Nika The Horse Listener

Nika The Horse Listener Fully qualified McTimoney Animal Chiropractor & Sports Animal Massage therapist, providing clinics all over the United Kingdom.

Horse Chiropractor | Horse Listener
Problem solver for performance horses
Providing solutions for Equestrian practitioners
📍Holding treatment clinics worldwide STOP, OBSERVE AND LISTEN TO YOUR ANIMALS

Having grown up around animals, it was no surprise that I dedicated years of study to enhance my knowledge and specialise in physical therapies. I have a Bachelor of Honours in Equine Sports Scie

nce with Psychology and a Masters Distinction in McTimoney Animal Manipulation. I also have a diploma in Animal Sports Massage therapy, NVQ stage three and a BHS stage one and two. My background in horses started in pony club, competing competitively in Dressage, Show Jumping and Eventing, until I outgrew my pony and he had to be retired. I then spent three months at the British Racing School in Newmarket where I learnt about flat racing and from there worked for Trainers Richard Fahey and Brian Ellison riding as a professional jockey on the flat. From here I then travelled to Australia for a year working for Chris Waller, David Payne and Tony McEvoy specialising in track work. After completing my BSc I worked with Witheford Equine specialising in problem or "misunderstood" horses. It was here that I learnt about how horses communicate and the impact pain or discomfort has on behaviour and subsequent performance. I then spent 4 years in Oxfordshire working with Premier Pre Dressage, facilitating in equine rehabilitation cases and in schooling and competing livery horses. I was fortunate to competed Internationally in Dressage up to PSG on clients horses, representing GB for the MCI. During my time at Premier Pre I trained weekly with International Dressage rider Alice Hurley and every few months with Olympic Dressage Rider and Trainer Richard Davidson and feel that I can relate to clients from a ridden perspective. I treat every animal as an individual and take pride in providing a Holistic Service. My mission is to educate every owner and provide them with the tools to help their four legged friends through the ups and downs of training, competing and injury. Team work is vital for optimal performance and welfare, therefore I enjoy working part of a team of paraprofessionals (Vets, Farriers, Dentists, Saddlers and Other practitioners). I am fully insured with the MMA, AHRP and the technique of Chiropractic, McTimoney is also recognised by BEVA as one of its MusculoSkeletal Paraprofessionals. Prior to any treatment Veterinary Permission is required as part of the 1966 Veterinary Act. If you have any questions please contact me : https://forms.gle/RdZ29VpZ8LPzU6pk6
[email protected]

Conformation is the hardware. It describes what the horse has available. Structure, proportion, architecture, the things...
04/09/2026

Conformation is the hardware. It describes what the horse has available. Structure, proportion, architecture, the things that can be measured standing still.

Function is a different question. It is what the horse actually does with that architecture once it moves. And good hardware does not guarantee good use of it. A horse with fairly ordinary conformation and excellent function will outmove a beautifully built horse that never learned to use what it was given.

Which is why the horse that looks flawless in the aisle can fall apart the moment it works, and why nothing in the static assessment saw it coming.
That was never your assessment failing. A standing horse cannot tell you what it does when it moves. You were looking at the only thing there was to look at.

This comes out of work Bradley Whale and I have been developing. Early work rather than settled science, which is why it is worth a look now.
So here is one thing to try.

Look at the thorax cold, before anything else. The shape of the back, where a saddle would sit, how it carries between the shoulders. Fix that picture in your head.

Then work the horse, or have it worked, and look again at exactly the same thing.

Where this is working, the shape has changed. Broader, flatter, differently carried. It is not quite the same horse standing there. Where it has stopped, you get the same shape twice. Cold and warm, identical. And that is the finding. Not what the shape is. Whether the shape can change at all.
A horse standing still can only tell you what it has. Never what it does with it.

PS. Bradley Whale and I are running a live 90 minute workshop on the thoracic sling on Thursday 24th September at 6:30pm UK. Comment THORAX and I will send you the details.

