I keep thinking if I write all this down my muscles will just magically start doing what I want, and isolate the way I need them to. It is starting to work, so hooray.
One of the problem is that I was a ballet dancer for a long, long time. Toe shoes, the whole nine yards. But year ago I had to make a choice — riding or dance, and the equestrian sports and ballet are not compatible. I had to make a choice. Horses won… because of course they did because horses are magic and as the anonymous quote says, “The air of heaven is that which blows between a horse’s ears.”. Ballet will break your body, and you can only do it for a limited number of years, while horses may kill you, but you can ride until you fall over.
Problem is that ballet had me really holding with my low back muscles and even arching my back. To ride well the low back muscles and your gluts need to relax so you can melt into the horse. It’s your core that needs to do the work, the abs, particularly the obliques, and the deep core muscles that form the pelvic floor. This enables the hip to swing through with the horse’s motion rather than bracing against it.
Because the horse’s body echoes our body, if the rider is sitting still and bracing the horse will begin to brace their back as well. Their stride becomes short and choppy, and they will often come above the bit.
So, when you ride you are doing a soft continual sit up for the entire time you’re on the horse, but the core muscles are also pulsing in time to the horse’s rhythm to lift your pubic bone and allow the hip to swing.
What I’m struggling to overcome is the tendency to tighten my back muscles when I use my core. Isolating the muscle groups is proving to be much, much more difficult than I anticipated.
