How effective is horseback treatment?
Treatment by horses (hippotherapy) is becoming more and more popular. This treatment is related to both the psychological and physical effects of horseback riding.
In general, riding is a wonderful "cure" for hyperdynamic, which is constantly haunting modern people. Sitting in the office, constant use of computers and other electronic devices increased load on the brain - all this has a negative impact on our health.
Communicating with horses helps to quickly relieve stress and minimize its consequences, and riding allows you to stretch all the muscles of the human body and give them much-needed exercise.
Psychological aspect of hippotherapy
When riding, a person follows the rhythm that sets the animal in motion. There is a certain dependence of the rider on the horse. This is involuntarily fixed by our subconscious, which allows us to better understand and take into account the opinion of others.
In the process of horseback riding, the horse and man become equal partners for a while, and this feeling often turns into a true friendship. In addition, there is a sense of responsibility for your trusted partner.
Thus, horses "cure" people for excessive aggression, temper, and instability. It is useful for hippotherapy and fussy or hyperactive people.
Regular communication with horses and horseback riding helps them to become more relaxed in everyday life
Many medical professionals recognize the efficacy of horseback treatment for neurological diseases such as autism, Down's syndrome, Duchenne's myopathy, polio, asthenic neurosis, various sensory disorders and so on.
For example, autists, in real life, closed people living in their own inner world, when communicating with these kind and sympathetic animals, do not feel any threat. This allows them to some extent to liberate their emotions, which in the future is very helpful in communicating with other people. Leaves a sense of constant anxiety, reduces the level of lethargy, disappears various phobias, which has a beneficial effect on the ability of people to adapt to reality.
Shuttle and uninhabited, insecure people, riding a horse, looking down at others from the top. This helps them to gain a sense of self-confidence, increase their self-esteem, which gives them an opportunity to overcome shyness and begin to communicate normally with others.
In other words, horses act as a link between the inner world and the surrounding reality, which leads to the normalization of external communication abilities.
Tactile contact with strong but good animals gives a sense of unity that simply has nothing to compare to. A horse, as a creature with a subtle mental structure, is able to transmit its energy to a human being, beneficially affecting his energy field.
Physical effect of horseback treatment
Horseback riding from horse to rider is transmitted from ninety to one hundred motor pulses per minute. The top of the horse is in a position of unstable balance, which makes the muscles tense to maintain balance. In addition, the body is constantly affected by shocks from the movements of the animal. The result is a kind of massage of all internal organs of the human body.
When riding a horse, the human muscles are not only tense but also relaxed.
A large number of shocks of varying degrees of intensity, which are transmitted from the body of the animal, make actively reduce the back muscles of the rider and the muscles of his stomach.
Regular exercises form a muscle corset, which provides support for the correct position of the spine.
An important therapeutic effect of hippotherapy is provided by the fact that during riding a person is forced to make a lot of different movements that are not typical of his everyday life. Even with normal charging, people move in two directions: back and forth and left and right. When riding a horse, another degree of freedom is added - up and down, which allows you to use other muscle groups. Such "shaking" increases muscle tone, helps to normalize the work of internal organs.
A healthy horse's body temperature is higher than that of a human horse - from 37.5 to 38.5 degrees Celsius. This allow
s us to feel the warmth coming from the animal, and this is very useful for all sorts of skin and muscle diseases.
And finally - an interesting fact, recorded by doctors: during horseback riding in diabetics, the level of sugar in the blood almost returns to normal value.