Most important body part for riding? How to use your pelvis for better riding

Our

pelvis

is the largest and heaviest bone in our

body

, it is also what we sit on when we sit in the saddle, the way we sit, the way we position our

pelvis

and of course the shape in which we move the hip joints. They are vitally

important

to how stable we are in the saddle and how comfortable we as a rider are being carried by the horse. I'm Cali, I'm here today with Ellie, one of our star school teachers at our agricultural campus in Pennsylvania, and I want to first give you more information, let's clear up some of the myths about how we really need to sit in the chair and then, With the demo rider, we'll look at how the position of our pelvis really affects our safety and I'm going to share a super simple exercise that will help you find the best alignment for you in the saddle, so that when we're sitting in the saddle we want to be sitting at the widest point of our sit bones that you can feel.

This, if you rock back and forth a little, when you move forward, you will find that you lose contact with

your

sit bones; if you go too far back, you end up sitting more on the big butt muscles and lose that contact. You also look for that place where you feel the contact and that wide

part

of

your

sit bones when we sit in the widest

part

it gives us greater security now depending on how your saddle fits you you can feel what is called a three-point seat this is where you also feel the contact of the saddle rise on your pubic bone, so this is what creates those three points of contact between the two sit bones and the pubic bone in the front, but you don't want to look for this because if you are trying to find this contact three point, you could end up getting too close, so when we are sitting in the chair, generally speaking we want our pelvis to be in what is called neutral, this is basically where the front points of the top of the pelvis and the pubic bones are aligned with the frontal plane of the

body

, which sounds complicated, it basically just means that we are not tilting the top of the pelvis too far forward, this is called inward tilt and this creates this hollow back position.

We'll see in a moment why this is actually insecure. We also don't want to have too much back lean and this is when we try to lean too far back in the chair or sometimes when we come back here to try to find a seat that is too deep depending on what we do with the rest of our body this can also be quite unsafe, so we want to sit back on the widest points of the ischium with our pelvis. usually in neutral and again there are some little exercises that will help you find exactly where this is for you and I will share that little test in a moment so from here when we move our pelvis it changes the angle of our hip, often the angle and when you hear the instruction to open the hip is misinterpreted as doing this and taking your knees off the saddle and widening your legs, but that's not what opening the hip angle means, the hip angle is from the thigh to the pelvis so this is the angle if I move forward I am closing the angle if I am in a jumping position if I am galloping cross country if I am in a light seat counterattacking I am closing my hip angle if I am opening my hip angle I'm bringing the top of my pelvis back now I'm not just sinking my body I can maintain a flat back and good alignment an open chest and open my hip angle like this and I could get to this position if I'm traveling down a trail and all of a sudden the trail turns and I think my horse might get spooked by something there.

I might get into this position if I come across a combination of fences and I want my horse to have a really jump packer and a more composed packer. I might get into this position if my horse is getting a little restless and I want to have a more defensive seat. These are all times when we can open the angle of the pelvis slightly, so now I want to bring in another rider so I can show you again what this looks like when we change the position of our pelvis and how that aligned position makes a big difference in your safety.

Now I'm here with jasmine with ellie and with plastic pelvis to do a little demonstration of these different positions and why they are

important

. First, can you go ahead and show us how to rotate the top of your pelvis forward so that Jasmine brings the top of her pelvis forward if we could see the pelvis in the movement? She would look like this, so she closes this angle at the hip joint and creates this hollow in the lower back. Now go ahead and bring the top of your pelvis way back, so again here she rotated like this, opened up the angle here and created this curvature in her lower back, so what we're going to do next It's doing some exercises, like some little tests, to help you feel where you're

most

confident and where you're maybe a little bit more confident. a little less sure and these are really good and you can do them on your own even if you don't have a

riding

instructor to help you so first let's go ahead and go back to the pelvis coming towards the top of the pelvis moving forward so again this creates a hollow back.

This is a very common thing. Many cyclists think this is a good position for posture. Know? If they tell us to stick out our chest and hip bones and sit tight. On the horse we can end up in this kind of stance, but I think you'll notice it and I think you'll feel that he's not very confident, so I want you to grab the reins, go forward and raise your hands just a little bit. little one, it's the normal

riding

position, I'm going to pull and I'm going to try not to let it pull you, so feel how much you can stay safe, okay, I'm going to pull, try harder and in fact, the more you tense up to try to stabilize yourself . the easier it will be for me to pull you okay now go ahead and go back to the other position and I want to add something to this so we talked earlier about how a lot of times cyclists think that we need to bend our pelvis and we need to keep our abs and core very tight to keep us solid, so I want you to try that, think about curling your pelvis, that will bring the top of your pelvis back a little bit more, tighten your abs and see how secure it feels.

It's a little safer than last time, but I can still lift you out of the chair. Okay, now we're going to move on, we're going to help Jasmine find where she is she's actually aligned her across her pelvis and then I. I'll pull again and we'll see what it looks like, so I want you to think first about just breathing into this space here. It's helpful that with My hand here you can think about filling your back in this place where My hand is you can think about this also in the waistband of your pants or in your belt, if you're wearing a belt, filling that space makes your breathing Go down a little and you can feel the top of your pelvis coming back right there. but it wasn't from bending it, it wasn't from squeezing your abs tight, so a little change, but I want you to stay there, keep thinking about breathing in that space, do the same thing, okay, how safe do you feel? this time and there's a big difference when I pull, so it's a simple thing but it really makes a difference and you probably didn't notice a big change.

Jasmine just changed where she was breathing, she let the top of her pelvis move back slightly, so she brought She's aligned, okay, so I'm back as we go over the initial talk here. As you watch this little demonstration with Jasmine, you've probably already seen some of the mistakes cyclists make. We talked about how to do that pelvic tilt when cyclists are trying to do their crunches. very tight and they think that tucking their pelvis in is the correct position. Some cyclists have been taught that sitting tight in the saddle and sitting up high like this with your chest out is the correct position and even with those little tests, I hope you saw that. how that can make us more insecure there is one more thing I wanted to cover and this is the movement of our pelvis in the saddle, so sometimes it is taught or misunderstood that the cyclist needs to rub the saddle with his movement.

Push the horse to keep going. This can sometimes happen with horses that don't have much forward movement and tend to be lazier horses, but what happens when we rub the saddle and do all this extra movement? Our pelvis while riding is two things: one, we actually encourage the horse to lower his back because with all that extra movement it's not very comfortable for the horse, so he tends to drop his back and, in fact, he can go slower. and not having the free forward movement we're looking for, so we have plenty of other resources here on how to best use aids to encourage your horse to move forward, so know that it's not just about position, but also how you move forward. you are moving and when we are well aligned it really makes a big difference for our horses because they can move more freely and not only are we safer but our horses are also more comfortable.

One last thing I would love to know. In the comments, write a comment below and just tell me a part of your riding posture that you would love to do a new exercise for or that you would love to improve if you want more riding tips like this but want to go even deeper and create a skill base in your horsemanship that allows you to be confident, effective and honest, be more connected with your horse, understand how riding goes beyond how we sit in the saddle, but how we actually communicate with our horse, so if you are Interested in going deeper, I would love for you to join me on my balanced horsemanship course.

You can learn more below and I would love to have you as a student there.