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- Herausgeber: J A Allen
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Do you struggle with pain, a lack of mobility, or a position in the saddle that just won't improve? Do you ever feel like you cannot find the right exercise routine to help your body and your riding, let alone fit it into your busy schedule? Biomechanics for the Equestrian will show you how to prepare your body for life in and out of the saddle by changing the way you move throughout the day. Discover what is causing your lower back pain or the stiffness in your hips and learn how you can move yourself away from discomfort and towards performance, without having to find extra time in your day. Key topics covered include: the physiology of movement; understanding your body; the riding connection; alignment; expansion breathing; mobilization; strengthening and integrating exercises into a busy day. Working with the mechanics of the human body and how we were all designed to move, you will learn how to build a sustainable and functional body that can sit in the saddle with comfort, strength and balance.
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Biomechanics
for the Equestrian
MOVE WELL TO RIDE WELL
Biomechanics
for the Equestrian
MOVE WELL TO RIDE WELL
Debbie Rolmanis
First published in 2019 by by JA Allen
JA Allen is an imprint of The Crowood Press Ltd Ramsbury, Marlborough Wiltshire SN8 2HR
www.crowood.com
This e-book first published in 2019
© Debbie Rolmanis 2019
All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 90880 985 8
Diagrams by Carole Vincer
Disclaimer The author and publisher do not accept responsibility in any manner whatsoever for any error or omission, or any loss, damage, injury, adverse outcome, or liability of any kind incurred as a result of the use of any of the information contained in this book, or reliance upon it.
Contents
Introduction
Who wants to ride better? Who wants to move with less pain? Who wants to avoid a hip replacement? And who wants age to not be a barrier to all the things you love doing? Me! I want all those things! That is what I decided a few years ago and, working with riders of all levels, across a multitude of disciplines, I knew that these were things they wanted too.
I haven’t always been interested in how the body works. I was a sporty kid; not the worst on the court or in the pool or on a horse, but certainly not the best either. I didn’t think twice about not being able to do things until I was thirteen and receiving physiotherapy for a broken collar bone (yes, I did fall off a horse) when I was diagnosed with congenital scoliosis. Apparently a couple of my vertebrae were ‘incomplete’, which had forced my spine to make the shape of a winding mountain road as opposed to the normal column that really would be preferable. For the first time I was made very aware of my body, especially on my one and only visit to the specialist who announced that I should never again get on a horse. Although I ignored him, it did awaken a curiosity in me and over the next few years I sought help from ‘alternative’ therapies; I stuck with the ones who told me what I wanted to hear and continued my riding career. Subsequently I became a personal trainer; understanding how the body worked not only helped me to coach riders, but also to keep myself strong and mobile. By this point my interest in all things performance was well and truly entrenched and I went on to become a sports therapist for horse and rider to help unravel some body and performance issues.
I worked with riding clients of all levels, ages, shapes and sizes for over a decade, and patterns of dysfunctions – common themes of pain, positional frustrations and horse training ‘trouble’ – appeared across the board. Elite riders would show up with the same physical niggles as amateurs and, although improvements were being made, niggling and insidious issues would continue. I knew I was missing something. Seemingly fit, active people were suffering with pain and dysfunction, which was impacting them both on the ground and in the saddle. The gap in my knowledge was understanding the body’s non-negotiable, indelible need for movement – not movement in terms of a workout at the gym or a thirty-minute run, but consistent, varied, aligned movement of the entire body. The work I was doing was facilitating the opportunity for good movement, but the missing link was the actual good movement. As soon as a rider left my clinic, they would continue to move their bodies in the same way as they had on their way in. Little wonder their problems were recurring. The way the rider moved during their everyday life was impacting their body in the most significant way, and when I realized this, I noticed every rider I work with suffering with similar patterns.
