Self Carriage for the Rider - part one

In my last two blogs, I discussed the rider’s balance over the horse. Next, we are going to explore an aspect of horse and rider biomechanics that is extremely important and often overlooked in mainstream teaching, and that is how we should support our body weight on the horse.

For a horse to carry us well, we also must carry ourselves. That means that we cannot allow ourselves to simply be a passive burden. The ideal is to sit in such a way, that not only do we distribute our weight evenly and thoughtfully over the horse's back, but also create a positive influence that allows space for the horse to lift and engage his back, to find his own ‘neutral spine’.

In very simple terms, think of the horse’s body as a suspension bridge. The stanchions of the bridge are his shoulders and hindquarters, and his spine is like the road bridge in between. If his back becomes hollow, then the bridge is soggy and the stanchions collapse inwards. Imagine adding a dead weight to the bridge that it was not designed to carry, and it is further going to collapse. This is far too often the norm for ridden horses, that not only are they coping with their backs being chronically hollow, but also trying to carry additional weight in that hollow.

Firstly it’s important to understand how the horse has evolved to carry his own bodyweight before we add that of our own and the saddle. He has two systems, one for grazing and resting, and one for browsing, socialising, and locomotion, which I will describe very briefly. As a herbivore, consuming vast amounts of vegetation and water, his gut can become very heavy to carry around. In fact, the gut area of a horse can weigh around 300kg! However, horses have a very clever labour-saving way of coping with this.

Their intestines are slung inside a large bag of fascia (called mesentery) that is attached to the supraspinous ligament at around L2 of the lumbar spine. The supraspinous ligament runs along the back and then becomes the nuchal ligament as it runs over the withers and extends up the neck. When the horse lowers his head below the height of the withers, the withers act like a fulcrum, and as the ligament becomes taught, it starts to pick up the weight of the entire gut, purely by leverage and without any muscular effort. How cool is that?

However, when his head is above the height of his withers, this system does not operate so well, and instead, he must engage his hindquarters, abdominal, lumbar, thoracic sling, and neck muscles to carry his whole body, which we more commonly know as self-carriage. So having understood how the horse carries itself without our weight, what happens when we sit on their backs? Well, if we add ourselves as a benign and relaxed passenger, we just become a burden to the middle of the suspension bridge, and it starts to collapse, which appears to the eye as a hollow. It also feels like you are sitting in a hollow, but for so many riders that I meet, they have become acclimatised to this hollow and have stopped noticing
it, as if it is the norm.

Over time this will cause muscle wastage and chronic skeletal imbalance, plus a big loss of athletic performance. And pain too. (Yes, it can be often seen in competition horses as well as happy hackers!)

I will often give a horse a belly lift while their rider is sat onboard, which allows them to gain a perspective on how the horse’s long back muscles should feel if its abdominals are correctly engaged, and pushing upwards. As the horse's back sinks back down after the belly lift, it becomes clear how the hollow has become the norm.

A good question to ask yourself is, what does the surface of my horse's back actually feel like? Does it feel toned and pliable, like it could lift and support me, is it flat and tense, or is it hollow, and squishy like an old sofa? Is it level on both sides? Of course, if you aren’t sure how your own body feels, then you are not likely to be able to notice the horse's body, which is why so much of my work is about developing riders to be able to feel and notice this physical interface, which has a great deal of nuance to it.

So what can we do to make ourselves less of the problem and more of the solution? Firstly, it’s important to be balanced over our seat bones in a shoulder-hip-heel alignment and stabilised against the forces acting on our bodies as discussed in previous blogs. Then the answer lies in our muscle tone, and probably a lot more physical effort than most riders want to acknowledge so that we can create some ‘suction’ over the horse's back as opposed to causing ‘deflation’!

Think of the poise and control of an ice skater or ballroom dancer. They look relaxed, but also very light and balanced, in the same way that talented riders do. In the second part of this blog I will explain the ‘how’ of suction and sitting lightly.

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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