The following is a question from a reader of this blog. Her question and my answer may be helpful to anyone struggling with asymmetries.

Dear Jane, I have been reading your perfect seat blog, and I have to say what a revelation! What you describe as the weak right leg syndrome is me and my riding problems. For the last couple of years I have been trying to cure my crookedness whilst riding, but to no avail. I have been to various physio`s and chiro`s, all of whom have told me that I am straight. But I know I`m not when riding because I always feel that I`m reaching for my right stirrup. My right leg is my kicking leg, and my left leg feels forced down and slightly too far forward. I get a lot of pain in my left ankle to the point it feels locked. For the last couple of months I have been doing the Pilates for the Dressage Rider exercises. This is not my first port of call, I dread to think how much time and money I have spent on various DVD`s in order to cure my problem! I wonder am I going in the right direction? Or should I be doing some other exercise regime? Do you have a system I could follow? This problem is really spoiling my riding pleasure, and of course cannot be much fun for my Horse, who is an absolute saint. I would be happy to pay you for your time and information. Please can you help? Regards, Vivienne, Yorks.

MY RESPONSE......

Dear Vivienne

So glad some enlightenment has been found from my blog. Its is so very difficult to unravel and then explain these remedial riding fixes but hope the following helps.

NB This is just the first stage of sorting out your position. Look at it as laying a foundation stone down on which to build everything else.

Back to basics. Try to clear you mind of everything you know and just think of yourself as a skeleton - more particularly just a pelvis and a spine. (Look up pictures or examine a real skeleton!) Think of your pelvis as just the bony rectangular box that it is. It rests on the saddle on two 'feet' that are slightly curved - your seat bones. Pause for a moment to consider how hard it is going to be to balance ON your pelvis and those little seatbones (continue to ignore all the soft bits of your body). The saddle is slightly curved and the horse is a barrel that is also moving! Add on top of the bony box (pelvis) a long, curved, articulated wet noodle (yes, that's our spines I am talking about) - which everything else hangs off of and is inclined to sway, collapse, droop, flop etc. Now you see the problem!

What is going wrong with riders who sit crookedly is simply that they are not paying attention to keeping the bony box ABSOLUTELY level on the saddle. Why? Because its is extremely difficult to do so. If you do not make the fixes in the right 'muscles' low down, right near to the seatbones radiating outwards, other muscles in the body will try to do if for you as your body hates to feel unsafe. Legs will grip, shoulders tense and rise up etc etc.

The bony box (pelvis) is very annoying as it can tilt from side to side and front to back at the same time AND do different variations of these on the left to the right. That's why lessons from untrained teachers often cannot solve the problem. Its almost like the best teacher for your body is you - once you start to know what to look for and read feedback from your body. Not everyone can do this I'm afraid. If you get even a bit of feedback, an ah ha moment, you'll be okay as you can build on this and get better at it.

So. Sit on your horse and walk forward. If safe to do so, take both thighs, knees, lower legs away from the horse's side so you are just resting (literally balancing) on your seatbones. This is to find them and take away compensating bracing and gripping that obscure the truth. Now imagine you have a little spirit level (with the bubble to tell what's level) in each seatbone/side of your pelvis. Feel how you have to use deep muscles low down near the seatbones and surrounding area to KEEP readjusting the distribution of weight so that, like a pair of old fashioned scales, you have equal pressure/weight/half of your body on BOTH sides of your pelvis. Keep taking your legs away and then putting them back to check that you are BALANCING and deep muscles keep firing to get you back to level. Make sure your eyes have gone 'soft' so you are concentrating only on the task of keeping your seatbones/pelvis level - as if your brain has gone down there to sort it out and your mind in currently empty!

Your spine must also do a 're-adjusting to find level' job but this is harder as you have nothing to gauge pressure against. Just think that it is not allowed to slump, flop, curve inwards or outwards but is involved in the job of keeping the pelvis level ON THE SADDLE. (I find it helpful to get a little 'angry' with my body and tell it....'Just keep level, all muscles wake up and put a bit of effort in!!!! We all often have a mindset that we should be able to ride along, doing nothing much, just sitting in a nice chair, but that's what insidiously causes the problem).

Your seat can still gently 'GO WITH' the horse's movement. Balancing is not about being 'locked' any more than a tightrope walker could go rigid on the rope and expect to stay balanced.

Think of keeping the spirit level bubble level both sides of the pelvis and this will naturally make the right core muscles come into play. You don't need to think of using them or you may become too stiff. Anyway, the mind needs to be engaged in the process of levelness/balancing/micro-compensating for gravity, missteps by the horse etc.