Delving into the world of biomechanics, discovering how loads shape our bodies and how our bodies are designed to thrive from movement, has turned my practice on its head. It is now less about treatment and more about movement education. There is nothing more powerful than corrective movement done all of the time. Real change is only possible if the body is moved how it was designed to be moved, and it isn’t about carving time out of your day to do it. Every rider I work with is time poor, so trying to stick to an exercise regime or time at the gym is often not practical and, as will become clear, is not necessarily the best for the body. Classes once a week can be really useful, but they can also present challenges to the body if it is turning up with muscle imbalances, immobility and vulnerable joints. Bringing a stable foundation to the exercise you want to do will give you greater results and provide you with more of a safeguard against injury.
Riding is complicated: we all know that, and every rider I know just wants to be better at it and keep their horse sound. The truth is that the body you bring to the saddle plays a massive role in dictating your riding journey. Everything you do in the saddle – how you sit and where you sit – will influence the way the horse loads his limbs, his back, his pelvis and his forehand. Adjusting your position in the saddle is fine for small tweaks, but the shape your body is in on the ground will be the same shape it will be in on the horse. That is to say, if you have a sore back, a stuck hip and a frozen shoulder on the ground, these will impact everything you do in the saddle and will dictate how your horse has to move. Knowing how to move yourself away from pain and dysfunction on the ground will change how you sit in the saddle; riding well doesn’t just happen in the hours you spend riding: it happens in the way you walk the dog, pick out feet and drive the car. Nobody has a ‘perfect’ body (just ask them), yet we all only get one for the duration of our life and we live in it all the time! Your body carries with it your past, present and future. As you will see, your ancestors left you with a blueprint of an exceptional machine and this book will help you unearth the body you probably never knew you had. The present shape of your body is different from what it once was. It is constantly in flow, which means you also have the power to control how your shape will change in the future. Educating yourself about your body is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself and it is my intention with this book to give you the knowledge you need to love the body you are living in, both in and out of the saddle. This is the book that is going to show you how to move well to ride well.
Part 1
Your Movement Story
If you spend any time at all thinking about the human body, from what you see to what lies beneath your skin, chances are you will consider it as a collection of parts – organs, tissues, systems and limbs that operate independently from each other and which largely perform tasks without a whole lot of input from you. However, if that were the case there probably wouldn’t be a need for this book. The reality is your body responds to everything you provide it with, and it also responds to everything you don’t provide it with in terms of nutrition, hydration, emotional well-being (stress, fear, anger) and movement. As an adult, you will be well versed with the basic needs of a human body: good nutrition from a healthy and well-balanced diet, sufficient daily hydration from clean, plain water (0.033ml for every kg of bodyweight if you weren’t sure) and most of you are probably all too aware of how stress doesn’t always serve your body positively. What is rarely touted as a life-giving essential is the basic human need for movement. You might know you need to exercise, yes, but the prescribed hour a day at the gym, or a thirty-minute run, or a class once a week, or riding your horse (although better than not moving at all) is only one tiny chapter of your movement story; it’s similar to knowing you should eat your greens, but greens alone do not make a complete diet.
The modern exercise prescription is not a complete movement diet for the body and to understand why it’s not enough, it’s time to look at the physiology of movement.
1The Physiology of Movement
Movement relates to the positions you have your body in all of the time. How your body is organized determines how it copes with the loads that are placed upon it and therefore what shape the tissues of the body are in. You are loading your body all of the time, which means you are shaping your body all of the time; whether you are sitting down or climbing a mountain, your body is receiving and responding to loads like a lump of clay being moulded into a shape. The form that you create depends on the way you move, how often you move and how differently you move. The shape of your body today, from the position of your spine to the direction your feet point, tells its very own movement story and, as a rider, this is the story your horse will read when you get in the saddle. So, how is it that your shape is dictated by movement? To understand how to create a shape that serves you, it is first necessary to take a look at cells.
