Sustainable Equine Solutions

07/30/2026

Halfway through an amazing week 10 sessions with long time partners in CT and RI so far, hoping to add a few more on the list before the next VA/MD haul. I love seeing everyone looking so good at the end of summer circuit! Thank you for your preference ❤️ PEMF with equine tensegrity balancing / somatic integration work and red light- sound therapies. My job is to offer new input to the brain and get it connected with the body for an iOS update. By work aimed at fascia remolding coupled with strong inflammation/pain relief and new stimulation for the autonomic nervous system, meaningful changes are possible for your horse. Curious? Spots are open, let’s make it happen
📲 774 232 245zero

07/19/2026

Would be interested in knowing if this is the same in other mammals too!

Your muscle rebuilds in about three months. Your tendons and cartilage take roughly a year and a half. Your bone, up to two years. Adding 40 grams of whey daily for two weeks doesn't change any of those timelines.

That's the finding from a study published this month in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The team measured rebuild rates across more than a dozen knee tissues in living older adults using a safe heavy-water tracer. Tissues sampled during routine knee replacement surgery. Half the participants kept their habitual diet. Half added 40 grams of whey daily for 14 days. At the end, the rebuild rates of every tissue were the same in both groups.

The hierarchy was dramatic.
Muscle rebuilt at about 1.2 percent per day. At that rate, your quadriceps theoretically turn over in roughly three months. Synovium, the membrane that lines the joint capsule, rebuilt at 0.8 percent per day. The fat pad behind your kneecap, about 0.5 percent. The cruciate ligaments deep in the knee, about 0.45 percent. The patellar tendon, the femoral cartilage, and the menisci all rebuilt at 0.18 to 0.21 percent per day, putting their full-pool turnover at roughly 1.3 to 1.5 years. Bone rebuilt at 0.12 to 0.21 percent per day across five sites, with the slowest taking up to 2.3 years for a complete cycle.

What this does and does not say.
It does not say protein doesn't build connective tissue. It does. Every tissue in your body depends on dietary amino acids as substrate, and the synthesis rates measured here confirm that all of these tissues are actively turning over. Bone is a living tissue that constantly remodels. Cartilage maintains itself, slowly. Tendons repair from training and from daily mechanical load, slowly.
What the study shows is that for these older adults on their normal diets, adding 40 grams of whey on top for two weeks did not accelerate the rebuild rate of any tissue measured. It is one trial. It is small and short. It cannot rule out effects in people with inadequate baseline intake, or effects that might appear with longer supplementation. What it does establish is that connective tissue synthesis rates are dramatically slower than muscle, and a two-week protein bump does not compress those rates.

That has direct implications for what protein supplementation is and isn't doing.
Protein supplementation is a tool for closing intake gaps and for hitting the per-meal threshold that maximizes muscle protein synthesis after training. It's effective at those goals. People who are not eating enough total protein, or who are not getting enough per meal to drive muscle protein synthesis in older muscle that has lost some sensitivity to amino acids, benefit from supplementation. That's well established and not in dispute.

Protein supplementation is not a connective tissue repair accelerator. Cartilage damage from running mileage, tendon overuse injuries, bone density loss in postmenopausal women, ACL rehabilitation timelines: none of these can be hurried with whey. The biology runs at its own clock speed regardless of how much you put in.

What this means in practice.
For training and recovery, the protein protocol that has actually been shown to work is unchanged. Roughly 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight per day, spread across three or four meals, each meal hitting at least 0.4 grams per kilogram. Training stimulus and adequate sleep do the heavy lifting on muscle adaptation. Supplemental protein at the meal level helps people hit those thresholds, especially for older adults, vegetarians, and anyone with a small appetite.

For connective tissue, the levers are different. Mechanical load through progressive training is the dominant signal for tendon and ligament adaptation. Resistance training drives bone density gains. Cartilage health responds to weight management and joint loading more than to nutrition. Collagen and vitamin C combined before training has interesting data for tendon collagen synthesis, but the effect sizes are modest. None of these tissues respond meaningfully to a protein bolus in a two-week window the way muscle does after a single training session.

