Why Pilates Is so good for equestrians.
Equestrianism is a sport, therefore riders are athletes. As athletes, riders require a fitness program which matches the needs of the sport. Let’s take a look at some of those requirements and the skills that riders must develop in order to excel as partners with their horse, whether that be as a weekend warrior or seasoned professional regardless of the equestrian discipline.
If you’re an equestrian it will come as no surprise that a life with horses requires a lot of physical labor, much of it before you do any riding. If you’re fortunate enough to care for your horses yourself, either at home or at a boarding facility, then you know the daily work required to keep them happy and healthy. This includes endless hours of cleaning - cleaning horses, stalls, tack, blankets, towels, wash stalls, trailers, barn aisles, feed rooms, buckets, manure piles, turnout paddocks, fields, wheel barrows, farm equipment and the list goes on. And of course, as any horse owner knows, sometimes things go wrong and horses get sick or injured which requires extra care and even longer hours in order to nurse them back to health.
Needless to say, the care and upkeep of horses is a labor of love and a physical endeavor involving long days and countless items on an ever growing to-do list. You literally never stop moving! Which means you need to have a certain level of fitness, strength and stamina in order to cope.
Riders, however, require an additional set of skills, including: superior balance in the saddle, a combination of stability and softness to follow the movement of the horse, coordination in order to move each of limb independently, body awareness to move or stabilize the upper body separately from the legs and seat, and quick reactions to resist the forces of gravity when things go wrong. Thus, to excel at riding requires a very different approach to fitness than just hitting the gym, pounding out some heavy weights or crunches or going for a run. No doubt these activities can be helpful as part of your program but in order to balance the strength and stamina requirements of equestrianism with the finesse and mobility necessary to be a truly good rider, you need a fitness regimen which connects mind and body, one which includes equal parts strength, stamina, stability, mobility, coordination and focus. Why are these all equally important?
Think about what it takes to progress from a beginner when you are learning the basics of walk, trot and canter to a rider who can work independently, taking the lessons you’ve learned from experts and applying them with proficiency and confidence as you work with your horse on your own. This is the difference between learning to ride and learning to train and truly partner your horse. To make this leap in your level of horsemanship you need:
A balanced seat: the ability to sit with balance (right, left and vertically) with your weight distributed evenly over both seat bones, pelvis square and level, legs “wrapping” equally around the horse’s barrel, a soft, straight back and square but relaxed shoulders;
Feel: the ability to move with the rhythm of the horse which requires mobility in your joints (pelvis, hips, knees, ankles and spine), softness in your shoulders, thoracic spine and neck so that your arms can follow the horse’s mouth, as well as the ability to feel where the horse’s feet, hips and shoulders are so that you know when the horse is straight and connected;
Adjustability: the ability to maintain a balanced position regardless of the horse’s movement, the terrain or the obstacles you are approaching;
Energy: the ability to maintain the energy of the movement in a forward manner, regardless of gait, movement or discipline (i.e., impulsion);
Reaction: the ability to sense when you have lost any of the above and quickly recover your balanced position or the horse’s impulsion without causing an overreaction.
To attain this level of skill of course requires hours upon hours in the saddle, ideally riding under the tutelage of expert horsemen/women. There are no short cuts to good riding. However, you can make your journey easier and more enjoyable by training your body in much the same way as you train your horse.
Consider this: if a horse can feel a tiny fly land on their body imagine how it feels to them to have a grown human sitting on their back. If that human is stiff, crooked or imbalanced, clearly this will have an impact on the horse’s comfort and how it moves under the weight of the rider. Now try this: pick up a 10-20 pound dumbbell in one hand and stand upright. Do you feel how your entire body has to engage in order to stand level and square without leaning to one side? Now try walking in a straight line. Chances are you find it difficult to keep your shoulders and hips square and you feel yourself being pulled to the side you are holding the weight. Now do this for several minutes until you begin to fatigue and you’ll have a better understanding of how a horse feels when asked to work under the weight of a rider who isn’t able to find or maintain a balanced position. Note: if you don’t have a dumbbell, try a bag filled with heavy groceries or books.
In an article for Dressage Today , Grand Prix Dressage rider and trainer Katherine Bateson-Chandler explains the importance of a balanced seat and how rider imbalances affect the horse. The “lack of straightness (in the horse) is one of the most important issues I address with my students, whether they are professional or amateur riders. Straightness is an evenness between right and left. It not only applies when riding on straight lines, but on bending lines and in lateral work as well. Our job as dressage riders and trainers is always to make the horse as equal laterally as we possibly can.” Similar to my dumbbell example, she says “think of the rider on the horse like a backpack on your back. If the rider is always leaning one way, the horse is always trying to put his weight under you like you would with an unevenly loaded backpack. Therefore, the rider’s unevenness in the seat directly affects the straightness of the horse.” She continues, “the best riders in the world sit square, straight and balanced on the horse. I like to remind my students that if you want the horse to be in self-carriage, you must be in self-carriage. You should hold your own body weight balanced, without tipping one way or another, otherwise the horse will not be able to be straight.” (Quoted from “Straightness: How to Align the Horse” by Katherine Bateson-Chandler which appeared in Dressage Today December 12, 2018 and was updated April 25, 2019).
This is true regardless of equestrian discipline. Whether you participate in dressage or western cow horse, you want your body weight to help not hinder the horse’s movement.
