Join me for a conversation with canine sports medicine vets David Lane and Chris Zink about what sports handlers should know! We talk about what is included within the canine sports medicine umbrella, how to find a specialist, and where you can learn more.

 Transcript

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast, brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today I have Dr. Chris Zink and Dr. David Lane here with me to talk about canine sports medicine. Hi, Chris and David. Welcome back to the podcast.

Do you guys want to just start us off a little bit? Give people a chance to recognize whose voice is whose and share a little bit kind of about who you are and what you do? Chris, you want to go first?

Chris Zink: Okay. So I'm Chris Zink. I have all my life been passionate about canine sports and all of the aspects of that that go into it.

Fitness and training and injuries and illnesses and different breeds and everything about dogs that has to do with being active, even not if they. Even if they don't compete. Just active dogs.

David Lane: My name's David Lane. I'm a sports medicine specialist in private practice in Squamish, British Columbia. So just kind of between Vancouver and Whistler. And yeah, this is obviously a topic of great interest to me and just basically all I do during my work week.

Melissa Breau: I know canine sports medicine is a specialty. It's still a pretty broad topic. Can you guys share just a little bit kind of about what the specialty encompasses?

Chris Zink: So actually the specialty encompasses canine sports medicine and rehabilitation, and those two are really integrated topics. And so canine sports medicine, gosh, that includes everything from the whole taking a look at the dog before it competes, how you bring it up, how you train it, how you keep it healthy.

So, all that preventive medicine component, and then of course, looking at it as an athlete, how to maintain its health and fitness, longevity for as long as possible, and then the treatment of any injuries or illnesses that occur so that the dog can stay active and healthy for as many years as possible. And of course, the rehabilitation component is very nicely integrated to that because it also includes fitness and conditioning training for healthy dogs, as well as bringing dogs back to performance after injuries or surgery or whatever.

Melissa Breau: Anything to add?

David Lane: Yeah, like a lot of people will gravitate. You know, my practice is, and Chris's is more to the sports medicine, the athletic side, so improving comfort and functionality in athletes. A lot of people focus on neurodegenerative conditions, you know, getting paralyzed dogs walking again. And, you know, perhaps they're working more with the pet dog population rather than High end athletes. And I do find people tend to gravitate to one versus the other.

And it included that chronic pain conditions like arthritis and other situations is just managing long term debilitating problems.

Chris Zink: Yeah, I really agree with that because it's not. I mean, why would we think that there should be a division in the health and care of an active pet dog versus a, versus an athlete? I mean, I'd be, you know, I'm kind of offended when people, you know, imply that because of my age or the fact that I'm not a competitor, maybe I don't require the same health status as an athlete, but I think I should, you know, to be completely healthy. So I really agree with David that it encompasses much broader than just the competitive athlete.

David Lane: Yeah. Awesome. About a third of our clients are competition athletic dogs. About a third are just palliative care and geriatrics. And then the remaining third are pet dogs. But living in the west coast, you know, people's idea of what constitutes normal exercise in this part of the world is perhaps different than other areas.

And you know, even the pet dogs are quite active here. But whether they're a couch potato or an athlete, doesn't matter. If they're in pain, then that's kind of our job to step in and fix that.

Melissa Breau: How popular is the specialty these days? Is it hard to find folks? Is it easy to find folks? Any ideas on how to find them? How to figure out what they know, what they're talking about? You know, that kind of good stuff?

David Lane: It hard to find us because there's not many of us on the canine side. Best I can figure, there's 125 to 130 of us in the world. So from my perspective, it seems quite popular. But that's, you know, that's because I'm at the receiving end of that. So it, you know, you could go to vsmrdog.org to find other specialists. There are certification programs as well.

It's not the same as board specialty certification or being a board certified specialist. But you know, there are people who learn rehabilitation therapy or acupuncture manual therapy that, you know, there are other useful certification programs and there are a lot of other vets that have those qualifications.

Melissa Breau: What was that website again?

David Lane: Vsmr.org

Melissa Breau: Awesome. So I think a lot of the time people, you know, the first time they think about seeing a specialist or kind of get interested in if there is a specialist near them is when something goes wrong.

