Ep 38: Laura Graves: What Keeps a Horse Sound in Late Teens

Today we're diving into a topic that touches every rider who loves their horse— longevity and aging. How do we keep our horses sound, happy, and competing well into their later years? I'm going to be joined by Laura Graves, Olympic legend and former world number 1, who's managed dressage horses at the very top of sport through to retirement. And who some of you know as our wonderful coach inside our Performance Riders Dressage program called the Gold Program. We're going to be covering so much ground with Laura today, but we're going to start off with a quick question that inspired this episode from Alyssa.

Hey there, a question really for Laura, um, about management of the equine athlete, I guess. My FEI mare is rising 15 this year and she has a joint supplement but nothing else really, So that got me thinking, what does Laura do managing the older equine athlete?

Supplements, joint treatments, you know, magnetic bandaging, all the other stuff that goes with that.

And then also, what does she do for the younger athlete preventative-wise, um, in terms of managing, looking to the future? Thanks so much, uh, Linda.

Bye.

Okay, Laura, are you ready to get stuck into today's conversation?

Yeah, I can't wait. I'm excited.

Okay, so I'm sure like everybody else, certainly me, you've been checking in with some of the World Championships recently. At the time of recording, that was just really the other day. We're all glued to the action at Arken. So I want to start this conversation by talking about one of the top horses there, Mount St. John Freestyle. 17 years old, and she goes out and puts down I think her record freestyle score of her life.

Was it? Yeah, amazing. She's amazing.

Laura, is that horse an outlier, or is that kind of peak performance at that kind of age of the horse's life, is that something that is more available to the rest of us than we might think?

Gosh, I think it depends so much. Okay, so I'm First and foremost, I'm a firm believer that what we do with our sport of dressage, when it's done well, should prolong a horse's fitness and soundness and ultimately their careers and their longevity into retirement after those careers end. So I think building the physical structure, the muscles that support the horse's skeleton in a really healthy way, I think we see it in ourselves as humans as well. We know that fit as we get older. We need fitness, maybe not high intensity, but keeping that muscle mass is crucial to our well-being.

What about your experience with your world number 1 horse, Vedadas? Now, I think, was he 17 when you retired him?

Oh my gosh, you know what?

Now I'm gonna—

I might know and you don't know.

Yeah, so let's see, he was born in 2002, we retired him in 2020, so his last year of competition was 2019. So that would've made him 17.

Yeah.

17. Last year of competition. And he actually, the, the big pull from 2020, he was getting older and then he had some shenanigans on a lunge line before— Oh, poor guy. I know. Before a hurricane that fall 2019. And we get all the horses out and we move them as much before they're gonna be cooped up. And he just went bananas and he was never right after that, to be perfectly honest. And so coming into 2020, we were trying and then COVID and the games got pushed anyway. And we just said, okay, there's not going to be a whole nother year holding onto this to 2021.

Fascinating hearing that because really when he was competing at that sort of 17 years old, he was like, he looked to be top of his game.

I couldn't really say otherwise. He was, I think there's a lot to be said honestly for Healthy stock, a good breeding program. And I think innately some horses are more prone to injury than others, whether that be genetics or whether that be the genetics that go into the conformation. I do think by nature some horses tend to stay a little sounder than others, and some are predisposed to being injured. I think a lot goes into how they're managed as young horses and how much pressure and how many miles and the type of miles that are put on them as young horses as well. What's working best for them. And because it's always fascinating and it's changing every day.

So what are the sorts of things that you like to use on the horses as they're getting into that, those teenage sort of years?

So I think we're really looking at different types of management and different reasons for different types of management. It can feel very nerve-wracking. It can feel aggressive. And I think the most important thing to understand is that if we don't help these animals use themselves properly, we are almost encouraging that injury. So if the horse is always favoring a certain leg and landing harder on one than the other, they're going to wear unevenly. And we know, for example, okay, so I learned your car, right? If your tires are overinflated or underinflated, it wears the tread inappropriately. And if your car is out of alignment, it wears your tires unevenly. And so we're trying to prevent the horse from getting into that situation where we overuse a leg and we strain a tendon. Soft tissue injuries are really the ones you want to avoid. I think the diagnostic tools have come such a long way. We can really pinpoint locations of pain and inflammation. No horse is a perfect structure, right? So it's about figuring out everything we can about their bodies. Some of it's significant, some of it can look pretty ugly on an X-ray or an MRI, and it might not bother the horse in any which way.

Mm-hmm.

So having kind of a roadmap and understanding your horse. can be really a crucial part of that management as they age. And I do think it's important to start when they're younger so that you know which things are maybe going to be a place to keep an eye on and which things or muscle groups that you need to strengthen around a certain weakness in the horse. And that way you can really be preventative instead of waiting until the horse becomes screaming that they're really in pain. We wanna avoid that at all costs.

And so What then does that look like on a practical level? What sort of age are you talking about and what might that prevention look like? Is it a matter, obviously it's highly individual, and is that a matter of having the vet on board as a solid partner from quite a young age with the horse?

Yeah, I think that's very important. I think it's important to also have more than one set of eyes. Same way I feel about coaching. Right. I think it's important to have more than one set of eyes on the horse. I think it's very important to have a veterinarian who you work very closely with, who can see your horse on a regular basis, who knows them very well. And that, as young as I can get the horse, as young as they're under saddle, even maybe before they're under saddle, so they can see how they move before the rider gets on their back. This is the ideal. Not always possible, but whatever age they come into the program, this is my goal, is to get a veterinarian that I can work very closely with. I also think it's rather important every once in a while to have another set of eyes. As we all know, we become blind to certain things that we say, oh, that's just the way he is, or you maybe don't notice it. And so having another opinion, I think, from time to time, or when you just don't feel 100% in your gut, I think is really great to have more than one opinion on that. And we're starting young. So the biggest and probably the hardest thing I think in managing these horses is finding a good farrier.