CELLS
Your body is a matrix of cells. Every tissue and organ in the body is made of cells. They run in your blood, they form skin and hair, they make and destroy bone, they build and deplete muscle mass, they fight disease, and they help to organize the body in time and space. They are everywhere, all of the time, and they are all connected to one another via a supportive and behaviour-regulating scaffolding known as the extra-cellular matrix. This means that whenever you move a limb or change the configuration of your body parts, you are also adjusting the arrangement of your cells. This cell influence is happening all of the time because of loads. From how you hold a pen to how you sit on a horse, to the loads created by the tension of your waistband, you are constantly providing input to some area of your body. Nothing goes unnoticed and every movement has a reaction. The movements you make (and don’t make) are quite literally shaping your body.
EXTRA-CELLULAR MATRIX
The extra-cellular matrix is made up of proteins and polysaccharides (carbohydrates). Its function is to bind cells together and regulate a number of cellular activities.
The effect of load on cells
Loading is the process by which cells receive, sense and translate physical forces and express these loads as your unique human form; from the shape of your bones to the length of your muscles, cells control it all. The body evolved to thrive on movement, and this is confirmed via cell behaviour. Cells require a consistent (and fairly constant) amount of squashing, bending and general deformation of shape not only to stay healthy, but to stay alive. Without any mechanical input or use, even with the best nutrition, cells will not survive. How this shows up in real terms is seen in your posture, your bone density, your muscle mass and the location of your muscle mass. The shape of your body today tells a story not only about what you have been feeding it, but also how you have been loading your cells.
Your body is receiving mechanical stimulation all day, every day. It receives it if you are sitting down, standing, riding, walking or grooming. Your cells are affected differently depending on the shoes you are standing in, right through to whether your trousers are a little snug around the waistband. If you sit down all day your body will adjust differently than if you were standing or walking all day. If you ride eight horses each day, the shape of your cells and the cells you utilize will be different from those of someone who has never sat on a horse, and if you ride after some time off you will certainly know all the new cells you have loaded the next day!
When you think about loads, it is also necessary to consider loads that impact all of your senses. Sensory organs receive loads via pressure (for example, eyes), skin receives loads via touch through clothing and shoes (with new loads experienced as blisters) and your musculo-skeletal system is constantly dealing with the loads imposed by gravity.
The human body is multi-dimensional, meaning that it is made from a range of parts that all contribute to how it functions as a whole. Each joint and soft tissue requires specific movements to keep them healthy, and this can only be achieved if the body is moved in a variety of different ways on a regular basis. It is the variety that ensures that all the cells of the body receive some mechanical input so that they stay alive. Problems, such as pain and lack of mobility, occur when your movements all use the same mechanics and therefore only target the same cells. Walking the same way and carrying things the same way, all the way through to always brushing your teeth with the same hand, will squash and bend some cells and leave others untouched. This imbalance of cell ‘care’ creates an environment of tissues with great strength next to tissues of profound weakness. If you look in the mirror and have rounded shoulders, or you look down to your feet and your knees are facing towards each other, you are looking at the results of an imbalance of cell loading. If every picture tells a story, so too does every human body: its very own story of how much, and how little, the cells have been affected by how they have been moved.
GRAVITY, LOADS AND THE SHAPE OF YOUR BONES
It’s possibly not every day that you spend much time considering the shape of your bones, and you would be forgiven for thinking that they are a fixed, immovable feature of the body whose shape cannot be influenced. However, your bones are also constantly being affected by the loads the body experiences, both via gravity and via the soft tissues that act upon them.
Gravity
Gravity is constantly loading your body and is therefore always having an effect on your body. The best way for the body to resist this force in order to maintain form (and therefore function) is via your bones as they are the strongest, least malleable tissue of the body. The purpose of bones is to maintain the structure of your physical form and to realize the movement potential given to them by your muscles. Every bone in your body has a unique architecture depending on its location. As the saying goes, ‘structure governs function’ so the shape and size of each bone depends on how much load it is expected to take, and the joint with which each bone articulates dictates how much movement it has to allow.
