A rider reaches for a ring while on horseback.

Parents are often worried when they see their child toe-walking. Is it a concern?

Toe walking may be a symptom of a hyperactive nervous system. A child may always seem in a hurry or in constant motion. Chronic toe-walking might make heel cords tight and over time may restrict movement.

As a school physical therapist, I had a student that was almost as big as me by the time she was in third grade. She had suffered a brain injury when she was a toddler. She was a toe walker and couldn’t sit still.

Because she was always in constant motion, she bounced with each step, and in small spaces seemed like a bull in a China shop, always bumping into things. Her physical disability was more of a sensory regulation and integration problem. I used whatever sensory strategies I could in the limited space, equipment and time that I had in school. It was a great challenge for both of us!

I convinced her family to bring her for therapeutic horseback riding at Centaur Stride.

How does therapeutic horseback riding help?

She would initially engage willingly in anything that was suggested but her attention was so short and her body so hyperactive that she was focused on another interest after only a very short time, sometimes only a few seconds. (One of her school goals was to improve attention to tasks). Once she was on the horse, she couldn’t get down by herself. It solved the problem of running off! She did often ask, “Miss Claudia, will you help me down now.” Because she was also easily distracted, my reply could be, “we didn’t do this yet” or “when the clock gets to the 5”, or something else for her to focus on such as a game on horseback.

The horse was calming her system the whole time she was riding, and we were focusing on attention with frequent redirection, initially for just short intervals, then longer and interacting with others also on horseback. The entire time she was also learning to control the horse’s actions, steering, walk-on and whoa to get to specific places in the arena to accomplish the task. I could adjust the stirrups to place her feet in them with just the right amount of stretch. She would notice the stretch feeling or discomfort after a few minutes and ask if I would help her get her feet out of the stirrups, and I would, but the stretch was being accomplished in small increments, and much longer than the 90 second stretch time needed for relaxing muscles. We would then have to put her feet back in the stirrups so she could complete a task that required her to reach higher than she could while sitting so she had to stand in the stirrups. She did have a significant difference in her gait when she got off the horse each time.

She could stand up more erect instead of forward leaning, could slow down her walk with hardly any bounce, getting her foot flat instead of up on her toes. In therapy then, we could work on her quality of gait, such as heel-toe pattern with weight shift and better control of speed. She met many of her school goals such as improved focus and attention span, ability to concentrate, ability to scan her environment to look for things, sequencing, remembering the order of up to 3 step tasks, and more aware of the body language of the horse. She learned to prioritize actions, stopping to address what the horse was or wasn’t doing so she could complete her task at a particular place in the arena. She was learning to take command of the horse instead of just passively going where the horse took her. She was multi-tasking with purpose.

Movement is necessary for the brain to process, and refine information, and even more necessary for someone trying to heal from an injury or brain dysfunction. Because the horse can work on so many different areas of brain stimulation simultaneously, the results were much more noticeable and lasted longer than anything I tried to accomplish in a school therapy session. (And I can say I was having a very difficult time addressing this child’s goals in the school setting!) The horseback riding was just an adjunct to her school therapy but made my job in school so much easier, and her goals so much more attainable!

Please help us to continue to help others. Follow us on Facebook: Centaur Stride Therapeutic Horseback Riding facility. https//linktr.ee/centaurstride

Claudia Monroe is the executive director of Centaur Stride.