan, and within a few weeks, something unexpected happened:
the ulcers healed, and the mysterious “stifle lameness” vanished along with them.

It turned out the stifle itself had never been the problem. The horse had been expressing ulcer-related visceral pain as stifle discomfort — a classic example of referred pain.

Why Ulcers Can Look Like Hind-End or Stifle Issues

This situation is a great illustration of how the equine body handles pain. Signals from the internal organs and the limbs travel through overlapping pathways in the spinal cord.

Here’s what science tells us:

1. Visceral nerves and musculoskeletal nerves converge.

The stomach and the hindquarters share overlapping spinal segments, especially through the thoracolumbar region. When the stomach is irritated, the brain can misinterpret those signals as coming from the back, pelvis, or stifle.

2. Fascia connects everything.

The deep fascial membranes link the viscera to the musculoskeletal system. When the gut is irritated, the horse may brace through the abdomen and back, altering pelvic motion and limb loading.

3. Protective guarding changes movement patterns.

A horse in visceral discomfort often holds tension through the core, diaphragm, and back. This can create subtle gait irregularities that look orthopedic but aren’t.

When the gastric discomfort resolved under the veterinarian’s care, the nervous system stopped sending those distress signals — and the hind-end “lameness” disappeared.

✳️ Why This Matters

Not every hind-end irregularity originates in a limb. Sometimes the body is expressing visceral discomfort through movement changes.

This story is a reminder of how important it is to work closely with a wonderful veterinarian, and to consider the whole horse — inside and out.

https://koperequine.com/fascia-the-skeleton-of-the-nerves/

19/11/2025

18/11/2025

13/11/2025

While men raised their rifles to slaughter the last buffalo, one woman lowered her hands to save them—one orphaned calf at a time.
Mary Ann “Molly” Goodnight was not the kind of hero the West made famous. She never drew a gun, never galloped through shootouts, never had her story sold in dime novels. But what she did was quieter, deeper, and infinitely more lasting—she kept an entire species from disappearing.
Born with gentleness that refused to bend to the cruelty of the frontier, Molly married Charles Goodnight in 1870, one of Texas’s most legendary cattlemen. He blazed trails across deserts and rivers, his name carved into the history of the West. But behind his empire stood Molly—the woman who built its soul.
The Goodnights’ JA Ranch in Palo Duro Canyon was no place for the faint-hearted. It was wild land, untamed and merciless. Cowboys came and went, some broken by storms, others by silence. Yet when they reached the ranch house, they found something unexpected: warmth. Molly nursed their wounds, cooked their meals, and spoke to them with the kind of patience that could soften stone.
They called her “Aunt Molly.” To them, she wasn’t just a woman on the ranch—she was home.
But in 1878, the sound of gunfire on the plains began to echo differently. It wasn’t war—it was extinction. Buffalo, once the lifeblood of the Southern Plains, were being slaughtered by the millions. Their hides were sold for profit; their bodies left to rot under the open sky. To destroy the buffalo was to starve the Native tribes who depended on them. It was a war not just on animals, but on a way of life.
Molly watched, powerless at first, as hunters left behind dying calves—tiny, trembling creatures standing beside their dead mothers. “They looked so lost,” she once said quietly. “I couldn’t bear it.”
So she didn’t.
She began bringing the calves home. One by one. Feeding them from bottles, wrapping them in blankets, refusing to let nature’s tragedy become man’s triumph. Charles thought she was foolish—but love, in its truest form, often looks like foolishness at first. Slowly, her herd grew. And with it, hope.
By the 1880s, when fewer than a thousand buffalo remained across the continent, Molly’s herd in Palo Duro Canyon was alive, thriving, and breeding. It would become one of the foundation herds from which the American bison made its miraculous comeback. The descendants of those calves still roam Caprock Canyons State Park today—breathing proof that compassion can outlast cruelty.
But Molly’s kindness wasn’t limited to the plains. She gave the same care to people that she gave to buffalo. Cowboys with nowhere to go, widows fleeing violence, lost travelers, and even Native guests shunned by settlers—all found shelter under her roof. One local recalled, “There was always room at Aunt Molly’s table. Always one more plate.”
When others built empires, she built refuge.
At fifty-five, when most women of her era were expected to fade quietly, she founded Goodnight College—a beacon of learning in the middle of nowhere. To her, the frontier needed more than cattle and courage; it needed knowledge. She taught that true civilization wasn’t measured by land or wealth, but by empathy and understanding.
She never called herself a reformer, a conservationist, or a visionary. She simply did what was right. “If you can help,” she said once, “you should.”
When she died in 1926 at the age of 82, newspapers mourned her as “the most remarkable woman in the West.” But the truest tribute came from the cowboys who had ridden under her care:
“She showed us that strength could be gentle,” one said, “and that kindness could save more lives than a gun ever could.”
Charles Goodnight outlived her by three years. When he died, he was buried beside her—a man who tamed the frontier resting next to the woman who humanized it.
Today, the buffalo she saved still graze under the Texas sun, their hooves echoing across the same canyons where she once stood with a bottle in her hand and hope in her heart.
The West remembers its men for what they conquered.
But it should remember Molly Goodnight for what she refused to let die.
Because she didn’t just save buffalo— she saved the soul of the frontier.

