Podcast 51: The impossibles: Conformation

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Have you heard or thought these things about a horse?

That’s just the way she is
He’s always been that way
Can’t do anything about how they’re built
Nothing’s gonna change that

In my opinion, many problems blamed on conformation are fixable. They’re usually simple alignment issues.

Such as:

Weak lumbo-sacral coupling
Shoulder too upright or too flat
Over at the knee
Too straight hind leg (post-legged)
and more

Learn more about this on today’s Horse Mysteries Solved podcast.

Summary:
Summary by AI:

Dr. Renee Tucker discusses the concept of confirmation in horses, emphasizing that it is not fixed and can be changed. She recounts a case of a horse named Brook who had a gait issue due to misalignments in her sternum, shoulder, and vertebrae. Through her Tucker Biokinetic Technique (TBT), Dr. Tucker realigned these structures, correcting the horse’s gait. She challenges the belief that confirmation issues are permanent, pointing out that asymmetry or deviations from the Fibonacci sequence indicate abnormalities that should be addressed. Dr. Tucker uses the Fibonacci sequence as a natural template for ideal horse structure, encouraging owners to assess their horses against this standard for optimal health and performance.

Transcription:
Renee (00:00)
Hey, friends. Dr. Renee Tucker here. Today’s podcast is on the Impossible’s, and this one is about confirmation. Can that be changed or not? Again, I’m Dr. Renee Tucker. I am the 30-year holistic, veterinarian, certified in chiropractic acupuncture, and started my own energy technique, the Tucker Biokinetic technique. As we get into our story about confirmation, let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, it was last year. Anyways, I saw this cute little babe there, a four-a-horse, and her name’s Brook. As they were bringing Brook up to me, I could see that she was winging out with her left front. Now, if you’re not familiar with winging out, that just means that instead of going straight forward, the left front was going out to the side, laterally, and then back into the front. She did that on every step, and she did not do it with the right front. Okay. I asked the owner about this, and they just said, Well, they had only gotten her about six months ago. The owners at that time had said, She’s always been like that. That’s just how she came. That’s her confirmation, and it’s no problem. That’s what everyone was thinking.

Renee (01:18)
That’s just how she is, and it’s not fixable. As I worked on broke, I found many misalignments. For those of you who might be interested, I’ll tell you what they were. The sternum, that’s the breastbone of the horse, the bottom of the barrel, thoracic cavity. That was moved over to the left. Now, that effectively moves the shoulder over to the left. But the There’s plenty of horses whose sternum is misaligned, and they don’t wing out. What’s up with that? In order to have a wing out situation, you actually have to have multiple things happening at the same time. So we gotbrooke’s sternum was totally misaligned. Her shoulder itself, so the scapula and the humerus, that joint right there, the shoulder, that also was misaligned. Then what usually happens with a wing out is the last two cervical vertebra and the first two thoracic vertebra. You have four vertebra in a row that were moved over, misaligned, to the right. She’s got underneath there, underneath of her left shoulder, she has her sternum pushing it out, and then the next four vertebra dropping over to the right effectively lets the shoulder fall in. It’s pushed out and it’s fall in.

Renee (02:44)
That’s what creates the wing out thing. My point here is, I fixed it. Not a problem, not anything big deal. You just align everything like we do in TBT. She walks off and she’s moving perfectly straight. Now, it’s fun for me, I’ll have to admit, when the owner is like, Wait, she’s not wing out anymore. How could you fix that? I’m like, Well, it’s just misalignments. The trainer who had referred me, and I appreciate that, he’s been a horse person for 40 years, and he said, I thought that was impossible to fix, and he just did it in 30 minutes. The whole session was 30 minutes, not the whole… Just the shoulder. Anyways, I was very happy about this. I love it when I get to surprise people with things they think are impossible to fix, and there you go. They are fixed. It’s delightful. And they’re very happy, and the horse is happy. Because even though she was technically not in any pain and officially not having any trouble with that winging out issue. She really was. Because when anything is asymmetrical, the body has to compensate or pick up the slack for that asymmetry.