Are there reasons for dog sport handlers to, you know, build a relationship with a specialist before they really need one, before they have a chronic pain issue or an injured dog. Or is it really a field where people kind of need a referral from the regular vet and it's only, you know, they're only going to see you guys if something's wrong?

Chris Zink: I see a lot of clients for what I call, you know, a structure and gait analysis before they ever like usually around 9 to 12 months when they, when the client knows that their dog is going to be an athlete and going to be competing in a lot of things and they want to set them up with an exercise or conditioning program.

I also see lots of dogs as puppies for evaluating, actually I evaluate litters for structure, etc. To see which ones might have the best structure for competitive sports. But I would say that probably is 25% of my practice. The rest are dogs that have issues. We do see preventive cases like it's, it's surprising how much low grade stuff you'll find in a 12 week old puppy and something that's causing them to say, offload one of their hind legs, maybe their sacroiliac joint is uncomfortable.

You have concerns if we don't address that now, you know, could that lead to unilateral hip dysplasia on that side because the bone doesn't develop properly? Because you weren't properly weight bearing. So I do feel that's important in the next breath. We, it's not much of our practice because we're so busy trying to keep up with the actual injuries that we don't, you know, our existing clients will, yeah, bring in their new puppies to be evaluated.

But often we're again just keeping up with the demand of the injured dogs and the ones that already having a problem. But that's not to say there's not value in preventing these problems in the first place. And it certainly seems like it's worth it to do the research to see if there's somebody near you or you know, if you're one of the lucky folks who's near one of those, you know, hundred and something practitioners.

Yeah. If you're serious about having your dog compete for a long time without injury, you, you need some sort of medical team to help with conditioning and do deal with problems before they manifest clinically to, you know, nip things in the bud. And it's just the best way to have a longer career in your dog. I think for most of us it doesn't require a veterinary referral. A referral from a GP veterinarian.

Would you say that's true, Dave?

David Lane: Yeah, we don't, we don't require that. It's kind of half and half self referred versus veterinary referral. It's good to know too.

Melissa Breau: We got into this a little bit earlier, but, you know, are there differences in how you think about veterinary care for a sports dog versus a pet dog? Can you guys talk a little more about that? Um, what should we be thinking about? Does it depend on how competitive the dog is? How much of an athlete versus a weekend warrior?

David Lane: The big difference for me is the level of awareness of sports dog people is generally much higher than pet dog owners. So to stereotype it, if a pet dog owner comes in with a problem, that problem is a lot more advanced on average, because the subtle signs went unnoticed. Whereas a sports dog person will say, yeah, if we jump 20 inches and immediately turn our turning radius to the right isn't as great as the turning radius to the left.

And, you know, we're just down to a very subtle sign that allows us to zero in on a problem a lot earlier. But it, you know, if you're not doing these drills with your dogs, you have no way of really determining that until the signs are a lot more obvious. So it's every dog that comes in, we're gonna put our all into fixing it, regardless of what it does in its recreation time.

But with the athletes and the people who are just very vigilant on how the dog's performing, we do catch things earlier.

Chris Zink: But again, I think it's the rehabilitation component that then encompasses all dogs, because. And especially especially with aging, especially with geriatric dogs. I mean, almost every geriatric dog can benefit from physical rehabilitation. And so that goes way beyond the sports medicine component and opens it up to all dogs.

Melissa Breau: Do you want to expand on what you mean by that?

Chris Zink: Well, some of the changes that occur with aging, so, for example, muscle loss and neurological. Subtle neurological changes in, for example, balance, strength, variations. A lot of older dogs experience neurological problems, and many of them can be significantly modulated by rehabilitation therapy. And I think neurological issues are a very large component of most rehabilitation practices. Maybe even up to 50% of what the rehabilitation component consists of.