The force of gravity occurs vertically; Newton’s apple didn’t fall off the tree at an angle. This exertion of force that can change the shape of the human body is best counteracted by resistance, and bones can only resist gravity in the best way if they are aligned vertically. When bones are stacked correctly, the loading they receive encourages more bone cells to be laid down, which increases their strength and density.
If, however, your bones are not stacked in alignment, gravity starts designing the shape of your body, often without you realizing it. If you are finding it difficult to imagine how an invisible force can create structural change, think about the shape of trees by the coast. The loads created by powerful ocean winds will bend the trees over so that they look like they are constantly in a wind tunnel. Gravity can do the same to your body.
So does any of this really matter? Well, yes. If, on the ground, you move yourself through the day in a posture that is not vertically aligned to gravity, you become like one of those coastal trees: a bit bent out of shape. You then take that position into the saddle and finding the position of your dreams becomes just that – a dream.
LOADS AND CELLS
Loads placed on the body via movement translate into loads on the cells themselves. This creates cellular data and this is where change in strength, density and shape occurs.
Loads
As well as gravity, your body experiences loads from other ‘sources’, whether it is just the load of your bodyweight or what and how you are carrying ‘things’. If you carry your loads in the same way every day, you are shaping your body in a way that will affect how it sits in the saddle. How you carry the saddle, how you groom, how you tack up, how you muck out, all matters to your body. The likelihood is you will do them all the same way, loading the same structures over and over again and leaving others unused. You now know that your movement patterns shape your body and the shape your body is in will determine a number of your experiences, such as how much pain you are in, whether your lower back greets you every morning or your shoes are rubbing on that bunion or maybe you can’t look over your shoulder.
So the question is, do you like or want the shape you are creating? How different would it be for your body if you changed how you loaded it? It doesn’t necessarily mean that one way is better than another; the important thing is that the loads are carried differently.
CIRCULATION AND MOVEMENT
Most people know that the heart pumps blood around the body to service tissues, organs and systems with nutrients, and to pick up and remove the waste that they generate. However, this relatively straightforward idea is only one part (albeit significant) of your body’s circulatory story.
It is estimated that an adult’s circulatory system is 60,000 miles long. To service the entire area requires a complex network of blood vessels arranged into an intricate web of delivery highways that start as large vessels as they leave the heart and become smaller and smaller towards the extremities so that every nook and cranny of the body is looked after.
The heart pumps blood around the body at rest with a heart rate that depends on your level of fitness and the ‘cleanliness’ of your blood vessels. It will then increase its delivery of blood flow by increasing how fast it beats as the demand becomes greater, which is what happens when the body is moving.
Homo sapiens evolved as an animal that relies on constant and varying movement for survival. Some of this movement would be slow and careful and some would be rapid and strenuous (sprints/climbing). The degree of complexity, speed and power of the movement the body was performing determined how much of the musculo-skeletal system needed to be used. When skeletal muscles are working, they lengthen and contract, sometimes slowly but consistently and at other times, such as when sprinting, much more rapidly. In times of maximum output, the muscles require a rapid delivery of nutrients coupled with a reliable waste transportation system to allow muscles to keep moving. Relying on the heart to deliver sufficient blood flow to all the working muscles under such intense circumstances would be a risky strategy. This is why the very action of muscles changing length helps to support the delivery of blood. As they contract and lengthen, blood is pulled in and then pushed out, servicing the cells of the muscle as it works. When a muscle is repeatedly not moved, the cells start to starve from a lack of input from movement, but also from a lack of nutrient delivery in the blood. If there is no change in length of the muscle fibres, there are no mechanics to help direct blood flow towards it. If the same movement patterns are performed every day, over a period of time the way the body arranges itself will show the result of cell death in the form of muscle atrophy (wastage).