The bigger reframe.
We have been treating tissue protein synthesis like a single dial. The reality is that your body runs many tissue clocks at very different speeds. Muscle is the fast one. Most of what we call "tissue building" outside of muscle takes 1 to 2 years per cycle, not days. When you injure a tendon at 55, the rehab timeline is set by how fast that tendon can lay down new collagen. Mechanical load and time do the work. Adequate protein supports it but doesn't compress the timeline.

Muscle responds to protein on a short timescale. Everything else responds on a long one. The two are not interchangeable.

Houtvast et al., Am J Clin Nutr, 2026
Moore et al., J Gerontol A, 2015
Morton et al., Br J Sports Med, 2018
Bauer et al., J Am Med Dir Assoc, 2013
Shaw et al., Am J Clin Nutr, 2017

07/11/2026

Finally got my new machine in and fired her up to do a first in a series of treatments of for horses! We will do a deep dive in a separate post about all the whys but the simple answer is our wonderful vet recommended instead of thousands of dollars of testing for something that may never show up on a test and there is no Rx to treat. Ozone efficiently, naturally, and comfortably delivers oxygen to tissues where it is then used by the body. Turns out the colon is one of the most efficient places to send oxygen and depending on your geomagnetic location on the earth can be extremely helpful in fighting off infections- particularly of the viral nature. In the gut, it has been demonstrated to restore the biome balance and proliferate the healthy bacteria but level out the harmful kind. Of course it’s way more scientific than that so look for a legit post soon! Happy weekend ❤️

07/10/2026

Ozonating water to irrigate/flush wounds sustained in the paddock because… horses! Excited to be able to add this tool to my arsenal. Working with nature.

07/09/2026

Sloppy joes
It’s what’s for dinner!

With the heat waves, we feed extra liquids and I have good eaters so thankfully can add salt at will without worrying if they will eat it. We do this year round, if you remember my winter video, but extra sloppy in extreme weather swings!! for horses 😁

06/30/2026

Filosophical Friday but make it on Tuesday: Bird Brain, Einstein, and Inter-species Teamwork

Bird brain: An insult, synonymous with stupid

Ironic, considering birds, the living descendants of therapod dinosaurs, were 1 of 2 species that survived the last KT extinction event 67 million years ago… take a listen to some of Dr Jack Kruse’s work to understand why. It’s a neat story about light and magnetism, biophysics at its finest.

But consider this video. This poor bird (who I did rescue after this video and release outside) was trapped in the porch patio. For a good 30 min, she/he contemplated one single exit strategy and guess what, it wasn’t working. If allowed to struggle, she/he would not only continue to stress her/himself to the point of disease but quite easily arrive and the point of mental and physical exhaustion. But there was a human watching that struggle. A human who saw the solution and who could assist.

Could the bird have figured out the door scenario 20 feet to the left and go out the way it most probably came in? I don’t doubt it.

But how many of us can see ourselves in this video?

I sure can.

Many times (more than I’d like to admit) we assess a situation and get stuck doing the plan until and as the plan is not working. We think just going harder and stronger at it will work when we just aren’t considering all the facts right next to us. We don’t see through the screen box, we see the screen. We miss the open door in the wall by trying to bust out the screen window.

Is it ego? Is it vanity? Is it bird brain?

Einstein called it insanity.

Because there are times, in the case of a piñata for example, that we can go harder and stronger and chip away at something until we get to what we are chasing. But many more times, our assessments are flawed or incomplete and so we waste valuable energy trying the same thing expecting a different result, time and time again.

One thing this bird did a lot in 30 minutes, to his/her credit, is pause. He/she wasn’t erratic most of the time, they were honestly convinced they could get through the screen, whether they knew that’s what it was or not is irrelevant. Now I’m no expert in the vision field of birds- I’m not positive they can even see screens. But I am sure of the fact we can observe them and learn from them.
And that when we see someone struggling, we should help them.

