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Impact of weight


mardigras

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I have referred to this in the past - but feel it is worth clarifying.

I certainly don't believe 1kg = 0.1L. 

I believe the average impact on a horse for that variance in weight is a fraction over 0.1L.

For many, the impact would be zero or certainly less than 0.1L. In some very rare circumstances around weight carrying ability, it would be a fair bit more than 0.1L. 

That's based on real horses, running real races. Not airy fairy treadmill bullshit.

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I presume this has all been deduced over many years of data collection and analysis.

The scientific(physics) theory suggests that carrying extra weight means doing more work, which means more kinetic energy expended.

I used to know all those equations fairly well, now they are somewhere inside an ageing brain

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Yeahh .... interesting eh. Something like K.E. = 1/2 m v2 ? The problem is that if you apply that to racing, and assume that v is the speed for the entire race and energy is limited or maxed out for the whole race, you get the idiotic relationships between weight and distance that bear no relationship to weight's effect on actual race performance using data from real races. Nice theory though.

 

Edited by curious
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30 minutes ago, Hesi said:

I presume this has all been deduced over many years of data collection and analysis.

The scientific(physics) theory suggests that carrying extra weight means doing more work, which means more kinetic energy expended.

I used to know all those equations fairly well, now they are somewhere inside an ageing brain

From approx. 8 million horse starts. (NZ has around 25-30k horse starts per year in recent years).

Carrying more weight will require doing more work overall, no doubt.

Using models that are purely theoretical makes the assumptions that horses are incapable of doing more work than what they do in a race, even though they are rarely working to capacity except for potentially a small portion of the race. They don't return to scale spent. Which is why using some physical equations on a treadmill is useless. It has no relationship with what a horse does with its available energy reserves in a race, they just tell you how much extra energy the extra weight potentially uses up.

Edited by mardigras
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Very interesting thanks.

So efficiency, the ability to transfer between different energies, is what it is all about.

Probably explains, why some horses have a very good turn of foot as they put it, we'll just call it acceleration.

I'm just wondering, is this what the great judges of a horse can assess early on in their life(yearlings), and why they pay so much money for some horses

 

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