Circulation is inhibited through any static positioning of the body and through direct pressure from external forces, but also from forces experienced within the body. The route your blood vessels have to take can vary depending on the geometry of your body. For example, sitting down forces the blood vessels to curve around and zigzag over the bones of the hips, creating some narrowing and pinching of the size of the blood vessel as it presses over bone. Blood is meant to travel smoothly through your veins and arteries like melted butter along a silk road! Kinks in the road or blockages (caused by plaque, or pressure from visceral fat) can cause the blood to ‘spurt’. This turbulence sends the blood crashing into the walls of the blood vessels, which can cause damage and over time may wear the walls too thin. The body decides it needs to protect the walls so it sends cells to lay down material. This creates a thickening in the blood vessel, closing the gap for the flow of blood even further. All of a sudden the body is at risk of cardiovascular disease, even though there is nothing wrong with the heart.
Fig. 1 Circulation and blood vessels.
a)Blood travels smoothly along a wide blood vessel that is not compromised through acute angles of bones.
b)Any narrowing of the blood vessel as it travels over bones causes blood to spurt and cause damage to the walls of the blood vessel.
YOUR HORSE’S CELLS
Your horse’s body responds to movement and loads in the same way as yours does. If you ride with any area of the horse’s body held in too much tension, the muscles in that area will not receive the input they need to stay healthy, and will therefore waste away.
JOINTS
Muscles might be the workers of the body, but it is the joints that turn their efforts into realized action. Muscles attach to bones via tendons, so when a muscle contracts it exerts a force/load onto the tendon, which in turn creates sufficient strength to move the bone from one position to another. Joints are formed between two (or more) bones to provide a point of mobility in the body to ensure smooth and energy-efficient travel. The architecture of each joint is determined by its location, the amount of force it is expected to receive, the direction of stressors it is likely to experience and the amount of movement that is required. The bones of a joint are held together by soft tissue structures known as ligaments. These strong, fibrous tissues act in a similar way to the stabilizers a child has on a bicycle, providing enough support to prevent chronic displacement (tipping over) and enabling the child to move forward with confidence. The same is true for joints. If ligaments are of the optimal length, they encourage the full range of movement of the joint by providing a safe and supportive environment within which the bones are suspended. Joints will only feel safe to move if they first feel stabilized. Ligaments are not designed to deal with load in the same way that muscles are. Muscles have a much higher elasticity, which means they are able to adapt for a much longer time to load and still spring back to their normal length. Ligaments can be stretched through load, but do not have enough ‘spring’ to rebound back to their starting length. This means that once a ligament is lax, it will always be lax. If you have twisted your ankle once, chances are you have twisted it twice.
As with muscles, joints require movement to stay healthy. They need to do the work they were designed to do; they need to experience load, force and articulation to maintain integrity, stay lubricated and to challenge their stabilizers (ligaments) to become strong and supportive. The genius of the body is that when it is put into an optimal biomechanic position and all of these moving parts combine, the balance of work share throughout the body is just right.
Problems occur when the body’s loading share is unequally distributed, and placed over joints not designed to take load. This occurs when the body is not moved from an aligned position.
THE MOVEMENT HABIT
The way you use and move your body comes down to habitually formed patterns. This is the reason people walk with a limp long after the actual symptoms of their injury have gone. The limp becomes a movement habit, which requires conscious effort to change.
Repetitive movement becomes a vicious cycle for the body. The way you stand and move will be in a posture that your body has found to be the most economical in terms of energy saving, the most comfortable and ‘normal’ for it. This doesn’t mean it is the best position for your body to be in, but that it feels so normal that you are not drawn to adjust it.
If you have ever been repositioned on your horse, you will likely have had the experience of feeling very ‘odd’, off-balance, wrong. This highlights how the body and the mind trick us into believing that our habit of misalignment is correct.
SKELETAL MUSCLE MECHANICS
‘A tight muscle will pull a joint into a dysfunctional position, and a weak muscle will allow this to happen.’