Renee (04:02)
Then those compensations, they get tired and they will start hurting eventually. Look, I’m sure we’ve all had this happen, but if you haven’t, just picture if you hurt your knee and you’re limping around trying to keep the weight off your leg. It’s not too long before. Not only does your other leg hurt because it’s taking too much weight, but then your back will start hurting. And weird enough, your shoulder might start hurting because it just travels around trying to compensate for the injured knee. Anyway, that’s just one example. I’m sure you all have had this happen. Okay. So one point to my confirmation topic today is But if it’s asymmetrical, it’s not normal. It is not just something they come with. So that can either be a lameness or a weird way of going, like the winging out, or it can be asymmetrical muscles. You have pretty decent muscling on one hind leg, but only not so good muscling on the other. That’s not how horses are. That’s not how they are made. Sure, it may have been like that for five years ever since you bought a horse, but that doesn’t mean it’s normal.

Renee (05:18)
Any asymmetries, those are not normal and should be addressed. Now, the other thing I want to talk about is just general confirmation. There’s lots of confirmation gurus out there who I respect. They know so much stuff. And those confirmation gurus, they are correct for that horse they are analyzing. That snapshot in time. So what I mean by that is a confirmation person will be like, Okay, look at this angle of the shoulder. You can see how it’s too upright, and therefore, the horse is only good for trotting, or whatever. But the key is a couple of things that I don’t feel some of them take into consideration. The horse’s shoulder could be too up right because it’s misaligned, or like we just talked about, the sternum could be shoving it over to one side, or the hoof could be trimmed poorly and making the angle of the shoulder different. I know some confirmation people do take the hoofs into consideration, but not all. The one thing I do disagree with, and I may have alluded to that already, is that some say, this cannot be changed. No, it is impossible to change confirmation. Let me tell you, it is possible.

Renee (06:38)
I do it all the time. We already talked about the shoulder issue. Horses that are over at the knee Everyone thinks this is a confirmation problem. I’m talking official over at the knee. That’s always a misalignment. The body doesn’t make horses that are over at the knee, the body. I mean, the body’s design is not made to be over at the knee. It’s not effective. It’ll damage the knee over time. On the one hand, it’s right to look at that and know some confirmation, be like, Hey, this over at the knee is a problem, but it’s very fixable. What else? Things like a lot of confirmation people talk about weak coupling. Basically, they’re looking at the angles in between the lumbar and the sacrum and the hip. They’re like, No, these angles not correct, not good enough for a jumper. Just pass on the source. Based upon this one snapshot in time, they could be correct. However, I’m saying you could fix it. Weak coupling, that’s easy. That’s typically the pelvis is misaligned and the lumbar is not functioning well. Lots of things can affect the lumbar. It’s like on a low back. It picks up the slack for a lot of things.

Renee (07:59)
The lumbar It will get, not twisted, but affected for sure if the pelvis is misaligned because it’s attached to the pelvis. But guys, if anything is misaligned in the front end of a horse, they’re going to shift some of their weight towards the back and the lumbar area gets misaligned as well from that. Well, the lumbar stuck there in the middle. Okay, but it is all fixable. Now, one thing that I do want to address is, sometimes people, many times, people don’t realize, well, what is confirmation and what can be fixed and what’s not? It’s confusing because literally my horse has been like this for 10 years, so how would I know? It came that way. And so I think that’s his normal. And shouldn’t we just not mess with it? Don’t fix it if it isn’t broke. Here’s my little clue I’d love to chat about. Two things. As I already mentioned, if it’s asymmetrical, that’s a problem. But the other thing is, if it’s not following the Fibonacci sequence, it’s a problem. I hope everyone just laughed at that and thought, Really, it’s crazy because this is the fun part for me. You may have heard of the Fibonacci sequence.

Renee (09:20)
It’s also referred to as the golden mean. You can Google it, and they have lots of good pictures for you. The Fibonacci sequence is the key to how everything in nature is designed. Fibonacci is a mathematician, and it’s a sequence of numbers. They go like this. It’s zero, one, two, 3, 5, 8, 13, that, that, that. It keeps on going forever. All you’re doing is adding the last two numbers together to get the next one. 0 plus 1 is 1. I think I might have done that wrong, but whatever. Then it’s 1 plus 2 is 3. Then 3 plus 2 is 5. 5 plus 3 is 8. 8 plus 5 is 13. You may wonder, why the heck are we doing math? Well, it’s about the ratio of the numbers in this sequence. If you take the last number in the Fibonacci series and you divide it by the one right in front of it, every single time you’re going to get a ratio of 1.6. Why do I care about 1.6? Guys, check this out. Okay, listen. Everything is designed this way. Have you noticed that the petals, the leaves on a flower, they don’t come off perfectly symmetrically?