Nobody wears tight jeans when they are bloated.We spend our riding lives asking for more engagement, more from behind, a...
04/09/2026

Nobody wears tight jeans when they are bloated.
We spend our riding lives asking for more engagement, more from behind, a stronger core, and this month we are asking for it from a horse whose belly is full of gas.
Have you ever tried to run with a sore stomach, or gone to the gym feeling swollen and heavy and done your best work? You would not do up the top button, let alone brace through your middle and lift.
Engagement does not start in the hind leg. It starts with the abdominal wall lifting the back so the pelvis can rotate underneath and the hind leg has somewhere to step into. Those same abdominals sit directly over a gut that, after this fortnight of rain, is distended in a great many horses. A horse cannot brace and lift through a wall being pushed out from the inside, so he does what any of us would do. He guards, he hollows, and he moves the work somewhere it hurts less, usually the neck and shoulders.
So you get the horse who has gone flat this fortnight. Heavier in the hand. Hollow through transitions. Snatchy about the girth. Not quite there for the first ten minutes.
He is not being lazy and he has not gone backwards in his training.
I can assess the same horse a fortnight apart and find two completely different bodies, and often the only thing that has changed in between is what is in the field.
You cannot train a core that is busy being uncomfortable. Sort out the gut and the engagement conversation becomes possible again, usually without changing a thing about how you ride.
And what is happening in the gut, right now, is coming straight out of your grazing.
Bradley Whale and I are running After the Drought, live on Zoom on Thursday 10 September at 6pm:�✓ Why regrowth after a drought is so much richer than ordinary autumn grass�✓ How long a flush like this lasts, and what makes it settle�✓ Why two yards a mile apart are having completely different Septembers�✓ Whether your grass is dead or only dormant, and what that changes�✓ How to stop the same ground becoming this winter's mud
£15, about two small bales at this year's prices. [Limited to 20 places.] [Recording sent to everyone who books.]
Comment DROUGHT and I will send you the booking link.

I was blindfolded and told to hold my hands out, and someone laid a lead rope across my palms.I didn't pull the blindfol...
03/09/2026

I was blindfolded and told to hold my hands out, and someone laid a lead rope across my palms.

I didn't pull the blindfold off straight away, because I could hear him breathing in front of me and I knew what it meant. That was my twelfth birthday, and his name was Bentley.

Being competitive and a little impatient, I thought trying harder was the answer to everything, and he set about correcting me in the first week.

We had built a jump ourselves in the field. I came into it, saw the stride, decided it was not big enough and asked him for an extra one, and he was generous enough to go anyway. The next thing I knew I was flat on the grass looking at the sky, and when I turned my head he was standing over me blowing softly into my face, as if to say slow down and do not be greedy. He didn’t run off and he did not hold it against me, he waited until I understood.

Horses have been doing that for me ever since, and not one of them has let me get away with being half there.

Reading and writing exhausted me in a way I could not explain, and the yard was the one place where none of that counted. When my parents divorced the horses were there for that too, and they never needed me to talk about it, they only needed me present.

I’ve worked with horses in every part of the world I have lived in since, and every one has carried on Bentley's work. They taught me to listen before I act, to stay patient when everything in me wants to rush, and to be kind to a body doing its best with what it has, and I use all three every time I put my hands on a horse. It is why I keep learning and keep questioning what I think I know.

So my mission is simple, even if it is not small. I want more horses to feel better in their bodies, and more of us to become the kind of humans horses deserve.

What has your horse taught you about yourself?

The ribcage protects the heart and lungs.That is true, and it is the smallest part of what it does. The rest of the time...
03/09/2026

The ribcage protects the heart and lungs.

That is true, and it is the smallest part of what it does. The rest of the time it is organising movement. How force from the hind end travels through, how balance is held left to right, how it adapts to a rider's weight.

Which makes it a driver rather than a box.
It is also not one structure, which is the part that changed how I assess it.

The ribs at the front sit against the scapula and work as a rotational interface, so when the shoulder moves they turn with it. The ribs further back answer to the diaphragm and abdominal pressure, and their job is lateral expansion, spreading load across the thorax.

Front rotation, back expansion, coordinated. That is what every turn, bend and collection runs on.
Which means the two can fail independently.
Look back through your notes for "ribcage tight". I have written it more times than I can count and it never once told me what to do next time.

The note was not wrong. Just too coarse to act on.

This comes out of work Bradley Whale and I have been developing. Early work rather than settled science, which is why it is worth a look now.
So here is one thing to try.

Feel the two regions separately, not one hand along the whole thing. Hand flat further back, wait a few breaths, feeling for expansion out to the side.

Then hand just behind the scapula, and ask the horse to reach forward for something at chest height. As the shoulder travels forward, feel what the ribs underneath do.

Where this is working, they turn away under your fingers. They give. Where it has stopped, the scapula slides forward and the ribs stay exactly where they are, as though the shoulder is moving across a wall.

Back expanding but front not turning: the scapula is gliding over something rigid. Front turning but back not expanding: nothing is spreading the load sideways.

Two different findings. Two different problems. And a note that tells you something.
The ribcage is not one thing, so stiff is not one finding.