Our goal as riders should always be to be the best partner possible for our horse. This requires that we develop our own “self-carriage”. To gain self-carriage, you need first to establish a balanced seat and the strength and stamina to hold yourself up from a strong and supportive center. From this base of support, you will adjust for straightness, lift and length through your spine and ribcage to eliminate collapsing to one side. This is the foundation from which you will be able to build the skills to master free and independent aids which are subtle and often very nuanced movements. These cues tell the horse what you want them to do and, therefore, should be clear and concise. For example, the slight shift of bodyweight into one seat bone can signal the horse to change leads or gaits. To cue the horse clearly so that they understand and respond correctly, riders must develop a high level of body awareness, coordination and mobility. You must be able to separate or disassociate your upper body from your lower body so that you can move your legs without disturbing the balance of your pelvis and your upper body. This requires complete control of your body movement down to the smallest details.
This is where Pilates can prove so beneficial for riders. Pilates strengthens your body from the inside-out, allowing you to harness the power of your deepest muscle layers to help stabilize your body. It also trains your mind-body connection and allows you to fine-tune your movement with precision and control. Pilates trains the body in a systematic way starting with simple, functional exercises, layering on skills gradually and progressing to more advanced movements as the student develops the necessary building blocks. There is an entry level for everyone, regardless of fitness, age or body-type making it a fitness program that anybody can do successfully.
I’ve been practicing Pilates for nearly ten years and I am still discovering ways it can benefit riders. As a Pilates instructor who works with equestrains, I find that riders relate to Pilates easily because there are so many parallels between Pilates and riding - both are built upon a system of learning and training the body, one human and one equine. Similar to the classical Training Scale in dressage, the Pilates method has basic principles which run through every exercise. The Pilates principles are: breath, centering, concentration, control and flow. Every Pilates exercise incorporates these principles starting with the most basic movements. Like the building blocks in riding, Pilates skills are developed gradually, introducing more difficult concepts and intricate movements over time as the body develops and learns.
Pilates is a full-body workout with emphasis on movement. Its benefits will help you in all of your daily activities - in and out of the saddle. You’ll find that it will strengthen your entire core not just your abdominals, providing you with a strong foundation from which you can move more freely and safely. It will make it easier to achieve a balanced seat with proper alignment from head to heel because it works all the muscles supporting the pelvis and spine including the back body (posterior chain). This is crucial for ideal posture and the axial alignment we strive for in riding. Every Pilates workout will strengthen muscles with a balance between stability and mobility. This balance of strength for stability and stretch for mobility makes it easier for riders to be malleable in the saddle, thereby allowing riders to follow the motion of the horse.
Also important for riders is the way Pilates prioritizes finding length in the body by training muscles both concentrically (shortened muscle contraction) and eccentrically (lengthened muscle contraction). The result is muscle tone that is long and lean rather than bulky or tight. Pilates includes a blend of symmetrical as well as asymmetrical exercises. The asymmetrical exercises reproduce functional movement patterns that you use everyday (walking, running or putting on your seatbelt for instance). These exercises require you to move your arms and legs in different patterns and frequently in opposite pairs (right arm, left leg and vice versa). Not only does this work your body in a more balanced way, helping to improve muscular imbalances, it also improves body awareness, coordination and concentration. This asymmetrical training method translates directly to the saddle by improving not only how a rider sits but also their ability to apply aids in a much more sophisticated and precise manner. It trains you to separate your upper body from your lower body, your right side from your left, your shoulders and arms from your ribcage, and your legs from your pelvis and seat so you can improve the quality of your aids without altering the balance or “straightness” in your body. Even when you are bending, twisting or rotating, Pilates teaches you to move from your center of gravity, always maintaining a strong base of support to ensure movement that is balanced and controlled. This is crucial to riders, especially those who jump, gallop, work cattle or compete in reining, barrel racing or other western disciplines.
Having a regular Pilates practice will give you better body awareness, help correct postural imbalances, strengthen your core from the inside out and result in movement which is more fluid, graceful and effortless. These are just some of the ways Pilates can benefit riders but it will make all the other activities you do outside of riding easier too, providing you with a strong foundation so that movement is safer with less risk for injury. Pilates provides the training your body needs for better “self-carriage” as a rider, an athlete and as a human, giving you more confidence in and out of the saddle. The result? A better partnership with your horse and more enjoyment every time you ride.
Notes:
There are many, many books out there about riding and every discipline no doubt has its own list. Many include chapters on rider biomechanics, fitness and asymmetries and how they affect the horse under saddle. Here are a few of my favorites:
1) Centered Riding by Sally Swift. This is a classic and should be a part of every rider’s library in my opinion, regardless of discipline. Personally, I was introduced to this book many years ago and was excited to discover years later after relocating to Massachusetts that a number of the photos contained in the book were taken at a farm near mine where Sally frequently taught clinics.
2) The Natural Rider: A Right-Brain Approach to Riding by Mary Wanless. Filled with great imagery and exercises to help you master the movements and skills of riding at all levels.
3) Posture and Performance by Gillian Higgins. Principles of Training Horses from the Anatomical Perspective. This is the author and clinician who created the “Horses from the Inside Out”, body painting horses and riders with their skeletal and muscular structures to provide a great visual teaching tool for riders and trainers. Really interesting for any horseperson but especially those interested in horse and rider biomechanics.
4) Ride Right: Balance Your Frame and Frame of Mind with an Unmounted Workout and Sport Psychology System by Daniel Stewart. This is a great reference as the author explains riding and common riding problems in a simple, easy to understand manner, providing great examples, illustrations and tips to improve your riding, your fitness and your confidence. A personal favorite of mine as I was lucky enough to be one of the models pictured in the photos used in the book.
5) I’m also a great fan of Denny Emerson’s writings. He has written many books and has a very active Facebook page which is always illuminating and thought provoking. I highly recommend it.
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