Welcome to Natty's wild and crazy house of canine fitness and rehab

Get that ice pack away from me, lady!

So the puppy had elbow surgery two and a half weeks ago. Bilateral elbow arthroscopy, fragmented coronoid removal, subtotal coronoidectomy, distal ulnar ostectomy with autogeneous fat graft. Phew! Say that three times fast! His stitches are finally out and now he has to do physical therapy and rehab to get the legs working right again.

The current regiment is

1. 10 minute slow walk, making sure he puts weight on both legs.
2. Physical therapy exercises including alternating front leg lifts and figure 8 walks around cones. Again, idea is to use both legs
3. Ice pack for 10-15 minutes.
4.  Massage

Depending on how cooperative he is for the ice and massage (usually he is not), this takes between 30 minutes and an hour. Three times a day. For the next two months.

But wait, there's more!

Miss Polly turned 6 recently (seriously? where does the time go?) While she's still as spry and crazy as ever, I started to notice that she no longer can go from sleeping on the couch all week to running agility on weekends. She still runs, but by the end of a two day agility weekend she gets slow and knocks bars. So I decided to start her on an exercise program.

Polly's current regiment is:

1. 2-3 mile conditioning run alongside the bike.
2. Core strength exercises with a balance disk
3. Massage

Polly is very cooperative, so the whole thing takes about an hour. We do this 4 times a week, she has one day off, another day is agility class, and I also try to swim her once a week.

So, all total, that's about 3 hours of dog exercise per day on average.

What? Do you have things to do? Well, cancel them,
my fitness is more important.

Oh, and the husband is doing a half-ironman in two weeks. The only one who's not on an exercise program in this house is me, but that's because I keep running around accommodating everybody else's exercise. That keeps me pretty fit.