Bio Mechanics Story and Photos By Stephanie Fish-Crossman
In this issue, we are going to work on some small changes that will make a BIG difference in ge�ng your horse on the bit!
Our volunteer for this review is Wilma, a lovely lady that I met while doing a clinic in the New Smyrna area. Wilma has been riding for around 13 years, starting as an adult in the hunter world and switching eventually to dressage. She and her horse Kyon have been together for 3 years, with his previous training being mainly in the dressage world as well. She works as a Title Agent, so sits a lot at work looking at a computer, and has no major previous injuries. Welcome, Wilma and Kyon!
TRAINING & Showing
In our first picture, Wilma looks safe and confident, and I feel that she is breathing enough to not have to address it. When you glance at this photo it really looks quite nice, what you would commonly see in the Dressage world, but the more you look at it the more you can see that some changes need to be made. For a change, let’s start with the horse – even at the halt, you can see that Kyon’s back AFTER is down, and his ears are back in a notnecessarily-happy manner. This body posi�oning, whether it is caused by Wilma or whether she is a by-product of it, makes it difficult for the horse to move over his back, reach for the bit and have a consistent connec�on. That, in turn, makes it difficult for Wilma to do with ease the things she wants to do – steer, make nice corners or lengthenings, and generally remain in a consistent rhythm. Can we help them? Yes we can!
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Going to Wilma, you can see that her shoulder-hip-ankle line up is slightly �lted backwards; always remember that my goal is to line my riders up in such a way that if I were to magically pull the horse out from underneath them, they would land on their feet. In our first picture it is clear that Wilma would land on her bu�, as her feet are in front of her, her ankle is locked down and her knee is too open. While Wilma is si�ng upright, her lack of ability to balance through her lower joints has created an engagement imbalance in her front and back of her torso, so that her guts are not engaged and her front lines are not suppor�ng her back lines. Think of it this way: I am dividing Wilma into two parts, a front and a back half. I am then filling her with beans, so that she is a bean-bag Wilma. Looking at our first picture, where would you say Wilma is carrying the majority of her beans? If you said in the back, you’ve got a good eye! By not engaging the front of her seat – meaning her quads and adductors in her thighs, and her core muscles up the front of her torso – Wilma is essen�ally riding only off the strength of her backside, which is one dimensional. This overreliance on her back lines gives her no assistance in ge�ng out of the hole in the horse’s back, and will cause her to have to resort to the reins to try to get him to lower his neck.
BEFORE
It may suffice for a while, but it will make it harder for her to accomplish things like collec�on and lateral work.
Let’s start the fix!
Star�ng with the thigh, we rotated the thigh in and pulled the hamstrings out of the way of the femur, so that it could lay closer to the saddle. I brought her heel back under her more through the use of isometric resistances, which help Wilma to note her muscle discrepancies and strengthen them through a series of exercises. You can see in the second picture that her foot is more underneath her body and her ankle looks less jammed in the s�rrup. There is a greater bend at the back of her knee, and if you compare the pictures closely, you can see that the seam of her pants is closer to the thigh block. These are all signs that Wilma is ac�va�ng all 4 parts of her thighs to ride in her muscles, while allowing her joints to flex and bend so�ly, rather than bracing into her joints as she was in the first picture. This is some deep work, and takes a lot of concentra�on! Let’s go back to the first picture for a moment. We know that the horse is standing in this photo, but look at the reins. While they are loose and not disturbing the horse, if you had to describe the direc�on of the energy running through the reins, would you say the energy is pushing from Wilma to the bit, or is Wilma pulling the reins to her from the bit? It is subtle, for sure, but I see that the direc�ons of the energy in the reins is going toward Wilma, not toward the bit. Once in mo�on, this will be a catch-22 problem – because the energy is going to Wilma, she will be pulling the horse’s head to her, causing the back to go down, which in turn causes her to fall more into the hole of his back, which keeps that cycle going. Conversely, if the horse is used to going with his back down, he will be shorter in the topline of his neck, causing there to be a space between her hand and the rein, which will encourage Wilma to shorten her reins to try to find him, while she is also trying Continued...
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