To understand the implications of poor movement, it is necessary to have an understanding of what happens at a cellular level within your muscles. Each muscle is an all-encompassing unit containing smaller and smaller segments that enable the muscle to do its job.
Muscles are an exceptional piece of kit. They adapt to the positions they find themselves in, they work hard, and they help each other out. If they are used they grow, and if they are neglected they shrink. Life becomes really difficult when the adaptations required are too severe, or the workload is too heavy, as although muscles are magnificent at adapting, their ability to compromise is not endless.
The whole premise of skeletal muscle mechanics is that they maintain the right length to be able to move a bone. Optimal length describes the ideal resting length from which it can contract or lengthen. Skeletal muscles (those involved in moving your bones) work as teams. There are muscles on either side of your joints, and when one shortens to move the bone, the muscle on the other side of the joint has to lengthen. This can be shown by the biceps (front of your upper arm from elbow to shoulder) and the triceps (back of your upper arm, elbow to shoulder).
Fig. 2 Muscle mechanics.
a)The elbow joint in a neutral position showing the biceps at the front of the joint and the triceps at the back.
b)Flexion of the elbow joint showing contraction of the biceps and reciprocal lengthening of the triceps.
c)Extension of the elbow joint showing contraction of the tricep muscle group and reciprocal lengthening of the biceps.
Fig. 3 Muscle anatomy. A look inside the belly of a muscle to show the rows of fibres, the fibrils within the fibre and the sections of sarcomeres.
MUSCLE ANATOMY
To really grasp the concept of the importance of movement, it is necessary to know how a muscle responds to movement, and in order to do that you need to get to the deepest, smallest segment that controls how muscles work on a cellular level.
The muscle puzzle is a layering system of ever-decreasing structures. The contour or shape you might see on a well-defined body is the end result of all these layers. If you were to take a peek inside, the first thing you would see would be bundles of fibres. These are individual rope-like structures that sit in uniform rows, one on top of the other. These are the largest segment of skeletal muscle. Within each fibre are smaller ropes known as fibrils. And if you look inside a fibril, you will see segments known as sarcomeres. But the story doesn’t end there, as to get to the heart of the muscle narrative you have to go one level deeper and look inside a sarcomere.
THE MAGIC WITHIN A SARCOMERE
Within each sarcomere (which are separate compartments along the length of the fibril, which are the length of the fibres, which give the muscle its shape and length) is the hub of intelligence, control and movement potential. Within each sarcomere are sections of proteins – actin and myosin – which enable the muscle to move.
Actin
The outer protein sections of the sarcomere are known as actin. Imagine this as two halves of a rectangle which are able to slide over each other.
Myosin
The proteins on the inside are known as myosin. The myosin proteins are attached to the actin by a spring-like structure called titin (seeFig. 4).
When the brain sends an instruction for the muscle to contract, the myosin are activated (via units of energy) to bring both sides of the actin closer together. Each myosin should have contact with the actin for maximum force generation. As the actin moves closer together, the spring on the end of the ‘box’ is stretched, and then recoils to allow the sarcomere to return to resting length; in other words, to move the box back to where it started. For the best movement potential, as many myosin as possible need to have contact with the actin.
When a muscle is held in a habitually shortened position through postural habits, the actin overlap each other when they are meant to be in their ‘resting’ position. This means that when the muscle is required to contract to create movement, there is no ‘movement potential’; quite simply, there is no space to move into.
Muscles are great adaptors, so where one might be sitting in a shortened state, there will be another in a state of chronic lengthening. Fig. 6 shows a sarcomere that is sitting in a habitually lengthened position.
Fig. 4 The components of a sarcomere, including the proteins actin and myosin sitting in a normal resting length.
Fig. 5 Shortened sarcomere. The appearance of a sarcomere that has no movement potential; notice the actin have slid completely over each other
Fig. 6 The appearance of a sarcomere that has been stretched. Notice that the myosin have lost contact with the actin and will therefore be unable to bring the actin closer together.
