Building UP Your Horse’s Topline

Are you ashamed of your horse’s topline?

Not all members of any species are the same and this of course includes horses. A few of these animals are structured so they demonstrate a bad topline. You definitely wouldn’t enjoy your horse’s weak toplines, and it doesn’t matter whether your pony is swaybacked or gets a bad topline when out of coaching.

There are some ways that you can get your horse to boost his topline. Here are three of them.

Improve Topline with Backing Exercise

As with all animals, your horse’s rear muscles are active when he is backing up, all the more so if he lowers his head when doing that. Training your horse to back up keeping his head down has two benefits:

1. It improves the topline;

2. Horses relax when their heads are held low.

Your horse is going to definately fight putting his head down when backing. It could take a large amount of effort on your part to make him back up with his head down. One method to get him to do it is to dangle a treat in front and well under so he needs to reach down for it.

Dependent on the horse I'm coaching, I split the exercise into two components: backing and dropping the head. In the dropping part of the exercise, I crouch low and yank on the lead rope. His curiosity will make the pony lower his head to see what I am up to. When he does, he gets a treat from me by way of a reward. I progress from there to getting him to lower his head while I'm erect. I reward him for doing what I desire all the way thru. I ultimately progress to the stage where I get him to hold his head low while backing.

The coaching can take many days: some horses are essentially ignorant of how exactly to back with their head held low. It’s a matter of muscular coordination the pony isn’t used to. At such times the horses can only stagger back a step or 2 with their head down. It can take a couple of days before the pony masters enough muscle-bound looseness to back up for a distance with head held low.

When your pony ultimately gets the swing of walking backward with head held low, get him to do it for a minimum of a 100 steps a day. This way, you will help him build up the muscles in his neck, back and hindquarters that affect his topline. In general, you should see good results within 2 weeks of starting this exercise, no matter how recalcitrant he is.

Change the Feeding Style

Your horse’s poor topline might have something to do with his being fed from a raised container or crib. The topline gets strengthened by sensible exercising of the muscles that make a contribution to it. You can add to the effect by employing a feed dispersing ground toy. Options on the market include the Nose-It, the Likit Snak-A-Ball and the Amazing Graze.

All of these widgets roll round the ground when poked. Your pony will be prodding them plenty as he makes an attempt to feed out of them. Keeping the head down and chasing after the feed device can consume lots of time, as the contraptions dissipate food slowly. This means plenty of exercise for the horse’s topline muscles.

Over time, I’ve used a lot of feed gizmos including the 3 named above and a few others that are now not available. They work best because the pony has to keep his head low to follow them. As discussed above, they disperse food slowly and force the pony to keep at it for an extended time.

You gain a further bonus with topline stretching exercises in that these exercises help forestall stuck withers. This occurs a lot with horses that are “built downhill.” Though they’re actually not structured that way, they seem like they’re sloping down to the front because of stuck withers. Their posture will improve considerably when their withers are unlocked.

Feed Unrefined Coconut Oil

Unrefined coconut oil is an excellent remedy for horses with excess weight everywhere but on the topline. It appears that raw coconut oil goes direct to the equine topline. Pretty much all horses with lean toplines and fat everything else seem possessed of a personality mold that is Shao Yin all of the way. These animals are capable of great performance, but look bad due to their sway backs and ewe necks. Coconut oil is the sure shot fix. You want the following resources for this sort of horse, raw coconut oil, which you can order online or from your usual source of health feed, more knowledge regarding Shao Yin as well as the other equine character types.

Horses are Heather Toms’ passion and she enjoys sharing her extensive knowledge through her 100’s of articles with other horse lovers… like all things about cheap horse rugs