 |
RE: [RC] Percentage body weight (was: Dainty horses) - David LeBlancMary Ann Spencer said: Might be easier to get those on here to sort of give a brief input about their wt division and wt of horse and how many pulls under what conditions. That's a self-selected sample, which is the worst thing you can do in a study. The only thing that can possibly make it less valid is to have insufficient data. For example, I'm probably an outlier - I'm a heavyweight rider with few pulls, and very few lameness pulls in over 2000 miles, and the record doesn't tell the whole story, and I've tended to have more problems with smaller horses than my 15.2+ horse. I think it's explained by the fact I tend to take my time and have a good horse. My personal experience doesn't establish a trend, though. Seems to me there are so DARN many variable that this is a difficult thing to prove one way or the other. IE how much conditioning of horse AND rider, conditions on the trail, weather during the ride, age of either horse or rider, previous injuries to horse or rider, etc Exactly - the only thing you can do is try and increase the sample size, and the variety of samples, and hope it comes out in the wash. Even so, say you collected data from a bunch of riders at 20-30 rides, and found a correlation, a follow-up could find that the conditioning level of the HW rider's horses differed from the conditioning level of the lighter riders. The key is that just about everything you mention has some explanatory value - the real question is just how much value. I also don't agree with Susan's assertion that the 100 mile distance adds any validity to the findings. It's common on 100 miles rides for fatigue to show up as lameness. That ride also has a very high pull rate. I don't believe you can safely extrapolate those findings to either different 100 mile rides or different distances without additional data. I'd expect there to be a correlation between horse size and lameness due to the obvious mechanical issues (as Heidi pointed out), and for there to be a correlation between rider size and pull rate (though it could be mitigated by slower speeds), but the finding that the heavier you are, the smaller the horse you should have is clearly counter-intuitive. We'd have a bad time finding a sample, but you clearly wouldn't expect to find that a 300# rider on a 900# horse would have a similar pull rate to a 100# rider on a 1100# horse. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Ridecamp is a service of Endurance Net, http://www.endurance.net. Information, Policy, Disclaimer: http://www.endurance.net/Ridecamp Subscribe/Unsubscribe http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/logon.asp Ride Long and Ride Safe!! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
|