Soothing Hands Equine Therapy

When movement matters … trainers call  Soothing Hands Equine Therapy; muscle maintenance and repair specialists.  Soothing Hands is the business started eleven years ago by Kim Allaby. Kim has been a horsewoman for over forty years and has three-day evented, played polo competitively, taught riding, exercised and trained racehorses, trained jumpers, and the list goes on.

Eleven years ago Kim wanted a career change, and was looking for something that would have a positive impact on horses. Equine Massage was the perfect modality; she had already seen how it had benefited her horse which had an undiagnosed “off and on” lameness.  Over the past eleven years she has massaged many breeds, and horses from many disciplines – polo, racing, hunters, jumpers, dressage, to name some.

 Her time now is mainly spent working on Thoroughbred Racehorses at Woodbine Racetrack. Three years ago, after extensive research Kim added laser therapy to enhance the benefits of massage. Kim describes the cold laser as acting like “super charged ice”. The laser is ideal for reducing heat and swelling in soft tissue (tendons, ligaments and muscles). With the combination of laser and massage as preventative tools, downtime can be reduced or eliminated and once a problem or accident has occurred they can reduce lay-up time.

 Time is money, and stall rest alone without a rehabilitation programme can be very expensive for competitive horses. All human athletes use a variety of therapies to assist in avoiding and healing injuries; competitive horses deserve no less. Soothing Hands Equine Therapy can assist your horses’ natural ability to heal and keep moving at it’s best, because movement matters in racing.

A nice young man went to ride his nice horse and found that all the horse would do willingly was walk. The young man did not feel competent enogh to school the horse through the problem and so he asked for my help.

Well I had all my hats on that day; my riding helmet, my therapist’s and trainer’s hats. There was a problem to be solved…..was the horse in pain or just being defiant?

How often do we all come across this problem? Pretty often. The question is how do we deal with it, beat the horse with whip and spur, do the horse whispering/Natural Horsemanship thing, give up because we wouldn’t want to upset the horse so we’ll just walk until it wants to do more? I know what I did and the outcome was successful for the horse, the rider and me.