Majyk equipe vrs neoprene vrs bandage, which beats the heat?
Leg protection in the equine world is almost its own industry. Many materials, designs, shapes and marketing campaigns to convince you to buy a brand product. But what effect does the leg protection have on the horse?
Heat is the biggest element we must tackle when is comes to our horses’ legs and tendons. Cooling the tendons via blood flow isn’t sufficient due to the deficiency of blood vessels at the tendon core. Not only this, but skin temperature and tendon core temperature are always different, with the latter being higher. When racehorses were exercised on a dirt track at a canter and gallop, the tendon core temperatures were found to be up to 40.4°C and the skin temperature to be 37.1°C
When you look at the tendon on a cellular level, the tendon fibroblasts are quite important. Fibroblasts are an active cell in connective tissue, they produce tropocollagen, which is a pre-cursor to collagen. Following tissue injury, fibroblasts play an important role in would healing. Tendon fibroblast cells survival rate drops by 63% after 43°C. High temperatures can damage the fibrous tissue but also affect the survival rate of the fibroblasts that are required to repair the damaged tissue. This shows that tendon temperature has a direct correlation to tendon healing ability.
So, as we exercise our horses, we must keep these tendons cool by any means. Usually after work we cool with applying cool water or ice, this will help rapidly cool the tendon. But what about when we apply boots and bandages for exercise? Many studies have been conducted to show that tendon skin temperatures increase when applying boots and bandages compared to a bare leg. Temperatures increase the most with the use of fleece bandages.
With this in mind, I wanted to compare three leg wear types on my horse. I compared the temperature changes of my horses legs wearing a Majyk Equipe Cross Country Boot, a standard neoprene brushing boot, a 100% fleece bandage and a control leg (no leg wear).
I took the tendon skin temperature of all four legs with an infrared thermometer, half way up the tendon, on the outside of each leg
I noted these temperatures and applied each of the boots and the bandage to my horse. Following this I lunged her for 16 minutes, 8 minutes each side, 3 minutes of walk followed by 5 minutes of trot. After this, I removed each of the boots or bandage and recorded the skin temperature in the same place.
Below are the results, before and after exercise in degrees.
From the results we can see the smallest change in temperature is the leg with no boot or bandage (1.7 degrees increase), the next lowest is the Majyk Equipe Boot (5.5 degrees increase), followed by the neoprene boot (6.4 degrees increase) and finally the largest increase is the fleece bandage (6.7 degrees). What is surprising is the similar level of increase between the neoprene and the fleece bandage. I would have thought the neoprene would not cause almost as much of an increase as the fleece bandage.
Overall, this is in line with the literature available, that no boot causes less of an increase in temperature compared to wearing boots, and that the highest increase of temperature was seen with the fleece bandage. The Majyk Equipe boots comes out on top as the lowest increase in temperature before and after exercise. This boot it ventilated and is made with a non-neoprene lining, so that would help keep you horses tendons cool during exercise.