The Basic Principles of Equine Massage/Muscle Therapy

Rating:
Summary: The Basic Principles of Equine Massage/Muscle Therapy
Review: Excellent book! Mike Scott communicates well with the lay person in easy to understand terms--almost as though he is speaking directly to you. His perspective is interesting--and the book is a great anotomey lesson or review as well. I highly recommend it and would look forward to a next addition.

Rating:
Summary: Just What I Was Looking For
Review: Mike Scott's guide provides an ideal overview for the horse owner/enthusiast interested in learning about equine massage. The book is very well organized and surprisingly easy to read. It introduces the layperson to how muscles work and discusses the importance of learning about horse anatomy. It moves on to various massage techniques and strokes before describing a massage session. It then contains a very helpful section consisting of anatomical line drawings of "active points" to be worked accompanied by black and white photographs demonstrating the techniques. Mike also includes helpful sections on stretches for your horse and saddle fitting.

As good as the book is, I found it could have benefitted from more extensive photo selection and diligent proofreading. The photos that were included were extremely useful; however, I found it somewhat frustrating that some photos were repeated when other angles or shots would have helped. Most of the captions are also appropriately descriptive, but there are others that could have been a bit more specific (particularly when identifying which muscles were being worked). Finally, there are more than a mere handful of grammatical, typographical, and punctuation errors. While the lack of care to cure these errors certainly had me wonder if there was a similar lack of care about the substance, all in all, I do recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: The Basic Principle of Equine Massage and Muscle Therepy
Review: My horse recently got a massage and it helped him a lot. When I worked him afterwards, he looked wonderful, and his canter, which is really a rocking horse canter, looked great! I really wanted to know what I could do to keep him in such great shape, especially through the winter.