Light Therapy for the Horse Athletes

Ever since we’ve been riding horses, we’ve also been trying to find ways to give horses the best comfort we can after they’ve been thoroughly worked out. Unfortunately, we can’t just bring them into our house with the air conditioning or heater so they don’t freeze or can cool off properly. That’s where a recent technology, that uses heat, lighting, and blown air, comes in. It’s called a Solarium, after the idea of glass used overhead in a room to allow sunlight in.

The Solarium can be used in the winter when a horse can’t be exercised much, but still needs to stay warm, especially in the snowy seasons. And even has the advantage of being able to ‘blow dry’ a horse after you wash them down, so they don’t get sick from being clean in the winter. On the flip side though, you can use it in the summer to blow dry the horse down after they’ve been sweating intensely from a ride.

Something new and fancy like the Solarium isn’t all that can be used though; in fact, the most common one we’ve been using for many years is ultrasound. The ultrasound tools can actually be used to massage various deeper muscle areas on a horse. Getting to the muscles in the flank can be a bit difficult, due to the sheer size of a horse, but this provides us with a tool to help keep the muscles stimulated or relaxed.

But of all the various treatments that have appeared, the most recent have to do with lasers. Most of which have only been locally tested as nothing official has come out, but lasers do seem to have strong applications for helping with swelling and inflammation from a horse working out too hard, and improve tissue in general.

The amount of therapies we’ve been seeing for horses may vary so drastically, but no matter what we are still working on ways to try and give our four-legged friends the best comforts we can. And that includes starting with the basics like a stable, before any of this other fancy light and sound toys.