PS. Bradley Whale and I are running a live 90 minute workshop on the thoracic sling on Thursday 24th September at 6:30pm UK. Comment THORAX and I will send you the details.

02/09/2026

Asymmetry is not the problem.
Movement spirals through the body rather than running in straight lines, so some imbalance is present in every stride of every sound horse either of us has assessed.
What separates a horse that is coping from one that is stuck is not how straight it is. It is whether it can still change.
A working thorax reorganises continuously. The ribs rotate and expand, the sternum shifts, and the whole thing rebalances from limb to limb. Ask that horse for something different, and the pattern rearranges to meet it.
A stuck one has run out of options. Somewhere along the way, one way of carrying itself solved a problem, and the horse used it again the next day, and the next, until the body built itself around the repetition and what started as a choice stopped being one.
The asymmetry did not get worse. It got fixed in place.
You know the one. You straighten it, the owner is pleased, and a fortnight later it sits exactly as it was, and you wonder whether you are the problem.
You are not, and neither is the horse. It was never ignoring you. It had run out of ways to answer.
This comes out of work Bradley Whale and I have been developing. Early work rather than settled science, which is why it is worth looking at now.
So here is one thing to watch for, and what it means.
Get the horse walked away and back, both directions. If nobody can lead, thirty seconds on your phone does the same job. Watch the same thing each time. Shoulder, ribcage, wherever your eye goes first.
On a horse that is still adjusting, the picture changes between directions. Not better one way. Just different.
On a horse that has stopped, you get the same picture both ways. Identical. It makes no difference which direction you ask.
And an asymmetry that looks the same in both directions is not a response to the work. It is a structure.
Which is why the horse that will not straighten is often the one with nothing left to straighten with.
PS. Bradley Whale and I are running a live 90 minute workshop on the thoracic sling on Thursday 24th September at 6:30pm UK. Comment THORAX and I will send you the details.

We re taught to find restriction and the shoulder girdle is a common one, but what if we shifted our focus?By the time a...
02/09/2026

We re taught to find restriction and the shoulder girdle is a common one, but what if we shifted our focus?

By the time a scapula stops gliding freely, whatever caused it has usually been failing quietly for weeks, somewhere nobody was looking.

Here is the order.
The thoracic spine elevates, and that lift creates the space for the ribs to expand, and that expansion steadies the sternum, and the steady sternum gives the scapula a platform to glide across. Every step depends on the one before it, so the whole thing can only ever fail in one direction. The lift goes first, quietly. Then the ribs stiffen, because there is nowhere left to expand into. Then the sternum loses its ability to steady the midline. And the last thing to happen, the only part visible from outside, is a shoulder that will not release. So you release it. It softens, the horse goes better for a fortnight, and then it comes back looking almost exactly as it did before.

You weren’t failing to fix it.
You were treating the end of a chain that started four steps earlier.

This comes out of work Bradley Whale and I have been developing. It is early work rather than settled science, which is why it is worth looking at now.

So here is one thing to feel for, and what it means when you find it.

Put a hand flat on each side of the ribcage, behind the elbow, and stay there for several breaths. Then change something. Ask for a step, change the head position, walk them on. Then feel again.
On a horse where this is working, what is under your hands changes. One side and then the other, expanding and giving as the demand changes.
On a horse where it has stopped, you get the same thing whatever you ask. It is not that one side is bigger. It is that neither side is doing anything different.

And if the ribs cannot change, the sternum has nothing to steady against, which means the shoulder you were about to work on is sitting three steps further down the chain than it looked.

Whatever fails first is the thing you will see last.

PS. Bradley Whale and I are running a live 90 minute workshop on the thoracic sling on Thursday 24th September at 6:30pm UK.

Comment THORAX and I will send you the details.