Mm-hmm.

A lot of this starts in the feet and keeping those horses sound relies heavily on having a great farrier on your team. And that honestly makes the vet's job quite a bit easier. Moving on from there, we do need to support that farrier and we need our veterinarians taking regular, at least twice a year, I would say for your average horse. If it's a high performance horse looking to do international competitions, I would really be giving that farrier as much support as he asks. Because they should, and they do usually want to do a really great job for us. So giving them all the information to make really great choices, I think, is— we need to do that for them to do their jobs well. And then we do flexions. These veterinarians should be checking your horses over from the tips of their ears to the tips of their tails. Number one, with palpation, checking for sore muscles. I would want to work my horses pretty thoroughly before a vet check. I don't want my vet to come and see my horse on their best day.

Mm-hmm.

I want my vet to see my horse on, after a really tough day. That's where I wanna know that they're still feeling great and talking about things like nutrition and really looking at it from a whole horse, whole management kind of perspective. That being said, we, we trot our horses, we flex all 4 legs, multiple lower limb, upper limb, and we're trotting them on hard surfaces. We're trotting them on soft surfaces. We're trotting them in circle lines, both directions. And we're trying different things, right? We always wanna start with hopefully the most non-aggressive. form of treatment. We're not talking about a horse who is in pain or is hopping lame on one limb. We want to try to be as non-aggressive as we can to see how the horse responds. And often we're not looking at a 3-year-old horse. We're looking at a horse who's gone through a portion of its life a certain way. So if we change too much, too fast, that's always a very scary thing for me. Relieving the horse of a certain way that they've been balancing themselves. I've seen a lot of wheels fall off of a lot of carts. If these horses have gone through a period of their life, let's say you're looking at a 12-year-old horse, they've gone 12 years of their life without maybe any intervention.

Mm-hmm.

And they're very used to getting around with what they're feeling. And so changing too much too soon can really not be in your best interest. So making sure you take that little bit at a time. And there are so many great therapies. I think it used to really be that we just had a couple of options for injecting these joints with steroids. And we all know that can be glorious. Any human who's had a steroid in their joint or a steroid when they're feeling sick, right, it can really kickstart Kickstart you. It feels great. But we also know the huge risk that steroids pose. And even in the horses, an exceptionally high risk for things like founder, okay, causing a bout of laminitis. And so having ways where it's important to reduce the inflammation in these joints, because increased inflammation causes damage. Okay. So it's important that we intervene and science is so amazing.

Yeah.

We have different products that we can make. We have iRap that we can make from the horse. We have products like Arthramid. We have A2M, different kinds of proteins that they're able to isolate and put back into the horse, the, this biological material that they're making from the horse. So that reduces the potential for a, a flare, flare-up reaction.

Amazing.

And it is amazing. Stem cells. We've been using stem cells in horses and now I think we're using them more and more on people.

Mm-hmm.

But it's, you know, it's amazing medicine, what we can do for these horses and where you might not get— it's always a risk to put a needle in the joint, but the, you don't get the benefit maybe as quickly with one of these more regenerative type of injections, but it is worth the increased cost and it is worth it with the lower risk than we have with steroids. I do, and we have done Adequan. We do Legend. There are always some new things coming out. I think it doesn't hurt. Okay, I don't think it hurts. I do think there's some real research that we're seeing in people as well with things like. I honestly think the horses with insulin resistance and laminitis are getting a ton of research that is relevant for performance sport, and I don't know. If it's coming around that quickly, but it's basically a lot on inflammation, right? That's infla— that's insulin resistance. That is laminitis. And on a cellular level. And so I think those types of developments are interesting, not just for those horses, but for the performance horses. But I would, if it's a, if it's a choice, I would choose to invest in the veterinary-grade care. If I'm Working with a budget and it's a choice between a feed-through supplement or investing in really exceptional veterinary care, I'm going to choose the vet option every time.

What about from the saddle? Now, we've been lucky enough to watch you coaching a lot of riders in our Performance Riders Program, and you're often talking to our riders about getting both sides of the horse very even, everything being super regular each side. And that's what I was thinking about a little bit when Before you were talking about the, the car tires wearing evenly, and I thought, okay, there's all the physical stuff that we're talking about with the vet, but the training as well, right? That has to come into it. And I loved right at the beginning of this, you were saying that really our dressage should be prolonging the lives and prolonging the quality of the lives of our horses.

Absolutely.

Are you seeing room for improvement in the way a lot of us are training our horses that we could be? Maybe having more of a focus on that evenness and symmetry to help their bodies as they age?

I do think so. I think it is one of the major factors of keeping a horse going into their older years. I think we, you had mentioned freestyle in the beginning and working at this level, it's a huge physical ask. On these horses, but keeping them lighter on their feet, keeping them balanced in their work. I think balance and symmetry are the 2 major factors, whether you're riding competitively and you're trying to score very high, or whether you're riding for pleasure. I think your balance and symmetry have to be a priority no matter what, if we're talking about longevity.

So if we go back to Linda with her question, she's got her rising 15-year-old FEI horse and she's, she's starting to think, oh gosh, how do I best support my horse? What do you most want Linda to hear at this point?

I want Linda, we all want to do the best for our horses. And she's talking about supplements and I would add up what you spend on your supplements on your horse in a year, and I would find a way to put that— I would put that into a veterinary budget. I would find the absolute best educated performance vet in your area, and I would make a great relationship with them.

Awesome conversation.

Thank you so much, Laura.

Thank you.