And that's not just including diseases like degenerative myelopathy or things like that, but really geriatric dogs and helping and to be able to negotiate their world for a longer period of time. You know, we talk about health span, which is the number of years that a dog has where it's still healthy, can get up and go and do all the activities of daily living without any problem. And that's what we all really want in our dogs, and that's what really everyone wants. So that's where rehabilitation therapy really steps in and encompasses a larger population of therapists kind of.

Melissa Breau: Are you grouping in that, like, multiple things, or are you thinking, like, canine fitness stuff? Is that, like, what are you kind of encompassing on that umbrella of rehabilitation therapy, if that. If that makes sense.

Chris Zink: It's not just. It's not just fitness, but, for example, the neurological system is incredibly responsive to retraining, and it's a typical example of a system that is use it or lose it.

So when the neurological. When a dog ends up hanging out a lot and just sleeping on the couch and going out to have a pee and coming back in and really isn't using themselves as much as they did when they were younger, they start to lose proprioception, for example, which is the knowledge of where the body parts are in space. And then that can lead to other issues like tripping down the stairs and, you know, or not being able to go up the stairs or other aspects of their life that start to decline.

And so a lot of that. A lot of the components for geriatric dogs involve not only strength training, but neurological retraining as well. So just dovetailing into that, the webinar that I'm giving on geriatrics or gerontology kind of gets into that and how frailty is linked to life expectancy and the various needs of the geriatrics. So that is something that will be elaborating on in that webinar.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. And do you know the date of that one? Just so that folks can kind of jot it on the calendar if they're hearing this?

Chris Zink: That one's like, I think two months down the road we're going to start. The first webinar is on arthritis, which, of course, is important in geriatrics as well. And then from treating arthritis, we'll get into optimizing health for geriatrics in general, I guess, kind of.

Melissa Breau: What considerations would you guys encourage the people listening or pet owners kind of in general to think about when they're choosing a, you know, kind of that next sports dog kind of based on what you guys know, you know, from. From your perspective, what factors did you want people to look at? What maybe are they not considering? They should be thinking about when they're looking for that next puppy?

David Lane: I'll let Chris run with this one. This is her pet topic.

Chris Zink: It's interesting. I've thought a lot about this. Everybody chooses the dog that they want to live with first, I think. And, you know, to each person that's a different thing. For example, I've had golden retrievers for four years and lots of people say, well, you know, they're cancer ridden and they got all that hair and, you know, whatever.

Those are things I'm willing to live with because of other aspects of the dog that I enjoy. And each person chooses for. I think those things come foremost what they want to live with. When a person's thinking about a canine athlete, though, then other considerations start to surface pretty soon after that. And those would be, you know, their activity level, their size, their, you know, their instincts and adeptness at various sports that the person individually wants to compete in.

You know, if you want to do herding, you probably need a border collie. If you want to do field trials, you would be best to get a Labrador retriever over, a golden retriever or some of the other retrievers. And so there are those instinctual considerations as well that start to surface pretty quickly when a person's thinking of an athletic dog.

Melissa Breau: You haven't touched on structure yet. I was sure you were going to go there.

Chris Zink: Well, it's true. So, I mean, that's a really big topic and I could go on and on and on. I will just say that structure is an extremely difficult thing to be really picky about. When you look at a litter most of the time a purebred litter has very little structural variation from one dog to another. They're usually pretty uniform. And so you're really picking structure mostly by virtue of the breed.

So, for example, if you like Doberman Pinschers, you know that you're going to get a dog with a lot of rear angulation and a dog of a certain size. And so that's going to play into the athletic nature of that dog. Much more so than picking the structure of individuals within a Doberman litter, for example. So I think that. I think that comes into account when you pick the breed, much more so than. Than the individual.

Melissa Breau: Fair enough. Anything you Want to add, Dr. Lane? Dovetailing of Chris's comments?

David Lane: Yes, certain breeds are more adept at certain sports if that's the sport you want to compete in. Yeah, your golden retriever is not going to be a good choice for protection work, by and large. So if you want to get into protection work, okay, you're, you know, in picking a German Shepherd, say, you can at least look for ones with less angulation and maybe that will help with reducing the chance of lumbosacral disc disease.

