Two researchers at the University of Kentucky have adopted a new approach to studying equestrian sports.

It takes the horse, the rider, and they environment all into account.

We talk with them about the new model and how it could impact one of keys Kentucky's key industries.

The Triple E model is an expansion off of one health, and one health is the idea that there's this interconnectedness between human, animal and the environment and when we looked at the current models for equestrian research, whether it's the horse, the environment or the human, no model really captures how to look at all three together.

And so that's why we expanded the one health model to the triple E model so that these are equine, so the horse equestrian, the person and then the environment.

The Equestrian Athlete Initiative was established in March of 2020, and our goals are to optimize performance of the equestrian athlete using research and community engagement.

So it's really important to us to understand regardless of what discipline people ride.

And so that could be horse racing, that could be doing dressage or it could be doing hunter jumper eventing and even combined driving.

And our goal is to actually help individuals that are performing in that sport be characterized as athletes.

So a lot of the research we're doing is establishing what are those performance metrics that would be used in other sports to describe an athlete, and then how injury and rehabilitation are important to that athlete as well.

Equestrians are people that work or ride horses work with or ride horses.

They are often not characterized as an athlete because people say the horse does all the work for them.

And I think anyone that actually competes in the sport or even rides recreationally, they will say that they're using muscles and different parts of their body that make them equivalent to an athlete.

And so that's a lot of what our research has been, is to first find out if individuals characterize themselves as athletes and if they don't, how can we help them understand that they really are.

The biggest thing we added was this community feedback loop, where you're including not just other researchers in multidisciplinary fields, but also at asking the community what they need or what their concerns are and approaching it to have them included.

Great reason to have this initiative in Kentucky is because we really want to support this community and we know there's such a high population of equestrians, whether it's our jockeys or vendors, our carriage drivers or our recreational riders who are riding their horses in the mountains in eastern Kentucky or using them for work.

I mean, we have mounted police here in Lexington, so we need to support that infrastructure.

So they feel supported as well.