11/11/2025

Activate Osteoblasts Naturally for Healthier, More Resilient Equine Bones

How It Works & What Actually Helps

Osteoblasts are the bone-building cells responsible for adding new mineral, repairing micro-damage, and strengthening bone in response to the forces your horse experiences. They don’t activate from supplements alone — they respond primarily to mechanical signals, meaning movement, pressure, vibration, and load.

Below are the most effective, science-supported ways to stimulate them naturally:

**1. Varied, rhythmic movement

(especially walking and slow work)**
Steady motion increases fluid movement through bone (yes, bone has a fluid system), which “wakes up” mechanosensors that tell osteoblasts to start laying down material.
Great choices:
• Long, relaxed walking
• Groundwork
• Hacking out
• Large circles instead of repetitive small ones

2. Low-impact, controlled loading

Bone strengthens when it experiences gentle compression and release, not pounding.
Examples:
• Hill walking
• Raised poles
• Transitions in balance
• Cavaletti at the walk/trot

This type of loading tells osteoblasts where to reinforce bone.

3. Terrain changes

Hard → soft → uneven → slight inclines → declines.
Every footing shift changes how force travels through the limbs. The more variety, the more signals bones receive to adapt and strengthen.

Walking and jogging a moderately hard ground, such as packed dirt, provides beneficial concussion and vibration that travel through the bones, gently stimulating osteoblast activity and supporting healthy bone remodeling.

Together these varied footing’s act like nature’s bone gym.

4. Adequate soft tissue mobility

Tight fascia or restricted muscle patterns alter loading and can reduce healthy bone signaling.
When the soft tissues move freely, forces distribute correctly and more evenly — giving osteoblasts the exact mechanical input they rely on.

This is where massage, myofascial work, stretching-through-movement, and ribcage/spinal mobility play a huge supporting role.

5. Balanced nutrition that supports bone turnover

Osteoblasts need the right building blocks. Key nutrients include:
• Minerals: calcium, phosphorus (correct ratio), magnesium
• Trace minerals: copper, zinc, manganese
• Vitamin D (sunshine is powerful)
• Adequate protein for collagen matrix

Nutrition doesn’t activate osteoblasts but ensures they can respond properly to the mechanical cues you’re giving them.

6. Micro-rest cycles

Bones repair during short rest windows, not during long layoffs.
The pattern that stimulates osteoblasts best is:
Work → tiny rest period → work again
Example: a hill set, then a few minutes of walk, then another set.
This supports better bone remodeling and adaptation.

7. Hoof balance

Uneven feet create uneven loading.
Even the best exercise won’t activate osteoblasts effectively if the hoof capsule is distorting force patterns. Balanced trimming/shoeing = better bone signal.

8. Age-appropriate and sport-appropriate progression

Gradual increases in workload strengthen bone far more reliably than sudden jumps in intensity.
Osteoblasts love progressive stimuli. They shut down under abrupt overload.

Read another fascinating article on connective tissue here - https://koperequine.com/mechanotransduction-in-bones/

10/11/2025

I teach my pupils ( and so do the rest of the RWYM network) to ride “as if you push your hands forwards” so we aren’t pulling on the reins…..

10/11/2025

P.S.
NEVER READ THE COMMENT SECTION:
AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM

Visiting with students and fellow trainers, I see how simply witnessing the constant barrage of criticism and nitpicking across social media, even when we’re not its target, has made us even more hesitant to share imperfect riding.

Heck, I think it’s made many of us afraid to be imperfect even when no one’s watching, because that cacophony of critical voices can become part of our own inner dialogue.

This can get so loud that we’re not even able to hear ourselves and our horses anymore, or we have to try to listen through layers of distortion.

THE CRITIC AS HUMAN…

The comment section isn’t just a modern peanut gallery, it’s often a feeding frenzy for critics.

But critics aren’t simply just trolling the comment section, they’re hiding in it.

