Rider Stability and Balance - part one
Oct 10, 2024
In the last two blogs, we looked at seat bones, how to find them, and how important they are in
communicating with the horse.
We are now going to move on to stability and balance, which are crucial for the success and
enjoyment of riding for both the horse and rider, as well as being essential for horse welfare under
saddle.
Finding stability and balance in the saddle
Finding balance is a bit like developing a taste for good quality wine. Once you have experienced good balance, and established a feel for it, anything else feels second-rate. The problem is that
finding it is not always easy, and in the case of riding, you can easily be seduced into thinking you are balanced when in fact you are not. When we first learn to walk, we go through a series of trial and error experiments, quickly forming a neural pathway that supports our coordination for balance.
The same needs to happen when developing our balance for riding.
Here is an analogy. Let’s say you want to learn to ride a unicycle. Pause for a minute and picture the
challenge. A vertically balanced bipod (human) learns how to stay upright and stable on a vertically
balanced one-wheeled cycle! Now that is some challenge. I expect I would fall off quite a few times,
and once I had mastered it, I wouldn’t be able to relax for a second, or I would risk falling again.
Then imagine travelling forwards and backwards on the unicycle… how much extra balance and stability would it take? In reality, you are aiming to keep your centre of mass over the unicycle’s centre of mass. Now let’s look at riding. A vertically balanced bipod attempts to sit on a horizontally balanced quadruped (horse). The horse doesn’t speak human, and can change speed and direction at any time, often in an unpredictable way! Mmmm, not such a relaxing sport after all!
The centre of mass in a horse
The horse has a centre of mass, just like the unicycle, It’s just not as obvious. Being a quadruped
makes the horse a bit like a table. Add to that a saddle, stirrups and reins, and it makes it easy to
believe you are balanced when you are not.
As prey animals, horses never want to draw attention to their lack of balance, which further
compounds the situation. They will often try to cope, which may look like stiffness and lack of
impulsion. When they can hide it no more, and it manifests itself in a demonstrative way, they are
often labelled evasive, difficult, lazy, or dangerous, usually because they are leaning on the
forehand and jack-knifed through their shoulders.
The same level of core stability and balance that is required for the unicycle, is also required for
riding a horse, except unlike the unicycle, the horse often ends up absorbing the effects of our poor
stability. So how do we check our balance in the saddle, and what affects it?
How to find your balance in the saddle
The most useful exercise to determine this is to try to stand up in the stirrups during trot or canter,
or in fact maybe just in halt or walk. To do this successfully means that you must stand up over your foot, in a similar way to how you would stand on the ground. You are aiming to get a shoulder, hip,
heel alignment in place. If your foot is ahead of you or behind you, then you will wobble backwards
or forwards respectively. In addition to this, your upper body also needs to be straight, as close to
neutral spine as possible.
A good question to ask yourself at this point is, "if the horse was taken out from underneath me in
this moment, and I fell to the ground – would I be able to land on my feet, and if I could, would I be
able to stay upright, or would I fall forwards or backwards?”“
If I am working with a rider, at this point I will often take a picture for them to see, as most of us
believe we are straight when in fact we are not. Visual feedback is the most useful learning tool in
this instance, so even better if you can get in front of a mirror.
Next week in part two we will look at stability, but in the meantime, maybe get someone to take
some pictures of you, static and moving on your horse. What would happen if the horse was taken
out from underneath you? How would you land? What would happen if the reins were cut – would
you fall back?
Join the discussion in my Facebook group, Groundwork for Humans with Sally Ede - I look forward to meeting you there!
Learn about breathing for you and your horse with my free download, Five Powerful Breathing Exercises to Connect You and Your Horse. Get your free download here!
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