THE CURSE OF SO MANY RIDERS, SITTING CROOKEDLY, MAY HAVE ITS ROOT CAUSE IN OUR FLIGHT/FIGHT RESPONSE AND OUR BIPED METHOD OF RUNNING AWAY!

Saying that sitting crookedly is to do with right or left handed dominance still doesn’t get to the heart of the problem.

This is my theory.

When runners are in the blocks, ready to speed off from the sound of the start gun, they get forward over their leading leg, the other leg back and ready to come through. We are bipeds and if we need to run (flight instinct) we adopt a ‘readiness’ mode of weight over one leg to free up the other one so that can come through and push us along.

When we get on a horse, most of us are in a mini ‘flight or fight’ tension and really worried riders even go into a form of feotal position with a curl forward too. Maybe something in our brains tells us to be in a state ‘poised to react’ with our better, dominant side primed up which is hardly surprising given we are on a large beast moving side to side, up and down and forward and sometimes back all at the same time! I don’t think we are aware of this almost unconscious stance we are taking. Just something in our survival mechanism switches on and we cease to notice it after a while.

The key here is WEIGHT distribution. On a horse it is very unhelpful to have one side of our weight over loaded, one side under loaded. We need to switch off that unconscious desire and get BOTH seat bones bearing exactly the same weight in the same way.

That should be easy, shouldn’t it? Not if you have been doing the wrong thing so long it feels normal.

What seems to happen is that the rider HOLDS UP one side of their body. That’s why the leg sometimes feels shorter and needs to reach for the stirrup. The heel comes up and, not being very safe, the leg wants to grip hence the rotation outwards.  But ‘letting go’ is so much harder than you would ever think.

It might help to really exaggerate the tension that probably starts in your neck and goes all the way through to your right seat bone which is literally being sucked up into the soft tissue in your bottom and is held there while you ride. Now think of letting the muscles go starting from your neck (or even your jaw), let your shoulder go and feel it travel downwards, let the shoulder blade go. Notice if it drops an inch! Let go all the way down your right torso to your pelvis and let all the tendons around the hip go so your seat bone sinks down through your bottom and rests on the saddle.

You can now start to think about having equal weight on each seat bone. Each step your horse takes will challenge your desire to hitch up your right side. Keep thinking of the spirit levels but also now think of those old fashioned scales where one side has to be weighted exactly the same as the other side to stay level to each other.

Many of the postural deviations that you see in a rider (head, shoulders, torso, thighs) are the RESULT of the sucking up of one side of the body, especially the seatbone. Fixing them won’t help without dealing with the cause.

I hope this is helpful but if it is at all confusing feel free to email me. I believe its so important to fixing asymmetry, you must understand it fully. Be sure to spend time thinking about what amount of weight is in which seatbone and then do the letting down/letting go on the light, held up side. Sometimes thinking of your skeleton on the hiked up side is like a lift that must drop down to the basement can help.

TIP: As you sit on the horse, try to follow the way your body wants to go so you are exaggerating and therefore highlighting the asymmetry. Its a way of holding up a subtle deviation to the light so you can analyse body part by body part what is happening. You might take it right through to its ultimate conclusion and find you are half off the horse which you will hate the feel of but it is a great way to confront the truth. Be prepared to be shocked!

Jane Christian