Horseback Riding With Balance and Ease
How can you tell if you’re riding in balance or not? Here’s a hint: is your trainer always after you because you have more contact with one leg than the other? Do you hear that you ought to “sit down in your saddle more” or “drop one heel?” Did you ever wonder about that?
When you stand in front of a mirror, is one shoulder higher than the other, or one hip? Can you look farther over your right shoulder than your left? A rider needs to be perfectly balanced on her horse because when she’s out of whack, she throws her horse off. Plain and simple.
Competitive riding is a team sport. When both horse and rider are supple, balanced and have access to their full range of movement, it’s a joy to watch them work and the partnership blossoms. A horse’s center of gravity is pretty high. That central balance point is about five feet above the ground and balanced on feet that are about 12 inches apart.
If the horse has structural imbalances, getting him to move gracefully may be difficult. By the same token, if the horse is structurally balanced but the rider is not, the rider will hold the horse back. Most riders have enough history of bumps, thumps and hard landings to compromise anyone’s body.
Nobody wants to hurt their horse, but I suggest that perhaps an impediment to your horse’s ongoing development might be you. Under saddle, a rider’s imbalances easily transfer onto the horse. Imagine carrying a bowling ball on one side of your body while you try to dance. If you did that a few times a week for a year, no doubt you would create ways to compensate for the imbalance so that you could be as graceful as possible. It’s easy to imagine, however, that you wouldn’t dance with as much skill or balance as when that weight is equally distributed.
When a horse has an unbalanced rider, he has to exercise in a compromised state. Over time, this drives imbalances deep into the horse’s structure and affects his movement and style. A structurally misaligned body experiences gravity as excess stress. Movement and flexibility become limited and cause energy loss, aging and deterioration. A body in alignment with gravity experiences gravitational forces as supportive and is able to move with greater ease, flexibility and strength.
How can you become a more balanced and powerful rider? Through the experience of structural bodywork, chiropractic spinal alignment, effective stretching and with specific strengthening exercises.
1 Comment to Horseback Riding With Balance and Ease
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So true….horses will become one sided if you are not sitting totally balanced on their back..if not corrected , in time, the stress on that one side will take its toll on joints, ligaments and muscle. The wear and tear can cause arthritic problems and irreversible damage to the components in the horses back and cause them to track sideways. They now do have stretching exercises for horses that do need help from improper riding and like for us, it does help muscles return to normal, but it takes time, and the correction will be permanent if no more unbalaning takes place. Because I have a deficit in my right sacro..I do a lot of bareback riding so as not to unbalance my horse. With a saddle I tend to put more pressure on my left stirrup and therefore would have her tend to lean more to the left over time. Stretching is great for me…I just need to do more of it!