You need to get blood back into all the muscles and give time to stretch out those muscles, tendons, ligaments, joint capsules that have contracted from bouncing in the trailer for hours and days. If it s been a particularly long or hard journey, this may be all that gets done. Sometimes just the walking is plenty. Don t go by distance, but by the watch. The purpose of this very gradual increase in work is to slowly bring more muscle fibers into play.
Muscles operate by recruiting more fibers and bundles into use as needed.
Our goal is to just bring in a few at a time to allow the blood flow and other metabolic shifts to occur a little at a time. The other major purpose of this technique is to keep returning the horse to the walk. Most often, an early tie up may be noticed by a subtle change at the walk. This can easily be confused with being high , so it really pays to know what your horse s normal gait is. If at any point during any of this exercise you are not sure, halt for a couple of minutes, then walk out again.