Understanding Load, Force and Capacity In Horses
Load, Force, and Capacity: What They Mean and What That Means For Your Horse
A Simple Way to Understand How Holistic Horse Care Actually Helps Your Horse
Most soundness, performance, and behavior problems in horses don’t start with a single injury. They start with an imbalance between three very ordinary things: how a horse moves, what the horse is being asked to handle, and how much the horse can safely tolerate. In more technical language, those three things are called force, load, and capacity. You don’t need to use those words in daily life, but understanding what they mean can completely change how you think about your horse’s health.
Force is simply how your horse produces and organizes movement. It’s the push from the hind legs, the swing of the back, the reach of the forelimbs, and the way motion travels through the body. Owners often describe this as power, impulsion, balance, or freedom. A horse can be strong and still organize force poorly. When force is well organized, movement looks easy, elastic, and efficient. When force is poorly organized, the horse may look stiff, uneven, heavy on the forehand, or awkward, even if nothing is obviously “injured.”
Load is everything the horse is being asked to tolerate. This includes the rider’s weight, training intensity, footing, tack, frequency of work, competition schedules, and even mental stress. Owners usually think of this as workload or pressure. Load is not just how heavy something is. It is the total physical and nervous system demand placed on the horse on any given day.
Capacity is the horse’s ability to handle that load without breaking down. This includes fitness, tissue health, nutrition, digestion, recovery, nervous system stability, and resilience. Owners often call this durability, stamina, or how well a horse “holds up.” Two horses can do the same work with very different outcomes, not because the work is different, but because their capacities are different.
Problems arise when these three fall out of balance, resulting in horse performance problems and chronic lameness. A horse may be asked to carry more load than its capacity can support. Or a horse may have enough capacity, but poor organization of force causes certain tissues to be overloaded. Over time, this leads to compensations, chronic strain, pain, reduced performance, and behavior changes.
This is where equine holistic medicine becomes so important.
Holistic horse care does not just treat symptoms. It works on all three sides of the equation.
Bodywork, osteopathy, chiropractic, and fascial therapies primarily influence force. They help reorganize how movement travels through the body, reduce protective holding, improve coordination, and restore efficient use of joints and soft tissues. When force is better organized, the same workload creates less strain.
Training and rehabilitation strategies influence both force and load. Thoughtful exercise selection, progressive loading, appropriate rest, and good movement education, including neuroplasticity exercises, help match what the horse is being asked to do with how the horse is able to do it.
Nutrition, digestion, herbs, management, and recovery strategies primarily influence capacity. Good mineral balance, healthy gut function, adequate energy, proper sleep, turnout, and low chronic stress all increase the horse’s ability to adapt and recover. A horse with higher capacity can tolerate training, heal more effectively, and maintain soundness longer.
Nervous system regulation influences all three. A dysregulated horse uses more force to do the same task, perceives more load from the same environment, and has lower effective capacity to cope. When regulation improves, movement becomes more efficient, stress responses soften, and recovery improves.
In simple terms, equine holistic medicine helps by:
organizing how the horse moves
matching what we ask to what the horse can tolerate
·and increasing the horse’s ability to adapt over time
True soundness is not about fixing isolated problems. It is about keeping force, load, and capacity in balance.
When those three are aligned, horses move better, recover better, learn better, and stay sound longer. This is whole horse health. When they drift out of balance, even the best treatments become temporary.
Understanding this framework helps you (the owner) stop chasing symptoms and start supporting the conditions that allow health to emerge.