I will endeavor to not comment on any more of your posts. What you include and leave out of your original question and replies, made you sound quite unknowing. Glad you have all your experts available, that must give you lots of peace of mind going forward.
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You seem determined to prove to me and the world that I just don’t know what I’m doing. Good for you if that makes you feel important.
Let me rephrase the original question (although I think most others understood it). If you had two horses equally fit for the job and equally well conformed, would one sport be more damaging than the other. That was my question. I did not ask you to evaluate my fitness program. Thanks though.
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I really know nothing about barrel racing other than what I saw at a small-time rodeo in WY, but it seems to me that barrel racing requires an incredible intense amount of stress put on joints and muscular-skeletal system but just for a short burst whereas upper-level dressage horses maybe have a higher likelihood of repetitive stress on their joints and muscular-skeletal due to the sheer amount of practice and training required to correctly achieve upper level movement.
Correct dressage is supposed to gymnasticize horse and encourage the horse to use its body to carry a rider efficiently. Of all the disciplines I have participated in, dressage folks were the most obsessed with evenness, soundness and musculature of the horse. YMMV.
I’ve seen good dressage training (paired with chiro and PEMF) really turn a poorly muscled, uneven, ewe-necked the horse into a beautiful mover. I know of a few horses over the age of 20 who are still happily competing above 3rd level. These are all just anecdotal points that dressage isn’t damaging, but rather (when done correctly and patiently) is beneficial to a horse’s body.
On the other hand, I have also seen some really bad dressage training with artificial aids and rushing a horse before it was ready that resulted in lameness so - I guess my point is that the training is what can be destructive. Not the sport itself.
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Update:
Last night, at a friend’s, watched some top level Barrel Racers (World’s Toughest Rodeo).
No Yank & Spank technique was used.
And I liked what I saw 
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Yay
To be fair, she said “my mare is barely breathing hard after a race”. Not her training gallops. Not a normal conditioning ride. A barrel race.
I would hope a well-conditioned horse wouldn’t be gasping for air after a single BR run.
She didn’t say that at all. She said:
that isn’t a lot of controlled, collected work.
Like others have said, it’s really hard to compare at a general level especially if you have to factor in all the terrible training practices. There are several articles out there looking at common injuries, but that’s looking at what’s common when there IS an injury, as opposed to “barrel racing horses are commonly injured”
barrel racing injuries - Google Search
dressage injuries in horses - Google Search
My personal take is that the BR horse is more likely to be injured than the Dressage horse, all else equal. Everything done in proper dressage work is aimed at making the horse stronger, fitter, and safer. This includes gallop sets for a lot of the horses.
Proper BR work should incorporate a lot of dressage principles, but the very nature of running a pattern like barrels, brings risks that aren’t in the Dressage world - extreme torque on legs going around the barrels being the most obvious.
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Let it go JB. OP did not give complete information in her original post, poor ways of phrasing, leading me to wrongly understand what she was asking. She did not want to hear what I said about conditioning for either discipline. I see injuries from lack of conditioning, improper warm-ups, legs not fit for the strain of work being asked.
Getting all parts of the leg fit aids the other body parts when stressed, in preventing injuries.
Along with fully conditioning legs and body, there is managing the entire horse, shoeing, rider skills, training, arena conditions in either discipline. This leads to helping a horse “last longer” in their chosen uses. I had obviously not read her posts well, to figure out the question you others did. .
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That’s what I was thinking too. The torque would be the major difference. I wondered about the carrying weight behind in dressage - the stress on the hocks, but I’m thinking the torque, while short bursts, is probably more significant.
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Of injuries to Dressage horses, hind legs are the most common, for this reason.
I’ll caveat this with - I have never run barrels, trained one to do, though have quite a few friends who train and show to higher ammy and even professional levels, so have some understanding: The right slow, steady conditioning of a horse to the pattern is critical, obviously. But even then, you can’t sprint and turn fast without practicing sprinting and turning fast. Obviously sprint work can be worked on in straight lines as part of general conditioning. Dressage horses aren’t typically asked to sprint. That takeoff from a standstill is hard on a body, and is a big player in issues horses have coming off the tracks.
The pattern though? Gotta run the pattern to get better at running the pattern, so while each pattern is a short burst, it’s done in repetition to a point.
I also assume that, like Hunters and Jumpers, once you get to the point a horse knows his job, the vast majority of work is flatwork, not discipline work, and the pattern is done more for a pre-race tuneup, and maybe not even that if you’re showing often enough. I would assume every BR has X amount of turns in him, like every H/J has X number of jumps, and done properly, there just isn’t a lot of pattern work done once the horse is confident in his work.
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This is certainly true. Even when I’m teaching the pattern, I don’t go fast at home. Trot or working canter. Still, there will be torque. Sprints are done on the straightaway (long side), come back to working canter on the short side. That being said, I agree that every barrel horse has X amounts of turns in him. It’s crazy - I know at least a dozen people off the top of my head that have horses that are still running in their 20’s albeit slower. I suppose that’s where conformation comes into play. Great insight. Thanks.
If more people became more educated on what functional conformation is all about, recognize when a horse is lacking, and where, they might find they have sounder horses for longer, by tailoring work to the conformation.
Well-conformed horses (which is not at all what a lot of people think) hold up so much more reliably for a lot harder work.
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@JB - I did some looking around and I found these two articles. Both of them note that lameness in the right front was prevalent in barrel racers. The articles both talk about the fact that most racers go to the right for the first barrel. That barrel is approached with the greatest amount of speed and then deceleration to turn. I thought this was really interesting. My retired barrel horse’s injury was right front.
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Totally makes sense! Every discipline will have a different main cause of lameness in general. Front legs vs hinds. Right vs left (as in this case). Hocks vs stifles, etc.
I haven’t yet seen any study that has looked at a variety of disciplines and noted what % of them end up in vet care for a lameness.
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