🦴❄️Winter Joint Health ❄️🦴

 With the weather now making a significant colder change, please be mindful of your horse’s joints. Please don’t expect them to be stabled for long periods in cold weather and expect ‘performance’ straight away, just as you need to warm up their muscles, please don’t forget about the impact the changing of the season has on joints. There’s nothing more that makes my insides shudder🫣 is seeing a horse stabled for days in cold weather, then either immediately being chased around in small circles or being rapidly tacked up, dragged out of a stable and trotted off down a road... eek🥴! Maybe the equivalent to you lying in bed and suddenly rushing out the front door and running down the road, I’m not sure about you but my body would not be thankful and be screaming at me to hold my horses and go back and walk around a bit first and warm up. 

🤔 How and why?
Without boring you and going into too much detailed anatomy, most of the joints in your horses’ limbs are synovial joints. So, what are these and why are they so important? Synovial joints are freely moveable joints, being one of a classification of other types of joints such as fibrous- (fixed, such as skull plates) or cartilaginous-(slightly moveable, spinal vertebrae). The typical structure of a synovial joint can be seen in the photo (left), a hand drawn cross sectional of a basic structure of a synovial joint. Hopefully now (if my drawing isn’t too terrible!)  you can now visualise how they allow for the most range of movement and also act as shock absorbers, by compression of the hyaline cartilage, for example on take-off or landing when jumping.  
Hopefully you are still with me at this point and not scrolled on by.. or worse fallen asleep😴 ...bear with me it’s worth it  ..

The joint capsule is made up of two layers, an outer fibrous layer attached to the periosteum of the bone and an inner synovial layer that secretes synovial fluid acting as a lubricant to the joint. Normal synovial fluid is clear, straw-like colour and its consistency bit like honey, without the synovial fluid the joint simply couldn’t function, if you think of it like a motor oil but far more complex! The joint fluid also provides nutrition to cells that maintain hyaline cartilage. The hyaline cartilage covers the ends of bones reducing friction and aiding in shock absorption as previously spoken about. As you can imagine they are the most active joint so are therefore unfortunately, the most susceptible to injury. 

So?  🤷‍♀️what’s this got to do with winter I hear you ask? Well, lower temperatures ❄️🥶 can cause this fluid to become thicker, impeding its ability to flow freely around the joint, therefore making the joint a little stiffer. Then add in the fact that lack of exercise decreases the synovial fluid production and can cause stiffness, you can see how this is now not a good recipe for optimum joint health and good performance. 

Hopefully any early onset of oingy boingy’s will be short lived! 

Happy winter riding ! ❄️🏇