Equine Massage

Excellent day yesterday, met some new people and got to see my favourite little Arab horsie :-D
Went to an equine massage demo by Megan Webster of Springfield Equus. She started off with a bit about how it all works on the muscles etc and showed us some massage mitts (including the one she referred to as a "porno mitt") then got us to do silly things with our ears

and massage each other, Tamzin seemed to enjoy hers!

Then she showed us how to massage the horse from head to tail, starting with the poll/ears area. Duke, our demo horse (a taller, very much cleaner version of Gandalf), doesn't like having his ears touched

but once she'd put on the mitt, he was happier with it....

She showed us stroking movements (effleurage)

and compression strokes, with hands or scrunched up mitt

and then concussion movements (not to be done on bony areas!)

More on the movements here

An interesting one that I'd never seen before was massaging the muscle down the front of the shoulder, and seeing if you can get your hand in and pull the muscle out slightly, many horses are really tense here and in the neck

Also, an often forgotten area is the coronet band, gentle palpitations here are good for the feet

After the demo, we got to have a go on the horses, I was really surprised by just how cold Duke's lower legs and shod feet were after being so used to my lot feeling warm....

We gave Ras a bit of a go with the mitt, but he was more interested in the mare next door than our ministrations, I suspect......

Megan is coming over to Tanya's on Wednesday to massage Polo and Sorcier, might take G over there for a workup too.....