Here you can see that only a few of the myosin have any contact with the actin as it has been stretched too far. This means that the force of the contraction will be very weak. In chronic situations the muscle fibres have been stretched so far that none of the myosin are touching the actin, which means that there is no force production at all.
Research in human muscle science has found that muscles which sit in a constant position, whether that be short or stretched, will change the number of sarcomeres within the fibril to ensure the body is able to be moved. To be static would be detrimental for survival so there needs to be a way for the body to ensure its muscles can continue to generate force from whatever position they find themselves in. This means that the number of sarcomeres within a fibril is changeable at a cellular level.
If a shortened muscle has sarcomeres that are all sitting in an overlapped position and have nowhere to move, the muscle will remove one or more sarcomeres to give the remaining ones space to move. So now a shortened muscle has been shortened on a biological level. Likewise, a muscle that is stretched and weakened will gain one or more blocks of sarcomeres to fill in the space and move the actin back over the myosin. This leaves a stretched muscle even longer. The situation is no longer a temporary, adaptable arrangement and the body is left in a state of more imbalance within the tissues, and a dangerous cycle of poor movement is enhanced.
These patterns occur when the body is moved out of alignment as a recurring theme all day, every day. Footwear and time spent in static positions are all responsible for demanding this level of adaptability within the tissues of the body. It is the reason why women who wear high heels for a number of years end up not able to walk with their heels on the ground.
So why does knowing this help you?
The impact of how you are moving through the day is probably greater than you have ever considered. By having an appreciation of the position you hold your body in all of the time, you will start to paint a picture of the shape of the body you are bringing to the saddle, and why some positional faults might be creeping in.
A SENSITIVE SUBJECT – SENSORY INPUT
‘The rabbit hole is not the problem. The problem is the body not being able to cope with the rabbit hole.’
Movement not only changes the length, shape and function of your soft tissues and joints, but also serves the body on a whole other level, which is neural and sensory. Movement in different planes, in a variety of postures, over different terrains, carrying, jumping, climbing, swinging and balancing all provide the body with a matrix of sensory input. This develops neural pathways that increase the body’s ability to understand where it is in time and space, which is known as proprioception and is necessary for balanced, economic and safe movement. It is the neural pathways that save you from twisting your ankle in a divot, or allow you to save yourself when you trip over. Movement provides the body with intelligence on how to navigate the environment. This is a ‘learn on the job’ scenario; you can’t read your way to great proprioception. You have to fall in the rabbit hole, trip over the bamboo cane and slip on the banana skin to build the infrastructure between brain and body so that when you find those obstacles again, your body’s reaction keeps you out of the doctor’s surgery. Riding is a highly proprioceptive sport; it relies heavily on the body’s ability to synthesize a huge amount of sensory and neural input. The difference between a riding and a non-riding life is that the pelvis becomes the new base of support in the saddle, as opposed to the feet. Building neural pathways on the ground relies on the reflex system of the core (seeChapter 2) to be able to synthesize the information the body receives when it is in the saddle. This only happens if the body is moved in different ways during the day, so building these proprioceptive pathways ‘off-horse’ is critical to improving matters in the saddle.
Every joint is responsible for its own integrity. This means that the ligaments and neural receptors within the joint capsule are responsible for constant dialogue through the nervous system, to tell the brain which position they are in and therefore what muscular support they need. When these channels of neuro signals are awake and fit, they are as sensitive as a hormonal teenager, reacting instantly to the slightest change in their environment. It is this sensitivity that corrects your foot on uneven ground, stabilizes your knees, hips and spine, changes the speed of joint articulation dependent upon terrain or activity and does a big job in keeping you upright when you take any step at all. The importance of conditioning this intrinsic support system is likened to having a solid foundation for your house. We are probably all familiar with the analogy yet most of us have not been taught how to strengthen from the inside out.
