10 REASONS YOUR DOG DOESN’T LOSE WEIGHT
The reality is clear APOP’s 2017 clinical survey, showed that 56% of dogs were classified as clinically overweight (body condition score (BCS) 6-7) or obese (BCS 8-9) by their veterinary healthcare professional. That equals an estimated 50.2 million dogs are too heavy, based on 2017 pet population projections provided by the American Pet Products Association (APPA). In 2016, APOP found 54% of dogs were overweight or obese. With all of...
Help Your Cat Exercise More
You’re not the only one who needs to work out. Exercise is important to your cat’s overall health. Movement, especially the kind that uses her hunting skills, can keep her weight down and help her work off extra energy. Playtime is crucial for her mental well-being, too -- it can help stop depression and boredom, which can lead to bigger health and behavior issues. With a little help from you,...
Equine Conditioning Principles
Individual responses to conditioning differ based on genetics, age, and previous activity level. As with a human athlete, the success of a fitness and conditioning program for your horse is based on the horse's body's adaptive response to the stress of exercise. To achieve a conditioning and training effect, the horse must be subjected to gradual increases in workload with each new level of training being maintained until the...
Easy Exercises for Canine Conditioning
Just like us, dogs can benefit from a stretching and strengthening program. It can build and maintain muscle mass, improve body awareness and balance, and provide a physical and mental workout. Canine athletes definitely gain an advantage from this type of conditioning, but senior dogs also need to stay limber. Couch potatoes and bored dogs can reap rewards too, because the activity is mentally stimulating. And some of these exercises can...
HYDROTHERAPY FOR DOGS – GUIDE, COST, BENEFITS
Hydrotherapy for dogs is a medical practice that uses water to relieve dogs of certain joint and bone pains and problems. Hydrotherapy or more specifically, canine hydrotherapy basically uses the main properties of the water namely buoyancy, viscosity, hydrostatic pressure and resistance. Buoyancy is the ability or tendency of a body to stay afloat or rise to the top of a liquid or gas. Such properties of water enable dogs...
Muscle Actions of Canine Locomotion
Dogs have a great capacity for assisting their human counterparts in their daily lives and are very excited and willing to perform these tasks. This assistance can be in many forms, which include, but are not limited to, physical assistance dogs, guide dogs, detection dogs, military and police dogs, search and rescue dogs and hunting dogs. In the human world, there has been a great deal of research in developing programs...
Gluteal Exercises for the Dog
A note from Laurie Edge-Hughes: The inspiration for this blog came from an article that I read regarding exercises for the gluteal muscles in people. Essentially, the article talked about training the glutes in 3 different positions and how this was key for full retraining of gluteal function. That got my head spinning to think about whether we could do this in dogs. The video blog (vlog) below contains my...
Neurodynamic Techniques and Jumping Performance
I found a fascinating article that I think could be of relevance to our sporting dogs. I’m just going to put the abstract up here to start. --------------------- The immediate effect of neurodynamic techniques on jumping performance: A randomised double-blind study Aksoy, Cihan C. | Kurt, Vedat | Okur, İsmail | Taspınar, Ferruh | Taspinar, Betül Journal of Back and Musculoskeletal Rehabilitation, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 15-20, 2020 BACKGROUND...