Renee (10:57)
Here am I talking about symmetry in a horse, but I’m saying the petals are designed to come off one, then two, then three. As it goes around the stem, they come off in the Fibonacci sequence. If you look at how our faces are designed, they’re designed by the Fibonacci sequence in that the ratio of one part to another part, everywhere you measure, it’s always 1.6. Same thing for seashells. You measure all the little changes, little curves on the seashell, all the ratios are 1.6. Same as tree limbs. Tree limbs are all coming off at 1.6. All of the fantastic architecture, like the Roman architecture, like the Roman Colosseums, all the ratios of the architecture are 1 to 1.6. All the great paintings from way back in the Renaissance era, the ratio of any… If there’s people in there, they’re spread apart, 1 to 1.6. The heights of the tree is 1:1.6. If it’s beautiful and gorgeous and natural, it follows this ratio 1 to 1.6. Look at the horse. If you look at the horse from the head to the tail, where are the withers? Well, they’re not dead center. No, they’re about a a third of the way of the length of the horse.

Renee (12:33)
That’s 1 to 1.6. So it’s essentially pretty close to one-third, two-thirds. Look at the legs. All right? We have, if you look at every bone ratio to every other bone, it’s 1 to 1.6 the whole time. It’s this beautiful ratio. I’m sorry, describing it is lacking. So if you take a look on the internet, that’s the Fibonacci sequence. Or On YouTube, there’s lots of videos. They show you all these pictures and showing how everything is designed exactly like this. Even the stars in the sky. Let me tell you about the Analema. Who’s heard of that? That is spelled A-N-A-L-E-M-M-A, and it’s super cool. Let’s say you wanted to make one. You would look at the sun. Let’s say the sun. Every week, you take a picture of the sun in the sky from the exact same spot from your house. You don’t move your camera. You just press the button, click, click every week, all year round. That picture If you put all of those little sun spots over every single week in one picture, superimposed, so you have 52 suns all throughout the year, it makes this shape of, guess what? A 1 to 1.6 ratio.

Renee (14:00)
In the sky, God. Super cool. Okay, again, please check that out on Google. It’s neat. My point is, your horse has got these ratios all over the place. If you have a horse and you’re like, I don’t know if this is normal. It just looks a little bit weird to me. Take a picture of your horse and then get a picture from one of those confirmation books or online and compare it. What is wrong here? Something is grabbing my eye and I don’t know what it is, but it’s just weird. Be sure, though, to get the confirmation of a perfect horse to compare from the same type breed. There’s no point comparing the confirmation of a driving horse to a thoroughbred. It’s all a difference. So make sure you get one pretty close to your breed and just compare. And you say, Okay, well, listen, this shoulder just looks so weird compared to ideal confirmation. Great. There’s a sign for you. Maybe it is the same right and left on your horse, but overall, it is not right. That can be many reasons for that. Or maybe the angle of the Hawks and the Stifles.

Renee (15:16)
They’re just not quite right. You can check that out by comparing to the normal confirmation, or I should say, ideal confirmation, and see how it’s going. Okay, so that’s my point for today. One, confirmation is changeable. How you know if it’s supposed to be like that is either asymmetry, so right and left thing, or when you look at the horse with the viewpoint of its design, the Fibonacci sequence, which is 1-1.6. Whenever we see something like that, it comes across as beautiful. If you see those, what’s that, People magazine, and they always put the most beautiful people in the world, look at their faces. They’re symmetrical and they’re perfectly aligned with this Fibonacci sequence. Many of us are. I know I’m not. I’m working on it. Give me a chance. My point is, Fibonacci sequence, take a look at it and then look at your horse and see what you get. Because if it’s not lining up to the Fibonacci sequence, then it is fixable. But with that, that makes sense. You enjoyed my rambling, and I’ll talk to you guys next time. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.

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