Exercises and Stretches to develop an Independent Seat

Your seat is an important point of contact and communication with your horse when you are riding, and where we are always told to firstly communicate with our horse.

However, the “seat” can be a little vague, and it is easy to mis-interpret when the instructor says to use it! This article will help breakdown what the seat is, how it should feel when riding and exercises to mobilise and strengthen it.

WHAT IS THE SEAT?

The seat is technically the sitting surface of your hips and your legs on the saddle, but really it is the position of your pelvis so it also involves the muscles of the core and lower back. All these muscles work together to influence the position of your pelvis and in turn influence your horse.

When we ride, the balance of mobility and strength of the muscles that influence your seat directly affects your ability to use your hand and leg aids. If your seat is not secure, you will be someone who clings, grips or bounces which makes it extremely hard to influence the horse clearly.

We want to be flexible and balanced enough to absorb the movement of the horse, but stable enough to be able to control and guide the horse without excess movement.

WHAT IS A BALANCED SEAT?

For a balanced seat, we must have a neutral pelvis.

This means the front bony points on your hips are level with the back. Your deep core muscles (mainly the transverse abdominis) are engaged to maintain this position. In this position, your weight will be distributed in a triangular shape between our pubic bone and two seat bones, but this doesn’t mean you dump all of our weight into your seat. Your seat also involves having engagement through the inner thigh and transferring down the leg, sitting snug along the saddle to assist with carrying your weight. There is also assistance from the glutes to help the thigh open enough to allow the wrapping and to stop the hip from falling off to the side or out the back. Think of a pelvis sitting atop a saddle, it will still wobble all about unless it has stability from the legs. None of these muscles are gripping or maximally contracted, they are engaged to maintain their position and as the horse moves they will contract and lengthen to absorb movement.

STRETCHES AND EXERCISES TO IMPROVE THE CONTROL OF YOUR SEAT

Now, at Equiletix we believe strongly in developing your strength and flexibility off the horse before practising the movement in the saddle. Here are some stretches and exercises to assist in developing a stronger, more stable seat.

The muscles we need to have mobility in, are the hip flexors, the adductors and the lower back enough that you can actually get a neutral pelvis.

The muscles that need to be particularly engaged when it comes to your seat are your deep core muscles, your adductors, your hamstrings and your glutes.

The seat is just one aspect of your riding position. Coaching with us at Equiletix will help you understand the rider’s position and provide you with workouts to help improve it.

STRETCHES

1. Hip Flexor Stretch To open up the muscles at the front of the hip. When these are tight, they will pull the hips into more of a flexed position, which can make you arch your lower back, and shorten the angle at the front of the thigh.

2. Glute Wall Figure 4 Stretch To open up the muscles of the glutes (your backside), and help improve your hip flexibility to rotate outwards. Tight glutes are often weak in this case, as not contracting them and sitting on them can cause them to “switch off” which doesn’t help your ability to tuck your seat and move your thigh bones independently!

3. Frog Adductor Stretch - Our inner thighs as riders also get very tight from over use, try this stretch to open them up and help reduce the tendancy to pinch inwards.

4. Downward Dog (Hamstring and Calf Stretch) - The Hamstrings and calves can also get very tight. They need to be able to lengthen enough to allow show absorption through the hip and ankle, and if they are too tight, they can tend to draw the heel up and interfere with the tucking of your seat. We want to be able to keep a soft bend at the ankle and the knee to absorb shock.

5. Cat & Cow Spinal Mobility - We need to ability to control our spine, if our lower back is very stiff it can lock you in that position. The cat and cow mobility exercise helps you to mobilise your spine, focusing on rounding and extending through your vertebrae, so you have better awareness and control of the position and improved flexibility through your lower back and ability to tuck your hips.

EXERCISES

1. Block Glute Bridge - This exercise helps strengthen both your glutes (which help to tuck your hips under) and your adductor (inner thigh muscles) which are how we wrap our legs around our horse and apply a leg aid. Being strong through these muscles will Without strength in these muscles, it’s very easy to try and kick with your heel or allow your backside to stick out behind you when riding.

2. Side Walks - To strengthen your glute medius muscles, which are on the side of your hips. These muscles are very important for hip stability, to be able to stay central on the saddle, and when you move your leg back or forwards, in or out, it moves independently.

3. Goblet Squat - This exercise is to strengthen your quad muscles, and to be able to learn to keep your spine neutral as you sit back and down.

4. Band Cha Cha - Helps to build stability and balance on one leg at a time. This helps to keep your awareness of not collapsing through your hip, knee and ankle and engaging the glutes and quads to stabilise.

5. Deadbugs - Builds core strength and awareness to be able to keep your core muscles stable and keep your hips tucked under.

6. Plank - Builds core strength and awareness to be able to keep your core muscles stable and keep your hips tucked under. Working against gravity is challenging, you have to have the core strength to not allow the force to change your position.

The seat is just one aspect of your riding position. Coaching with us at Equiletix will help you understand the rider’s position and provide you with workouts to help improve it.