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Rider Fitness Tip of the Month: Teaching Your Body New Patterns
Exercises to teach your body new patterns to improve your riding.
Do you ever find yourself wishing there was a more direct link between your brain and your body parts? You know what to do: you’ve studied it, you can see it in other riders, your coach has reminded you a hundred times. It’s just that the road between what your brain knows, and what your body actually does must be under construction or washed out because your body does not seem to be getting it. When this happens, riders often exteriorize the problem with statements about how the horse is not doing what he is told. Most of the time, close observation reveals that the horse is doing what he is told, it just isn’t what the rider thinks.
I just got back from a clinic half way across the country from where I live and normally work. With 18 riders, it was arguably the largest single clinic day I’ve ever done- and an excellent opportunity to spot some trends. Riders ranged from early teens to late middle age, and from relative beginners in their discipline, to fairly advanced. Most were dressage riders, but we had two Western riders, and a former hunter and former Event rider.
Once you are standing in the arena dust working with a horse and rider, it does not seem to matter what corner of the planet you are on: our bodies and brains work the same way. Our bodies and our horse’s bodies interact the same way, regardless of our discipline or saddle preference because of basic biomechanics.
Observing a sampling of riding abilities as broad as this, condensed into one day has a similar effect on me as my experience scribing at dressage shows. It’s like a condensed version of the training year (or several years), and a really great opportunity to spot trends and patterns in rider development. This particular clinic was, well, almost a clinical opportunity in the scientific sense because so many of the common variables affecting riders were not present. I could eliminate footing, horse quality, saddlefit and cold weather as factors. All the riders had horses with acceptable conformation for the task, had gone through saddlefitting, rode on a nice surface in a well heated arena.
An Equifitt clinic is a little different than a standard riding clinic in that instead of focusing on the horse’s training through the rider, the focus is on the way the riders’ bodies are going and influencing their horses movement. As you know, the interaction between the rider and horse can be influenced negatively by poor saddle construction or fit. When analyzing a rider’s posture and body usage, poor saddle fit can throw the analysis off. In this particular clinic, I had the rare opportunity to work with riders who had all gone through saddle-fitting, which eliminated saddle fit as a factor affecting their posture and performance.
The coaches and instructors also taught from a well rounded perspective with classical riding principles. The riders also had frequent exposure to clinic opportunities with international and high performance coaches. So, what I was watching their bodies do had little to do with the instruction quality or access to knowledge. Their ears were hearing the right things, and their saddles were putting them in the right position to ride correctly. The footing was excellent, peers were supportive, horses had appropriate conformation for the work, and the arena was heated so not even cold weather, horse suitability or footing could be blamed for the various compensating patterns and biomechanic inefficiencies I was observing. There were simply gaps between will and execution.
We carry the body we have into our ride. In the September issue of Dressage Today, Charles de Kunffy said that the horse cannot go better than the rider will allow. The rider’s body can block or allow the horse- or even more hopefully, lead the horse to better movement than he would do on his own naturally. The rider detracts or helps the horse through posture, stamina and strength, tightness/joint mobility, and body usage (movement patterns).
Body usage is a simplified way to talk about kinesthetic abilities of proprioception and muscle recruitment and movement patterns. Proprioception is like perception, but related to your sense of where you are in space. You could simply call it body awareness. High level athletes typically have a very high natural proprioceptive ability, but it is something that can be improved through training.
People who practice ball sports have a high degree of proprioception which allows them to move their bodies in relation to the game object very precisely. Conditioning coaches for these sports develop exercises to improve foot or hand and eye co-ordination. Gymnastics and skate are two other sports that require a high degree of proprioception. From a rider’s perspective, proprioception means knowing not only where your body parts are (seat, limbs), but also where they are relative to the horse (a calf a hair behind the girth, a seat bone moving in the upward half of the elliptical cycle following your horse’s hind leg motion). Your degree of proprioception has a very big impact on your effectiveness as a rider.
Firing patterns, or movement and recruitment patterns, are what your body does in response to or in pro-active leadership of your horse’s movement. As you can appreciate when you try and execute a movement that is difficult for you, there is much more to achieving the result you want than the actual aids. It’s how you get your body into and out of position, and the side effects of whether you do so efficiently (soft, supple and accurate) or inefficiently (unclear to the horse, tensing other areas). An example could be the way a very talented rider seems to naturally do everything from the core, vs an amateur rider that tends to ride from seat and legs. Unless they have training in dance, martial arts or pilates, or are an advanced athlete in another sport, many riders initiate signals from legs and hands without core engagement.
Proprioception and firing patterns are often at the basis of a disconnect between will and execution. An example could be the rider who is sitting a trot to the right, and the horse is having difficulty bending. The rider is not conscious of the fact that their pelvis is actually pointing off the circle to the left. This is a proprioceptive issue. What the rider does to correct a problem could show an inefficient movement pattern. For example, a rider with a twist in the hip will likely have oblique muscles which are weaker on one side than the other. The rider feels straight. When they go to adjust, they may have difficult simply adjusting the hips because the connection to the weak muscle area is weak. The muscle does not turn on the way it should. So the rider will frequently try to achieve the desired result through a compensating pattern such as adjustment of the shoulders instead.
Heather Sansom is the author of rider fitness ebooks Complete Core Workout for Rider, and a regular columnist in several equestrian publications including Dressage Today. Equifitt.com offers personalized coaching through clinics and convenient online coaching available anywhere. Clinics available include fitness, yoga and fitness, and sport-psychology and fitness. You can get a free subscription to monthly rider fit tips, or download the ebooks at Equifitt.com.
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