01/09/2026

Stop looking at his belly.
Since the rain came half the horses in the country have rounded out, and every yard is having the same argument about whether it is fat or just grass belly, when the belly is the one place that cannot tell you the answer.
Gas and fluid change the outline in days. Real weight takes weeks. Both push the barrel out, so from the gate they look identical.
You know the horse. The girth has been on the same hole since June and will not do up there now, the barrel is hanging low and wide, and this is the same horse who looked a bit ribby in July.
You are not imagining the change. You are just reading it in the wrong place.
Real weight goes on the crest and behind the shoulder first, and it goes on firm. Gas leaves both of those alone and sits low.
So put your hands on him this week rather than standing back and squinting.
Run a flat hand along his ribs. If you can find them as easily as you could a fortnight ago, the shape has changed but the horse has not.
Feel along the crest and behind the shoulder. Firmer than two weeks ago is real weight, not wind.
Then stand behind him. Fat is a broad, even fullness that includes the topline. Gas hangs low and drops away sharply behind the last rib.
That tells you which one you are looking at. What it does not tell you is how long this grass stays like this, or what your particular field is about to do next, and that is the bit that decides how the next six weeks go.
Because the horse did not do this. The field did.
Bradley Whale and I are covering exactly that in After the Drought, live on Zoom on Thursday 10 September at 6pm:�✓ Why regrowth after a drought is so much richer than ordinary autumn grass�✓ How long a flush like this lasts, and what makes it settle�✓ Why two yards a mile apart are having completely different Septembers�✓ Whether your grass is dead or only dormant, and what that changes�✓ How to stop the same ground becoming this winter's mud
£15, about two small bales at this year's prices. [Recording sent to everyone who books.]
Comment DROUGHT and I will send you the booking link.

Nobody taught me which finding mattered.They taught me how to find things. Palpate, observe, note it down, build a list....
31/08/2026

Nobody taught me which finding mattered.

They taught me how to find things. Palpate, observe, note it down, build a list. What nobody taught me was how to look at that list afterwards and say which one of those findings was the cause, and which ones were just the body coping.

And I am not the only one carrying that.

When I sent a questionnaire out before a workshop earlier this year, ten equine practitioners answered it, and not one of them rated their confidence above three out of five. Four had been in practice for more than twenty years.

Seven of the ten named the same struggle. Telling primary dysfunction from compensation.

Which is a lonely thing to carry when you work on your own, out of your car, with nobody at the yard to check your thinking against.

So on the 24th, Bradley Whale and I are taking that question into one region, because the thorax is where it shows up most clearly and where it gets missed most often.

You know the horse. The same finding every six weeks. Ten good days and then back to where you started. The vet has been out and found nothing, and the saddle was refitted in the spring.

The tight shoulder was never the problem. It is the last thing to go wrong in a sequence that started somewhere else entirely.

In The Thoracic Sling, live Thursday 24th September at 6:30pm UK, we will cover:

✓ How the thoracic sling really supports and positions the trunk
✓ The sequence, and how to trace a stuck shoulder back to where it started
✓ Why single measurements mislead, and which ratios to use instead
✓ The coupling relationships, so one finding tells you what to expect from another
✓ How to show an owner measurable change after rehabilitation

Ninety minutes live with both of us, questions answered in a room of twenty, and the recording is yours to keep.

Comment THORAX and I will send you the details.

Is he fat, or is he bloated?After weeks of bare, burnt off fields we have finally had rain, and half the horses in the c...
29/08/2026

Is he fat, or is he bloated?
After weeks of bare, burnt off fields we have finally had rain, and half the horses in the country have suddenly rounded out as though somebody inflated them overnight, which most of us read as weight going back on.
A horse cannot lay down real fat in ten days. Fat arrives slowly, and it arrives everywhere at once. What can change in ten days is what is happening inside the gut.
Grass that has been drought stressed and then rained on does not come back gently. The plant has been sitting on stored sugars with no water to spend them with, so when rain arrives it flushes fast and sweet. That sugar lands in a hindgut that has spent weeks adapted to hay and short dry grazing, and those microbes cannot switch diets overnight. Fermentation shifts, gas and fluid build, and the belly distends.
So you get the girth that has been on the same hole since June and will not do up there now. The barrel hanging low and wide while the ribs and topline look exactly as they did a fortnight ago. Droppings gone loose. A horse who is sharp about the girth and not quite himself, with nothing you could point at.
You are not imagining the change. It is just not the change you think it is.
Fat is laid down over months and fills the whole outline, crest and shoulder included. Gas and fluid arrive in days, they change one place, low and wide through the belly, and they can arrive alongside sore feet, because the same sugar flush that upsets a hindgut is the one that puts feet at risk in September.
The horse has not changed. The ground he is standing on has.
In After the Drought, live on Zoom on Thursday 10 September at 6pm, I will cover:�✓ How to tell whether your grass is dead or only dormant�✓ What to do in the first week after the rain returns�✓ Why the flush that follows a drought behaves so differently�✓ How to stop bare paddocks becoming this winter's mud�✓ When reseeding is worth the money and when it is not
Comment DROUGHT below and I will send you the booking link. £15, live on Zoom, with a Q&A at the end where you can bring photos of your own fields.

28/08/2026

Comment the word DROUGHT to find out more

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