Hiding from the real work, and their own fears of imperfection, while indulging in the emotional vampirism and empty dopamine hits of challenging others rather than themselves.

That might sound like a spiteful insult, but really, we’ve all done that at one time or another, haven’t we?

Maybe not on a public forum… but to a friend- or silently, to ourselves.

The problem isn’t ‘them,’ it’s that the critic lives in all of US.

And after a couple run-ins with trolls who were really struggling with their mental health, I know it’s not right to ‘troll the trolls.’

We never really know what other people are going through, privately, and we really shouldn’t enable harmful patterns by interacting with them.

Leave them alone. Go ride.

HOW ARE WE CONTRIBUTING TO TOXIC PERFECTIONISM?

We should not be pursuing perfection.
We should be pursuing progress.

In fact, I believe there can be no progress without imperfection.

And this is where I think trainers and creators have a responsibility… to give more transparency to what everyday training actually looks like.

I’ve seen peers who are ruled by the fear of their own inadequacy, who build public personas from carefully curated content, a house of cards that crumbles under pressure.

I’ve seen others who seem fearless, sharing every part of their process.

I respect that immensely, whether I agree with all they show or not. I also know I don’t always have the backbone to weather the level of criticism they are willing to endure.

As a trainer, I know myself and others can struggle with doubting our own transparency when we pick and choose what to share.

But I believe we can be genuine, and still choose what to share, and who to share it with.

I believe in the power of positive visuals, and often share ideal moments from my own sessions, but I also try to show the ordinary, and the imperfect, to inspire others to go out and embrace their own progress.

But there’s something else we need to acknowledge…

PEER-TO-PEER POISON

For professionals sharing their work, the poison of criticism doesn’t just happen in the comment section.

There’s also an undercurrent in our industry, an underworld of peer-to-peer networking, where professionals with polished public images privately pick apart eachothers’ work, like sharks scenting blood.

As someone who’s gotten caught in this web myself, I’ll say, triangulating is a trauma response, a pseudoconnection that will always short-circuit.

I’ve often hesitated to share my own horses’ progress, because I know some peers will be dissecting every frame in private messages.

Trying to overcome this has resulted in one of my biggest ego deaths… where I’ve had to stop being afraid to really LIVE.

Where I fall in love with the horse all over again.

Where I find complete fulfillment in the work…

In temporary but timeless moments, that transcend the transient critic.

Imperfection is FREEDOM.

To progress, perhaps we have to detach from both the inner and outer critic.

But we also have to become deeply re-attached to what made us fall in love with the horse in the first place.

A follow-up:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/14XXPWsJum2/?mibextid=wwXIfr

08/11/2025

I think we are in the third group….and it is getting much less lonely….;)

What if the practice we don’t think we want, the slow, sometimes frustrating stuff, is exactly the change we’re searching for?

People love horses. But more and more, they don’t want to train them. Somewhere along the way, we fell in love with the idea of the horse but not the work of understanding them.

They want to ‘have’ horses, to enjoy them, to photograph them, to feel close to an animal like no other.
They want to experience partnership, but not the process that the partnership requires. Hard, slow, often repetitive work of shaping behaviour and understanding another complex being.

This isn’t new, but it’s become more obvious in recent years. After the pandemic and lockdowns, many people of a certain age moved to a more rural life, and horses became part of that dream. They arrived with good intentions and a genuine desire to do right by their horses but without much experience or a clear framework for what horse care actually entails.

They imagine horses come pre-loaded, like a laptop. They look for naturalness but not in the sense of ethology, in the sense of not needing effort. One of my pet sayings is, ‘Horses don’t learn through osmosis’. It’s not, of course, strictly true. Sometimes they do seem to absorb things by magic, noticing patterns or spotting tiny details we think we never taught them. But that kind of learning is a mystery to the new horse owner, and it only makes the rest of the work more necessary.

Horses learn through interaction, consequences, environmental stimuli causing changes that they can respond to.

The irony is that people who avoid training because it feels unnatural end up missing the most natural thing of all: genuine communication with another species. The joy of discovering how your body language, timing, and movement can shape the world for your horse. The realisation that you’re both learning, all the time.

There’s the other side of the industry, the competitive equestrians. These are the people who do train. They work hard. They sacrifice; keeping horses costs big in money and time. They study technique and commit to training. But the systems they train within are often so deep in tradition that they don’t find time to question how horses actually learn.

Making a horse do ‘the thing’ is still the overriding logic. It seems efficient and they get results. But many quietly struggle with tension and resistance. There is no joy in their training. They know something isn’t quite right but don’t have the tools to approach things differently.

