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From learning about wound care, signs of colic, lameness, to muscle soreness, learning about how horse’s bodies are built and work improves your horsemanship skills and the overall care you give to horses.
The horse’s body possesses approximately 700 muscles that control movement. Skeletal muscles, which attach to bones via tendons, contract or shorten in length in highly coordinated ways to produce movement. These muscle contractions allow horses to spin and run with their turnout buddies, chew mouthfuls of grass, pin their ears in warning, and swish their tails at flies.

Movement therefore is dependant on groups of muscles working together to create fine precision and smoothness; when one group contracts, the opposite group relaxes.

There are 3 types of muscles:

1. Skeletal muscles. They are the ones connecting the different bone segments to each other.
2. Smooth muscles. These muscles are not voluntarily controlled. Such as: digestive tract muscles, the esophagus and the blood vessels’ wall.
3. Cardiac muscles. This is an intermediary between the two previous types of muscles.

In this article, we will only talk about skeletal muscles due to being the only ones we are able to voluntarily control. I could try to advise you on how to strengthen your intestines but that probably won’t work…😁

Muscle is covered by a fibrous tissue called fascia, to which other muscles can attach, and muscles attach to bone via tendons.