If you want it deflate faster, just unscrew the cartridge; simple as that.
FWIW, I have observed that the hissing sound when you do this seems to bother horses more than the “Pop” when it activates, so maybe have some hold your horse for you and back off a bit.
No additional comments, except that there are some very foolish “Never wear one” arguments presented above. If you land on your head, or on your ass, the air vest just isn’t gonna help, is it? Neither will a foam vest. Sheesh.
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Exactly….this is what I do! I always carry an extra canister with me and I’d I need it undeceive the old one and voila it deflates incredible fast! I’ve also never had an issue with getting out of the way of a horse….in fact I fell off my new lease horse yesterday (silly me threw my shoulders ahead and she still jumped and she quite literally jumped me off!) first time she’s ever heard a vest! She didn’t react!
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I would suggest you seek to understand spine biomechanics. It is the concept that when a vest inflates the spine is held rigid and the lateral forces must be redirected into axial forces that is the point. These are mechanical facts and not opinions. The spine is not meant to be a rigid curve. It is intended to absorb forces through flexion and bending. There is a robust selection of literature over decades describing these concepts. More recent FEA work validates this from a mathematical level.
But to your point explicitly, yes we get more horse related spine trauma from riders who land on their butt after landing on their feet. Our record was 3 surgeries in one week.
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No interest whatsoever, thanks anyway.
Horseback riding is unsafe. Period. Wearing a helmet and vest, air or otherwise, can sometimes make it a little safer. The air vest can absolutely save you some pain, at least as important to me, anyway. I think I’ll risk it.
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The point above was that an air vest can increase the risk of spinal fractures or ruptures in situations where you might otherwise be a bit bruised up (if wearing no body protector of any kind) but not have a broken back because the vest will hold your spine rigid.
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Fair enough. However, making factually false statements is not helpful in enabling others to make their choices. Airvests may have a place in the equine safety toolkit but they are highly experimental with no definitive testing nor science to explain efficacy or failure in real world application.
The only approvals required right now are puncture resistance. The testing conducted to this point has been pure marketing type tests with no actual statistical validity.
Wear what you want to wear but don’t dismiss facts via oversimplification.
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Yep; the important word here, “Can”. “Might”. “Potentially”.
About the same value as me saying it “can” prevent injuries.
Are you prepared to put some numbers behind that assertion? Well, neither am I, 'cause AFAIK, definitive research hasn’t been done.
Anecdotally, however, the air-vests do appear to work as advertised for most riders, in most situations. This one included. Really all I need to know about it at this point. YMMV.
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Please don’t think I’m arguing with you. I stated in my first post in this discussion, that there were people here who know a lot more than I do on this subject, and you are certainly one of them.
What I’m looking for, and maybe it’s impossible to answer, is some kind of relative assessment. Because for me, once it gets hot outside, my foam protective vest is not a viable alternative unless I want to size up and wear an ice vest underneath, which I assume defeats the whole purpose. But maybe not?
Is it less risky for me (old lady with inner ear disorder that is gradually eroding my balance) to simply go without any vest at all than to wear an air vest?
And yes, I’ve already replaced Mr. Spook-and-Spin with Mr. Freeze-In-Place and do what I can to minimize risks, but I really don’t want to quit riding yet.
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In my experience, I have been told by neurologists and paralysis rehab experts that a vest would hand likely saved some people from injuries that resulted in paralysis. They explained that yes, there may be a risk of fracturing a vertebrae, or potentially hurting yourself more
in a minor fall than you normally would, but those things are more desirable than being paralyzed from neck hyper extension, (in the same way that we have headrests in cars in case of an accident) this is just my experience; I think it’s interesting that there’s a couple different perspectives among experts and medical professionals!
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Well, that’s me too. I’m a mountain trail rider, and all of the foam vests I have tried (and I’ve tried a few, including the high-dollar ones that were marketed as “breathable”) are far too hot to wear on an all-day ride in warm weather. So it boils down to an air vest, or no vest at all. My HitAir vest is virtually un-noticeable when you’re wearing it, and the one time I had it on during a potentially damaging fall, it worked perfectly, I got up, deflated the vest, and finished the ride just as if nothing had happened. (Except I felt kinda naked w/o my vest. I now carry a spare cartridge.) Other get-offs while wearing the vest were unlikely to have serious consequences, but the vest did deploy as intended, and didn’t do any harm except to my wallet.
Life only comes with one absolute guarantee, and Life with Horses comes with none at all.
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Equestrians, falling off of their horse, landing on their feet but falling back onto their butt, causing a . . . compression fracture . . . (is that the layman’s term?) whatever, damage to their spine, requiring surgery?
While wearing an air-vest, that deployed properly, with the injury apparently related to the inflated air vest preventing their spine from flexing to adsorb the energy, or just in general?
That would be significant, can you provide any details? Specifically how many equestrian back injuries do you/your facility treat on, say, a yearly average, what percentage were wearing a protective vest, and what percentage of those were in an inflatable vest?