Teamwork- when someone else (sometimes a different species) offers a different solution that you hadn’t considered yet, can save your life. At the very least, it can spare you valuable resources in time and energy. While there is merit to figuring things out on your own, good for character and brain development and all that jazz, sometimes we just need a little help from our friends, or stranger as it turns out.

It was a very docile bird and he/ she let me collect her and free her outside with little resistance. Another lesson I learned this morning, which was particularly hard for me my entire life and still kind of is, is accepting help. Is offering no resistance to an offer. To allow instead, and trust that I am being taken care of in all ways, to trust that the hand reaching out to me, will take care of me and not hurt me. To trust that the help is coming from someone or something that sees beyond my bird brain abilities in that moment. Well, I very much consider myself a team player. I have always been a do-er and not as much a receiver. A caretaker more than a patient.

But there are two sides to every coin, and you cannot have one without the other. You cannot only be a caretaker and never be a patient. You cannot only be a do-er and never a receiver. I sometimes think that humans believe we are the only species on the planet, even though that’s clearly, blatantly, the farthest thing from the truth and you only need to look around you 1 second to figure that out. But we live in this delusional concept half the time that our opinion is the only one that matters and that we know more than anything and anyone else.

And again that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

One thing horse sports taught me and my career as well working for hundreds of equestrian programs as a freelance barn manager and elite groom, is something I adopted a decade ago and that was every single person I worked for, I tried to observe and learn something from them. The truth is even lowly birds with their oxymoronic bird brain, have things to teach humans. They are so connected to the Earth and their environment and it seems that as days go on humans have never been MORE DISconnected in our entire existence.

So as you go forth into the week, I challenge you to think of how you are any different from this bird? And, what lesson can you learn from another species today?

May you take time to stop and smell the roses, appreciate a bird’s song, be thankful for the breeze or the shade offered to you, and may you pass a kindness forward in interspecies teamwork. Because between you and this bird, I promise you we have more in common than we do different. And together we can help each other in different ways, we just have to be present enough and willing to consider outside the screen.

Like Death Cab for Cutie, I’m proposing a swift, orderly change, in exchange of the slight “bird brain” for “human brain.” Because I’m convinced we are the dumb ones amidst ancient intelligence on this planet, and we really aren’t getting much smarter. One day, that will save our lives. Better get a head start now.

06/24/2026

Humpday shipment of the latest batch of SES Tick Target cream! Off to the Bay ⚓️ at

Horses and their owners are loving the results! Why not let it help your horses, too?

🐴 Specifically formulated to fight ticks
🐴 Soothes irritated skin/ fly bites
🐴 helps promote healing+hair growth back
🐴 helps prevent new bites
🐴 won’t leave a residue (girth\riding!!)
🐴 pleasant smell you like and bugs don’t
🐴 gentle, sensitive skin formula ✅ approved by horses that break out/swell with the industrial offerings on the market

Tested in swampy summer conditions by multiple herds across the east coast New England to FL from foals to seniors.

Put an order in order in to make a fresh one yours today! All sizes trial (1oz, shown, with 8oz) to barn size available for order ✨

06/13/2026

Really need to do a braiding photo dump from the entire year up until now 🤣 but one more night and it’s time for a change of scenery. I feel like I have lived at Upperville the last two weeks! So here I am with your LAST CHANCE TO ORDER, NEW ENGLAND FRIENDS! SESwat aka Tick Target Belly Balm.

🥕 Homemade in small batches, it offers a skin-friendly alternative to commercial cream/balms that not only leave an oily residue/film and attract dirt, but are known to cause nasty reactions

🥕 Also unlike those options, Tick Target is SPECIFICALLY formulated against ticks and soothes bite lines promoting healing in just 24-48 hours. Tested and proven from New England to Ocala!!

✅ For use in sensitive areas in ears, under chin, muzzle, privates, belly line and more!!

If you want a personally-delivered (MA/CT/RI) or locally shipped batch (available from size 1oz to 24!) NOW is the chance.

Make it yours by PM 🙌