Asher and Smart

Thought it was about time I updated about the special. He is doing ok. I took him to the Smart clinic in Wales which is a referral clinic. They have been absolutely fantastic. They identified his injury as damage to the hip abductor muscles. They could tell this because the muscle wastage in surrounding areas was so specific. So he had ultrasound to kick start the healing process and also had accupuncture to reduce inflammation. Along with his injury they identified other areas of muscle tightness, some possibly caused by trying to compensate for the injury. He also had analysis on the water treadmill, which he has done really well on!

So we were set tons of physio exercises including stretching out his neck and back as some of the muscles in his back are over developed, he runs and jumps with a high head carriage which causes him to pull from the front legs rather than push from behind and they believe this could be part of the reason for him knocking poles in agility. So he started off on 3 x 15min slow lead walks a day (so that he had to distribute weight properly) and after 3 weeks is now up to 3 x 30min lead walks a day plus 2 x 10min off lead. It would be longer than this but he is such a nutter we didn't want him to do too much too soon.

Smart are really pleased with his progress, the inflammation around the injury has gone, as has the tightness in his diaphragm caused by overcompensating and trying to transfer his weight to his front end. I can tell that the leg still isn't 100%, he's still not weight bearing fully but it is much better than it was and it's only occasionally or very slightly that I see him favouring now. It clicks quite a bit at the moment but I read somewhere that this is a sign of healing.

Because of this progress he had to start a little bit of jumping this week, but I had to encourage him to jump properly with the right take off point and with his head lower. He coped with this well and has showed no adverse effects after so I'm feeling hopeful that he will be better soon.

We're back at Smart on Monday and providing he has continued to progress will be allowed to go back to flyball training. They said he could do full runs but I think I will just let him do runbacks because lets face it, Asher is not your ordinary dog! All being well we will continue to build him up from that and he will be back competing at Acremead at the start of May.

I've been very impressed with Asher through this time, he has been an angel at the Smart clinic with everything they have done to him. Everyone there loves him! They were also amazed by the amount of muscle and muscle tone he has especially considering the amount of time he had off exercise, apparently he must have good genes! So, feeling a bit more optimistic although still haven't entered any competitions for fear of jinxing it! Fingers crossed please, and i'll update on him again soon.