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The forces in that fall example scenario are not lateral forces. They are an example of the type of damage that can be done when the force is axial force. Which is how the force is transferred when you have an inflated air vest that restricts the spine from absorbing lateral forces directly.
I’m not aware of any vest that will protect you from landing on your feet and then sitting down/falling back onto your butt.
Lots of people here prefer to wear an air vest over nothing at all which would be their realistic other option.
No one has said “never wear one” on this thread. But just as you are comfortable wearing one because of the ways in which it might help, others have pointed out that there are scenarios in which the vest could make things worse, including based on knowledge we already have about how the spine works.
And telling people to unscrew the canister so it deflates faster? Like someone who is in the process of falling off their horse has a fraction of a second to start unscrewing, possibly mid-air after vest deploys so that it will act more like a car airbag. Really?
I’ve seen vests deploy without freaking out the horse too but I won’t discount someone else’s personal experience to the contrary with a different horse.
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Don’t be silly. Eclipse said that she felt like the Michelin Man when she got up 'cause the post activation deflation was so slow. It is, too; several minutes at least. If you unscrew the cartridge it will deflate in 10 or 15 seconds.
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You are correct. No one has explicitly said, “Never wear one.”
However, neither have the people describing the scenarios in which an air vest could make things worse said anything about any potential benefits of wearing air vests or acknowledged that they might be a reasonable choice for some individuals under some circumstances. This creates a pretty emphatic implicit statement that you should never wear one, which is what some people are reacting to.
If I say, “I’m going to wear an air vest” and you reply with “Air vests can cause spinal fractures because they prevent your spine from flexing,” I, and I think most other people, are going to hear “You shouldn’t wear an air vest.”
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SIIIIIIIGHHHHHH… well got bucked off again. This time I went to the ER because walking was painful and very difficult. I also was having severe shoulder pain. Turns out nothing is broken but I’ve torn a whole bunch of things. An air vest may have helped my shoulder but not my walking.
This is very unusual for this horse to be doing this so it will be investigated! Adult ammies do not want to fly on a regular basis.
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Does anyone know why GP riders do not appear to wear vests? I’m just curious. It certainly not a sign that I or my family shouldn’t wear one, but I am curious about their reasoning.
You see similar things in eventing - the big names don’t necessarily wear the air vests, but will wear the (required) hard vest. Or, they’ll pop one on for certain horses but not others.
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Quite a few of them do.
Some of the vests are built into the jackets, so they are pretty unobtrusive.
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If that is how someone takes the information then at least they are making their decision based on information that is factually accurate about how the human spine works.
There are limitations to all three options (no vest, hard vest, air vest). I was thinking about the falls I’ve had over the past 10 years (a couple I mentioned up thread), and in most cases, an air vest would not have deployed at a time that would have been helpful, I can think of several ways an air vest would have made 4 of the falls worse (including 2 not bad falls where I actually bailed out, with very sound reactive horses), one fall where I went head first into a jump and no vest would have done anything for my resulting sore neck, several close calls where if a vest had deployed I probably would have come off instead of staying on, and one situation where a vest probably would have worked properly but without any vest I only walked away with a scratched elbow and so I wouldn’t have been able to say that a vest was the reason I wasn’t otherwise hurt.
But I also acknowledge that I don’t fall off that much and in too many cases, if I’m going down, so is the horse. So for me with my personal experience point of reference, if I choose to wear a vest, a hard shell makes the most sense for me, and I consider an air vest to add too much risk. Others are free to choose differently, but at least be informed about it—that is the whole point of this thread right?
I suppose the short answer is that the jury is still out.
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Just here to agree with others about how extremely limited the data is for air vests. Not only do we not know if they overall reduce risk of injury, we also don’t know for sure that they don’t actually make things worse.
Many people have had minor falls wearing air vests and report anecdotes about how they were much less bruised or sore than they otherwise would have been and try to take that as evidence that air vests are an effective safety tool. But we don’t know if there is a tradeoff whereby due to the inflation of the vest you are at increased risk to have a more severe injury of another type, such as a neck or spine injury.
We also do know for sure that air vests do not deploy and are therefore useless if you have a type of fall where you do not separate from your horse (i.e. your horse falls with you). We know for sure that air vests provide zero protection for falls that occur while mounting/dismounting when the vest is not clipped in, and falls that occur during or immediately after mounting are very common. There’s also a known element of human error–forgetting to clip in, or forgetting to clip out and spooking the horse as you get off. There’s a known element of equine unpredictability–many horses DO spook when an air vest is deployed. Now maybe in many instances the horse was already doing something bad, but I think it is fair to say that there are plenty of instances where the horse’s behavior could be intensified–a more violent spook, more severe continuation of a spook that would have otherwise stopped, a reflexive kick, interference with the horse catching its balance, etc. If you are riding in a group, other horses will 100% spook at someone else’s inflating air vest, potentially causing accidents for other people.
Obviously people are free to make their own choices, but I think that standard vests have a much better track record with good safety data. Air vests are a marketing marvel for sure and appeal strongly to people who are fashion/trend conscious and are swayed by anecdote vs. actual data/evidence.
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