But in general, German Shepherds seem to have different angulation on their sacroiliac joints and that may be playing a role in why they have lower back issues. And how do you, you know, there's no screening for that. How do you get away from that? Picking someone with more robust muscling that may help hedge your bets. And there are little variables like that that you can play with, but nothing's a guarantee.

You know, you get the dogs with, you know, ridiculous looking confirmation that go through their whole lives without having a problem. You know, border collies and their predisposition to shoulder issues, okay, we can work to, to build muscling and, and hedge our bets that way, but they're really good performance dogs and this is just something that comes along with them. So I, you know, I don't think there's a magic answer to depicting that.

It's like Chris said, you got it. There's a price of admission. With every breed that you pick, there's something that comes along that, you know, has to be reconciled that makes sense.

Melissa Breau: Are there, you know, particularly common issues that you guys see in sports dogs? Are there things that people should be thinking about in terms of preventing things? Is it really? I mean, what I'm hearing is it's a little bit of kind of know your breed some more to it?

Chris Zink: Well, I think the one thing that, and one thing that I've given a talk on this for Fenzi, and that is the importance of the owner watching their dog carefully and getting their dog checked out if they see anything that is abnormal and not just assuming it's a... So if there's ever a problem with training, the dog is knocking bars or the dog is making wide turns or whatever small thing that might seem like a training problem, Always, always you should rule out a physical problem first because that's first of all, if it is a physical problem, retraining is not going to help you at all anyway.

And you would hate to think that you just worked and worked and worked at retraining something when it was a physical problem. So I really, really encourage people to look for those for any change in behavior and first check out whether or not it's something physical going on. I think that goes a really long way in any canine athlete for keeping them healthy. And it always surprises me how a person could bring to me.

Well, for example, let me tell you a little story. So I had a client that had a Jack Russell Terrier and that Jack Russell Terrier had aggression problems. It had been on behavior modification drugs for 21 months and was wearing a muzzle full time when it came to me. And it had lumbosacral disease and tremendous pain in its back end. And when it was cured, it's a very nice dog.

And it was very sad to think that this dog spent 21 months under every kind of, you know, training and behavior change modification methodologies, but it was something physical. And it's a really happy dog now. And, you know, it had to be separated from its housemates and all kinds of other things, but now he's living the life that he should have had from the very beginning. So the real key is that every single person who has a dog is like the triage nurse in the emergency room that decides whether or not the person has a hang nail or getting a heart attack or a stroke and right away.

So I really think that educating ourselves on noticing any abnormalities is really critical early on, so early treatment. And I think probably. I don't know, Dave, I don't know what your experience is, but, you know, in my experience, I see a lot of dogs that have had problems for months and months and months, and they've been to, you know, they've undergone many different visits to many different professionals of a variety of kinds before they were diagnosed and these. So sometimes you have to be also persistent to find the right person to give you that answer.

David Lane: Yeah, like a lot of things we see, it will appear to the owner, like, okay, there's suddenly this problem. And when you talk about how that day went there, there was no accident, no trauma. The dog was doing the walk they normally do, but suddenly, boom, they're sore. And then you start to pick apart the history and, okay, well, there was that sign two months ago, and there's just been this odd skipping thing that we do.

And you can pick back and realize this has been a slow burning fire for a while. What we call repetitive stress or cumulative trauma, where things are fairly subtle and the owner may not be aware until you have a final straw day. And that final straw day doesn't have to be any different than any other day. But that's the day we go from a subtle thing to, okay, there is clearly a problem here.

And by then we're in a deeper hole. It would have been nice if we could have caught that problem earlier. Probably be a faster return to function and just an easier solution. And circling back to what Chris was saying about how adaptable that the neurologic system is, it's constantly learning things, good or bad. So if we've got an issue and we're learning to move abnormally to compensate for the issue, you know, that the nervous system adapts to that a bit and makes you very efficient at it and can make you better at being out of shape and moving improperly.

And then now we have to remove the pain, get you moving properly and reteach the nervous system how to move properly again. And just kind of the sooner we can get at that process that the faster we can turn it around.