Positive reinforcement, learning theory, and a more science-literate approach to behaviour could help bridge that gap. But those ideas are often dismissed as soft, sentimental, or ‘woo’. They don’t like the sound of using food to ‘bribe’ a horse to do ‘the things’ they’d rather use the dig of a spur or a good old kick with the leg.

And so the horse world has fractured and we have:

A growing population of horse owners who never meant to become trainers.

A competitive core that trains but hasn’t evolved in their methods.

And a small, persistent group of people trying to show that it can be different. That horses can learn joyfully, that connection and results aren’t opposites, that the slow road is worth taking.

Being in that last group can feel lonely. I offer something that asks for more reflection and curiosity than people are used to giving. It’s not a product you can market easily.

But maybe there’s a quiet revolution. This week I heard a well known behavioural term attributed to a hat-wearing cowboy who has done a great job of repurposing it.

I won’t name them but you’d know them. I’ve heard other giants (yes, no shock, they’re men) in the horse world mentioning they use clicker training. They still wave a whip or flag in the other hand but the language is becoming more common to hear.

Perhaps we can come round to the idea that that training isn’t the thing you have to do to get the horse to work for you. It is ‘the thing’ you came for. The fun. The art. The communication. The whole nine yards. Everything.

When you stop trying to skip training, when you lean into the most humbling, beautiful process of learning together, everything flows from there.

That’s the paradox. The grunt everyone wants to avoid turns out to be the most meaningful part of animal guardianship.

08/11/2025

This is why Equine Touch is so powerful….

Exploring Fascia in Equine Myofascial Pain: An Integrative View of Mechanisms and Healing

Myofascial Pain Syndrome (MPS) is one of the most common — yet often misunderstood — sources of chronic musculoskeletal pain in horses. Traditionally, explanations have focused on muscle tension, trigger points, or neurological sensitization. But new research suggests a deeper story: fascia, the connective tissue that surrounds, supports, and integrates every structure in the body, may be a key player in both the cause and persistence of pain.

Recognizing fascia as a living, sensory, and emotionally responsive tissue shifts how we view equine pain. It’s not simply a matter of tight muscles or mechanical imbalance — it’s about communication, perception, and the body’s ongoing relationship with safety and movement.

Fascia as a Sensory and Signaling Tissue
Fascia is far from inert wrapping. It’s a dynamic, contractile, and highly innervated network that helps transmit force, tension, and sensory information throughout the horse’s body.
It houses a vast array of nociceptors (pain receptors) and mechanoreceptors, as well as interoceptors that feed information about internal states back to the nervous system.

When fascia becomes compromised — through injury, repetitive strain, imbalance, saddle pressure, or systemic inflammation — several changes may occur:

Densification: Thickening or dehydration of the ground substance that reduces glide between fascial layers.

Fibrosis: Excess collagen deposition that stiffens tissue and limits elasticity.

Myofibroblast activation: Contractile cells within fascia become overactive, tightening tissue even without muscle contraction.

Inflammatory signaling: Cytokines and neuropeptides released locally can sensitize nerve endings, amplifying pain perception.

In the horse, these changes have wide-reaching consequences. Because fascia connects every region — from hoof to poll — a small restriction in one area can alter movement and tension patterns throughout the entire body. What appears as behavioral resistance or unevenness may actually reflect deep fascial discomfort or altered proprioception.

The Pathophysiological Cascade: From Local to Global

1. Peripheral Mechanisms
Local fascial changes can stimulate nociceptors and chemical mediators, generating a constant stream of pain signals to the spinal cord.
Muscles respond reflexively with increased tone, forming tight bands or “knots.” Circulation and oxygenation decrease, further sensitizing the tissue — a self-perpetuating loop.

2. Central Sensitization
When this nociceptive input continues, the horse’s central nervous system can become hypersensitive.

Normal sensations begin to feel exaggerated or threatening.

This process, known as central sensitization, helps explain why some horses react to light touch or grooming long after the original tissue injury has healed.

3. Whole-Horse Manifestations
• Altered posture and asymmetrical movement.

• Hypervigilance or irritability under saddle.

• Shallow breathing, digestive changes, or reduced engagement.

• “Mystery” lameness or tension patterns that shift from one area to another.

These are not random — they reflect a body whose connective tissue and nervous system are caught in protective overdrive.

Somatic Memory: When Fascia Remembers -

Click here for the rest of the article - https://koperequine.com/exploring-fascia-in-equine-myofascial-pain-an-integrative-view-of-mechanisms-and-healing/