07/09/2025
If you read one post today please make this the one. Dr Shelley Appleton Calm Willing Confident Horses explains loaf transfer so well and why when horses “break down” it’s generally not as simple as a hoof, or joint. We need to look beyond this and look at the system as a whole.
Load Transfer: The Invisible System That Keeps Horses Sound (Until We Break It)
(This is probably the most significant blog I have written to date...and I am deadly serious.)
1️⃣ Why We Miss the Point
Most riders and owners look at legs, joints, or hooves when a horse goes lame. We obsess over hock injections, tendon scans, or shoeing tweaks.
But here’s the blind spot: horses aren’t Lego sets where you can just swap out a dodgy block and keep stacking. They’re whole systems where forces - rider weight, ground impact, propulsion - have to be absorbed, stabilised, and passed on like the world’s most complicated game of pass-the-parcel. That process is called load transfer.
If load transfer works, the horse moves fluidly, distributes force safely, and stays sound. If it doesn’t, the wrong bit cops the pressure - joints, tendons, ligaments - until it breaks. Cue “mystery lameness” and your savings account crying into a feed bucket.
2️⃣ What Load Transfer Actually Is
Load transfer is the art of sharing forces across the horse’s whole body:
- Hooves = shock absorbers (your horse’s Nike Airs).
- Tendons and ligaments = springs (boing, boing).
- Core and spine = suspension bridge (though honestly, comparing a living, moving horse to a bridge bolted to the ground is a bit crap - sorry Tami, I’ll get to you in a second and anyone else having a fit over my analogies :P ).
- Hindquarters = the engine room.
- Trunk = the bridge deck, carrying weight forward.
- Nervous system = Wi-Fi (sometimes 5G, sometimes “buffering…”).
It’s not one joint or one leg doing the work - it’s a team effort. And when one player drops the ball, the others cover… until they tear something.
3️⃣ How It Gets Compromised in Domestication
Here’s the catch: our horses don’t live or move the way evolution intended. Instead, we’ve gifted them the equine version of late-stage capitalism:
- Sedentary living → Wild horses walk 20 km a day. Ours do laps of a 20 x 60 and then slouch around on the couch bingeing Netflix. Fascia weakens, cores collapse, proprioception clocks off.
- Gut health issues → Ulcers, acidosis, restricted forage. Imagine doing Pilates with chronic indigestion. Goodbye stabilisers, hello bracing.
- Rider influence → Saddles, weight, wobbly balance. A hollow back under a rider = hocks and forelimbs eating all the force. “Congratulations, you’re now a wheelbarrow.”
And then we act shocked when the “bridge” collapses and the legs file for workers’ comp.
4️⃣ Why This Explains Early Breakdowns
A horse with poor load transfer isn’t just inefficient - it’s a ticking time bomb.
- Hock arthritis by six.
- Suspensory tears that never heal.
- Kissing spine in a horse that never learned to lift.
This isn’t bad luck. It’s physics. And yes, physics is painful. But so is paying vet bills the size of your mortgage repayments.
Once you see it, the endless cycle of injections and rehab isn’t fate — it’s the logical result of pretending your horse is four pogo sticks with ears instead of a system that has to share the damn load.
5️⃣ Why Talking About This Will Probably Annoy You
Here’s the thing: people who really understand the sheer magnitude of load transfer will most likely confuse you… or offend you.
My good friend Tami Elkayam is the one responsible for hammering this into my thick skull. And I’ll be honest: it took four clinics and two years of friendship before the penny really dropped. She will read this and her hair will stand on end, because load transfer and how the body works is far more interconnected and complex than I’ve made it here.
Because here’s the reality: there is a reason your six-year-old has the joints of a 27-year-old, or why your horse developed kissing spine. And while I’m pretty good at spotting when dysfunctional load transfer has already chewed through a part of the horse… my bigger mission now is to spread the word before more horses — and bank accounts — get wrecked.😎
It may sound like physics, and physics isn’t sexy. But this is physics that explains your vet bills, your training plateaus, your horse’s “difficult” behaviour, and that nagging sense of “not quite right.”
6️⃣ What We Need to Do About It
Instead of obsessing over the parts, we need to step back and care for the system:
- Movement lifestyle → Turnout, hills, hacking, grazing posture. (Not “arena prison with cardio punishment.”)
- Gut health → Forage first, low starch, fewer ulcers. (Because no one engages their core mid-stomach cramp...and that's not even mentioning how digestion impacts the whole things - that blog is for another day)
- Training for posture → Lift the back, wake up the core, balance the bridge. (“More forward” and "rounder" isn’t a strategy, in fact saying those things can be part of the problem...)
Rider responsibility → Balanced seat, good saddle fit, some self-awareness. (Yes, because we have a massive impact on load transfer and how dysfunctional we make it...but let's get the idea in our heads before we beat ourselves up.)
Preventive care → Conditioning, fascia release, thoughtful management. (“Wait for it to break, then panic” is not a plan.)
7️⃣. Closing
Load transfer is the invisible system that keeps horses sound. When it fails, the legs, joints, and tendons take the hit - and horses “mysteriously” break down.
The tragedy isn’t that we can’t prevent it. It’s that we’re too busy staring at hooves or arguing on social media about everything from bits to barefoot to notice the actual system collapsing under our noses.
Once you understand load transfer, you can’t unsee it. And once you can’t unsee it, you’ll never settle for patching symptoms again. You’ll start caring for the whole horse - because that’s the only way to keep the bridge standing, the system working, and your horse sound.
This is Collectable Advice 17/365 of my notebook challenge.
❤Please share this if it made you think. But don’t copy-paste it and slap your name on it - that’s the intellectual equivalent of turning up to an office party with a packet of Tim Tams and calling it “homemade.” This is my work, my study, my sweat, and my own years of training horses (and myself) before figuring this out (well with Tami Elkayam's patience too). Share it, spread it, argue with it - but don’t steal it.
