Clean Run Magazine - March 2010 - 13

to talk to the neighbor’s dog or jumping on the counter to steal your dinner). The most common cause in canine athletes is from incorrect warm-ups and cool downs, which we are all guilty of (yes, including me). We get sidetracked and forget the importance of those two exercises. Unfortunately, this is how most injuries occur in a canine performance athlete and our not being focused on the job creates unnecessary and easily avoided pain for our canine companions. Most of it can be easily repaired by regular massage and creating a safe and effective warm-up and cool down routine, a tool every handler should have to use in their tool bag. When Not to Massage Your Dog One of the most common questions I am asked as a canine massage therapist from performance dog clients is when to massage their dog. What a great question! There are definitely right and wrong times to massage your dog. First, let’s look at when not to massage your dog. I recently read a comment about a dog being massaged just before lunch in the middle of the day at a recent trial. It dawned on me that people are having their dogs massaged at events during the day because that is the only time they can see someone. No other options appeared to be available. People are confused, because some books say you should pre-massage your dogs and some say not to; so what is the right thing to do? All animal-care practitioners go by the mantra of “First, do no harm.” So let’s look at how that fits into massaging your dog before an event. We know that massage assists in the removal of toxins and allows fresh blood to circulate into the muscle fibers. The fresh blood carries new nutrients and clean oxygen into the cells to clean and renew them. All of this takes time. If you massage your dog during the day of an event you would have just removed the old toxins and waste and just got a fresh batch of blood in. Then you put the dog through an agility course and you are injecting lactic acid and more waste into the very muscles you had just cleaned out. You’re “back to square one,” where you need to remove that waste again. Another problem with pre-event massage is that often the dog is very relaxed while being massaged and the muscles become soft and relaxed as well. While some dogs need touch to calm them down in a stress situation, having them completely relax before an event can actually create injuries and hinder the dog’s performance. Unlike a human athlete, a dog is unable to stay mentally focused on the task ahead and goes into a mentally relaxed state as well as a physical one. The next minute you are asking your dog to be focused, alert, and to attempt a number of obstacles in a very short time, when a few minutes ago or an hour ago he was in the land of nod enjoying a relaxing massage and his body and mind have not yet caught up with your excitement and adrenaline. I don’t know about you but I would have a very hard time after a relaxing massage getting up and doing something like that. In this relaxed state the dog’s body can also betray itself as its muscles are much more relaxed than they were in an earlier event that day, which can then lead to knocked bars, inability to turn tightly, and muscle injuries to name a few. I have also seen handlers come out of the ring shaking their heads, unable to understand why the dog was too slow or was just not with them, when I had just watched them March 10 | Clean Run 13

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Clean Run Magazine - March 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Clean Run Magazine - March 2010