Melissa Breau: Are there subtle things that people should be keeping kind of an eye out for all the time? I know, I know. I think previously, Chris, in some of your stuff you've mentioned the importance of having video and just being able to compare video A to video B and say, look, there's a difference here.

Chris Zink: I mean, I think it varies for the sport too. So one of the most common, one of the most common things we see in agility, of course, is knocking bars and, or making wider turns, missing entries, you know, missing entries for the dog walk, for example, you know, those little subtle things, longer times. I mean, that's actually flyball, fast cat agility, any of the timed events, you know, you should keep a record of your, of your times.

It's really interesting. I saw a sort of a quasi study in which a guy looked at all of his agility times from hundreds of agility competitions of five of his dogs showing the increase in speed during the first five years and then sort of a maintenance of their speeds, except for times where there were injuries in which you could see the speed decline. And it was like a beautiful graph that really showed the importance of tracking these things.

And then around the age of 10, showing the speeds gradually declining after that age. So I think that, you know, I think that kind of monitoring, if it's a speed related sport, can be very valuable as well as anything you see visually. And I would argue that we can palpate things before they become clinically apparent. We know from force plate and pressure match studies that we can't see mild lameness with the naked eye.

Like by the time we can see something happening, it's already a moderate issue and there's plenty of stuff that we can palpate and go, you're sore here, you're inflexible. There's in dogs belonging to, you know, very vigilant owners who aren't seeing anything. And maybe it's that the painful things I'm palpating just aren't causing discomfort in the dog's day to day life. Or maybe they are, but they're able to blow through that and not give you an outward sign.

So yes, monitoring what I call judicial paranoia. They're just look for anything that changes. Dogs don't change their habits without a reason. But I would couple that with, with someone who's going to give you a very detailed myofascial exam, like examining all the muscles, examining the limb very diligently each individual vertebrae and how it's moving relative to its neighbors. That just goes over the entire dog in detail. And that is the other key component. Picking up on things early.

Melissa Breau: We were talking about this a little bit before I hit record, but I believe I've heard that the two of you are working on a book is this. Do you guys want to talk about a little bit? Do you want to share kind of what the thing is there?

Chris Zink: I and my colleague Janet van Dyke in 2013 wrote our first version of Canine Sports Medicine and Rehabilitation.

It's really a textbook that addresses the topic intensively. We revised it to the second edition in 2018 and there will be a third edition coming out in 2025. And Dave has made a great contribution to that book which we really missed out on, in the previous versions. And he came to me and said, you know, geez, why are you, why do you not have a chapter on osteoarthritis for all of all things.

And so Dave has been the contributor of that really outstanding chapter in that text. And the text should be coming out in a few months. We don't know an exact date, but April, May, something like that.

Melissa Breau: Is it styled for vet students? Is it styled for the average?

Chris Zink: Honestly, you know, I mean, so here's what I think, you know, you know, we don't have to know everything about a subject to get something out of reading a textbook or reading or even reading a published paper.

You know, I always tell, you know, my clients, you know, you don't have to have a scientific background to read an abstract and get something out of it, or at least enough out of it to decide that you need to know more and seek to learn more about the subject. So yeah, I mean we have, of course it's targeted at veterinarians and physical therapists and veterinary technicians and nurses that are working in the field and also trainees who are training to become specialists in the field. But really I think that it's useful for everyone that's interested in the topic.

David Lane: My perspective of it was I got brought onto the textbook to contribute to shoulder lameness discussion on the chapter on forelimb lameness and ended up discussing non surgical options for cruciate disease. And in just trying to comply with the word count, I didn't want to talk too much about arthritis if that was covered elsewhere.

So I just, I made the mistake of saying to Chris, I assume you have a chapter on arthritis and I'm not sure what happened there, but suddenly I'm writing a chapter on arthritis and I don't know how that happened. It just, I asked a question and there we are. Now I'm writing a chapter.

Chris Zink: No, actually, we were aghast that we did not have an entire chapter on that.

So it's so important for so many dogs and for almost every dog as they age, just as with people. And so Dave came to the rescue there.