Do this on a few hacks so you start to understand your body. You might now start to notice what your right leg is doing. Compare it to the left leg. Do you know notice that one seatbone (your right) is angled front to back differently from the left? Lift your right leg only up and put it back down. Previously you may have been sitting more on the front of the right seatbone and that made your leg go back, your heel go up and feel as if you are reaching for the stirrup? When you hold you leg up and put it down, you should sit more on the back of the seatbone (like your left seatbone does) with your thigh more horizontal, not slipping into vertical, and this puts your right thigh more out in front of you. It also takes a bit of a hollow out of your right lumbar area, making it a bit rounder and therefore softer to the horse. This is what is causing rotation (I'm sure there is some) in your upper body but its very complicated to explain the connection at this point. However, fixing it is not too difficult if the pelvis is level.

So turn your attention to your torso, or upper body. You probably have a rotation so that your left shoulder is slightly in advance of your right although you won't feel this as your body thinks its straight!

Can you try to reverse this? Its as if your left side has been trying to push your right side off the horse! The rotation pushes your right side back but also down. Think of your right side trying to push back by rotating/easing the right shoulder with the rest of the torso forward so the left has to stay back instead. This should make you feel more secure and help 'balance' because 1. you are more straight in the torso from shoulders down and 2) you now have more equal muscle tone each side to hold you straight.

One other very important little tip. As you ride (all paces), try to hold your right knee OUT from the saddle about an inch. Sounds odd I know but you are activating a tendon that runs over the hip joint and this being in tone/holding will stop your leg and pelvis slipping off the horse and keep your seatbone securely anchored onto the saddle.

As you can see, these little, but major, corrections are quite lengthy and complicated to explain but please have a go trying them out getting a friend to read them out while you are riding if necessary.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email me.

Regards and good luck,

Jane
HER REPLY.....

Hi Jane, Thank you so much for all your great advice. I shall start practising Today. You are right about my left shoulder, as I am forever being told that I am blocking my Horse on my left turns. I am quite happy to put in the work required to correct my position and I realise that it will not happen overnight. But to be able to ride without feeling that my left stirrup is shorter than the right would be great. Hopefully I can then progress to working on other aspects of my position.  I will keep you updated with how I get on. Any other tips you feel may benefit me would be greatly received, (by my Horse as well). Please feel free to put my question on your blog, because after speaking to various people and watching others ride I am amazed at how many appear crooked. I think some don`t realise and others don`t know where to get help. I was definitely the latter. I feel now I can make some progress, rather than just trying something and hoping for the best that it will work. Thanks again, Regards, Vivienne


Hi Jane, (reader is replying to my comments regarding some photos she sent me).

Er, wow. Now that has given me food for thought! I have spent some time analysing what you have said along with taking a good look at my photos. And of course I will keep on doing this. I understand that I need to get it clear in my head before I can fix it. I`m a little unclear as to how I can manage to have my right shoulder down and back when I am holding my right side up. How, or rather why do I do this? Would you recommend any exercises to do off the horse, either on the floor or on the gym ball? Regards, Vivienne

MY REPLY

Hi Vivienne,


Firstly, you ask how you can be 'hitched' up one side but have a shoulder held down? Its actually easy sadly. If you look at your first photo you could superimpose a letter C on your back - exaggerating of course to make the point. The spine is slightly deviating with a side to side curve with the bulge towards the left. So what does the helpful shoulder do? Try to anchor the body down to the right to counterbalance or you would feel unsafe.

Re exercises. Anything that develops both sides of the body equally is good. Swimming, yoga, pilates. Sitting on the gym ball or even just a chair and trying to connect with your pelvis to get feedback as to whether you have EQUAL PRESSURE on each bit of the bony bits (seatbones) you are sitting on. The truth is that there are no magical exercises that we can do to fix this. It has to be a slow appreciation of the finer points of balance or equilibrium. The way to do that is constantly refine your concentration on the matter and your processing of the feedback from your body.

Its a bit like our body initially sits on the horse, finds a position and says 'That's good enough. I'm straightish". What you've got to do now is say, 'No, that is not good enough'. Probably the most appropriate 'exercise' I could give you would be to say 'find a doorway or beam in your house, reach up and grab hold of it. Let your body hang down from the beam until all the kinks are out. Now as I insert the horse underneath your bottom, sit down slowly and CHANGE NOTHING'. The truth is that I could ask you to flex this muscle, elongate that tendon, tweak here and there and it might help a bit but if you don’t realise the ultimate aim is to be able to balance, really balance without grip, on the horse, I will just tie you up in knots.  My hanging exercise is not being flippant, just trying to convey what the real problem is. The old fashioned method of riding bareback and without stirrups has lots of merit. Any kinks in the body and we fell off.

It may come down to how much brain space you currently have spare while riding. If you are on a young or difficult horse, so much of your concentration will be outside your body trying to deal with what is happening it will be more difficult to 'go inside' yourself to 'listen' to the feedback and make micro adjustments all the time you are riding - each step the horse takes.

Let me give you this idea though to try, if you haven't already. When riding, think of bringing, and then holding, each seatbone nearer to the middle, i.e. 'narrowing in' your seatbones. Its actually not possible to really move the bones of course but you will find the increase in muscle tone whilst trying to do this will help stability of the whole pelvis, seatbone and thigh.

Hope this helps, keep me updated.

Jane Christian