2026-08-03
Strength, Shoulders and Staying in One Piece
Steer wrestling has the worst injury profile of the timed events. That is not a boast and it is not an excuse — it is a planning input, and most people treat it as neither.
What the load actually is
You leave a running horse, take hold of a 500-pound animal that is also running, decelerate it with your body, and put it on the ground. The forces do not go anywhere convenient.
- Shoulders — the arm hooked over the horn takes the deceleration, repeatedly, at a bad angle
- Elbows — same load, less tissue around it
- Knees — you are landing from a moving horse onto uncertain ground and then immediately loading laterally
- Neck — the one nobody logs, and the one that accumulates quietly
Those four regions are what our injury records are keyed to, because “shoulder” and “knee” are specific enough to show a pattern and “upper body” is not.
What the long-career guys do
Nothing surprising. What is surprising is how few people do it.
Actual strength training
This is one of the few rodeo events where being genuinely strong is a performance input rather than a nice-to-have. Stopping a steer is eccentric loading under speed, and that is trainable.
Logging it by lift, load, sets, reps and RPE is not gym-bro bookkeeping — it is how you know whether the thing you have been doing for six weeks is doing anything.
Neck work
Ten minutes, deeply unglamorous, and probably the highest-return item on the list. Same as it is for the roughstock riders.
Landing mechanics
Knees do not usually go in the throw. They go on the landing, and landing under control is a skill that can be drilled off a stationary horse or a dummy before it ever needs to happen at speed.
Not competing hurt when it does not matter
The hardest one. A shoulder that is 70 percent at a Saturday jackpot in April is a shoulder that will not be there in September.
Why writing it down changes things
Two reasons, both mundane.
Patterns are invisible in the moment. A shoulder that aches after every rodeo is a fact you live with. A shoulder that has ached after every rodeo for nine weeks and now aches on the drive there is a decision — and you only ever get the second version if it is written down.
Workload compounds. Rodeos entered, runs taken, miles driven, and how much of that was on a horse you were not used to. Across a season that picture tells you when you are cooked. In the middle of a four-rodeo weekend, nobody can see it.
It is private, and that is the point
Injury records here are private to your account by default. They are never shown to producers, associations, horse owners, or other contestants, and we do not analyse them for anyone but you.
That matters more in this event than most, because you are constantly asking people to let you ride their horse. A health log that a horse owner could read is a health log nobody fills in honestly — and a dishonest record is worth less than no record at all.
The blunt version
This event will take something from you. The variable is how much, and over how long. The guys still doing it at forty are almost never the toughest ones — they are the ones who trained for it and who stopped when stopping was cheap.
None of that has ever had a tool built for it. It does now.