Heather Sansom owns Equifitt.com Equestrian Fitness, offering personalized coaching through clinics and convenient online coaching available anywhere. She also offers a free monthly fittips newsletter and new e-books, Complete Core Workout for Riders and Handy Stretching Guide for Riders, at Equifitt.com.
Over the last couple months, we've emphasized building strength. Now it's time to come back to the topic of flexibility. In the article on the rider fitness training scale, we discussed the importance of flexibility at the base of your personal training pyramid. Just as with training our horses, we cannot go forward in our own conditioning without a pre-requisite of suppleness and lack of pain. The misinformation that strength training creates tight muscles and bound bodies, really comes from the fact that you cannot ask muscles to work effectively without a base of flexibility and suppleness.
When you think about it, we already understand the principle quite clearly when it comes to our horses--that's why we have warm-up and cool-down time. And in many disciplines, such as endurance riding, it's quite common to actively stretch horses before and after a workout. Dr. Hilary Clayton has made many of these stretching practices more popular among dressage riders with 'carrot stretches' and through her work on activating the horse's core.
Most riders--regardless of discipline--are quick to acknowledge that they could be more flexible, or are not spending enough time stretching. We understand that we have tight hips, hamstrings or calves, and that these issues affect our riding negatively. It's fairly easy to understand that a tight area will impede motion in the joint and block your horse's motion. If you've ever had massage or chiropractic work done, you can also understand how tight muscles can pull you out of alignment structurally, and create all kinds of referred issues.
So we all know we need to stretch more, but the question is how. I discuss rules of thumb and stretch suggestions in my short ebook, Handy Stretching Guide for Riders. Stretching is one of those aspects of training that can seem easy at first. We have all been introduced to stretch ideas over the years through various sports and activities. Ideas common in the general population may not always be current with sport conditioning best practice. For example, we know in principle that it is a good idea to stretch before sport. The way many people do so is by holding a stretch or bouncing. In the past several years, sport conditioning best practice has discouraged both of these types of stretching prior to training. Instead, the current practice is to use dynamic stretching not static stretching before sport or conditioning, and not to bounce. There are reasons behind the practice that we'll look at.
For example, I still see a lot of riders who do actually stretch before they ride, hold the stretch or bounce. The current practice is to use dynamic stretching not static stretching before sport or conditioning, and not to bounce. There are reasons behind the practice that we'll look at.
To make stretching more effective for your riding, it's important to understand what is going on, how your body works and what you're trying to achieve. I find it a lot easier to remember what to do, when I can understand the system of thinking around it, rather than as a list of tasks.
So, before we look at a stretch, here are some rules of thumb to keep in mind:
- Tight muscles can't perform effectively
- Tight muscles and ligaments block joint mobility
- Mobility and stability are directly tied together and have nothing to do with rigidity. On a moving horse, your body has to be in constant micro-motion (and sometimes macro) to appear motionless, and to maintain equilibrium that does not interfere with his movement.
- Muscle fibres need to be warmed up before they can be lengthened
- Muscles fibres need to be lengthened before they can shorten (work)
- Muscle fibres that are pulled (overstretched), are at risk of injury when introduced to work
- Your body's first response to a stretch is to contract, so gains in flexibility take time (at least 30-seconds; but five minutes of yoga is even better).
8. To absorb your horse's motion, your goal is to have freedom of movement in all the joints involved, and this guides what muscles you stretch.
When I design a stretch routine for a client, or a book like the Handy Guide, I'm aiming to create a set of exercises that work together to fulfill the above principles. When you work to principles, you can swap out different exercises now and again, because your precise choice of stretch (unless you are addressing a specific issue) is not quite as important as the overall effect of your routine.