Melissa Breau: Awesome. Whether he wanted to or not. So I know that you both have a couple of webinars for us on the schedule coming up. You've both done some stuff for us in the past. We've got some stuff coming up. Do you want to talk a little bit about what's in the works, what you've got? Maybe who should consider joining you for them? I know when this comes out, Chris, you'll have just finished one for us the day before, but.

Chris Zink: Yeah, so that'll be, that's on designing fitness program for your dog, wherever they are, and getting them fitter and healthier. We know that that improves longevity and health for dogs. So. And we know that, you know, it's not onerous. So as you'll, you'll be able to still sign up for the webinar when you hear this podcast.

So please do so. It's kind of, it's, it's kind of fun, actually. When I first, when I first started talking about designing fitness programs for dogs, I ran it past a group of 100 competitors. We kind of had an experiment where we had a system where they could design fitness programs for their dogs. And what I learned from that, which was completely unexpected, was that people kept coming to me and saying that it had changed their relationship with their dogs to do this.

Now. These were people that were already competing in lots of sports with their dogs and already felt they had optimal relationships with their dogs, but it really changed that. So I encourage anyone that hasn't watched the webinar to sign up for it. And then I'm also going to be doing one on March 6th on training dogs to jump. You know, gone are the days when we would stick a dog in front of a jump and put it on a long line and pull it over the jump.

There's much, much more to it than that. And so I'm going to be talking about all that foundational stuff right up to advanced jumping skills in that webinar. So I hope you all sign up for that.

David Lane: And if I could piggyback onto that. So earlier you'd asked about what people can do for prevention. And when people ask me that question, like, to me, the number one area you can put your sweat equity into is strength training and exercise conditioning, which I know I haven't seen Chris's webinar, but presumably she covers it.

Well, they've looked at this in humans. They've done meta analytic research that went over 700 odd papers over 18 years and concluded that strength training cuts acute injury by third and repetitive stress injury in half. So it is just one of the single biggest things you can do to prevent your dog from getting hurt. And anyone who's serious about preventing injury in their dog should be looking at some sort of program like that.

Melissa Braeau: Awesome. You want to tell us what you got coming up?

David Lane: Right. So having spent all that effort to write the chapter on osteoarthritis, that seemed like a good topic to, you know, bring to the people because it, you know, in the, in the book, it, it gets into the nitty gritty details on, in terms of drug dosages and things like that, that, that perhaps not everyone needs to have.

But basically I've taken that content from that chapter, which is, as far as I know, is the most comprehensive discussion of this topic ever published or about to be published. And it just, it takes out the relevant information for pet owners and sort of boils it down for that. And in terms of, you know, what can I do to treat my dogs arthritis or potential, potential arthritis. If we know, maybe we've discovered hip laxity, but we don't have arthritis yet, but we might get it in the future.

Or do we want to just purely prevent it? It just gives you an overview on arthritis and all the different options and how we tend to tailor those options for different severities or presentations of arthritis so that they can then go back to their vet and start to inquire about these options. That's the 20th, right? Yeah. The other one is again, canine gerontology and so much about quality of life.

Again, Chris alluded to it with health span, you know, keeping them as comfortable as long as possible. So much of that ties into sports medicine because you are in the field that's involved in removing musculoskeletal pain and maintaining function and mobility and strength and all these other parameters which are just crucial to these geriatrics. So, again, giving information to pet owners about how to best care for their older dog.

Melissa Breau: Fantastic. All right, do either of you have any final thoughts or maybe key points you want to kind of leave folks with?

Chris Zink: I mean, I think we covered a lot here, so I'm going to leave it at that.

Melissa Breau: All right. I'm good at that. Well, thank you both so much for coming on the podcast.

Chris Zink: Thanks, Melissa. Thanks for listening, everybody.

David Lane: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Melissa Breau: Absolutely. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in.

We'll be back next week with Janice Gunn to talk about competition obedience. If you haven't already, subscribe to the podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty free by BenSound.com

The track featured here is called Buddy. Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training.

 Credits

Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called "Buddy." Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!