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Many riders want to feel at one with their horse. However, muscle tightness, weakness, poor balance, and lack of flexibility prevent many from being able to be their best in the saddle. If you struggle to keep your heels down, feel exhausted after a ride, or struggle with nerves at shows, yoga can help you become a better rider.
What is Yoga
Yoga is an ancient practice that combines movement, breathing, and meditation to transform the body and mind. Dating back thousands of years, yoga has become a favorite workout of many in the modern day. The most common form of yoga practiced in the west is hatha yoga. This branch of yoga uses postures and breathing exercises to promote stress relief, relaxation, physical fitness, and wellness.
Benefits of Yoga
Yoga boasts numerous benefits that are enjoyed by millions of practitioners around the globe. For equestrians, who have to exude strength, flexibility, balance, and fine motor coordination, a regular yoga routine can help transform their riding and help them find more security and success in the saddle.
Increases Endurance
While yoga is often thought of as a meditative practice, it can also get your heart pumping. Yogis hold strenuous poses for extended periods of time. Some practices are swift and involve moving quickly through intense movements, creating a flow. Both muscular endurance and cardiovascular strength can be improved by these types of routines. If you often feel fatigued or out of breath during your ride, working on muscular and cardiovascular endurance can help you power through your rides and perform better longer.
Strengthens Core and Promotes Posture
To ride effectively, a specific posture must be maintained to help distribute the weight of the rider and keep them in balance with their horse. Finding this posture can take years of practice and strength to hold. Yoga promotes this same posture: shoulders back, head up, and shoulder-hip-heel alignment.
While many of us know how we are supposed to be positioned, lack of muscle memory and bad habits from sitting at a desk can make maintaining these postures challenging when we get on the horse. A strong core and back are essential to being able to move with your horse and keep yourself aligned in the saddle. A regular yoga practice can help you develop muscle memory for the movement patterns you need to be an effective rider as well as strengthen the muscles you need to maintain those postures.
Improves Balance
Riding takes an immense amount of balance. Especially as riders advance to jumping, increased speed, and high-level dressage, their need to remain balanced over the horse's center of gravity becomes even more important. Yoga leads practitioners through intricate postures, many of which involve inversions and standing on one leg. With regular practice, you will gain better fine motor control and balance essential for riding, leading to increased security in the saddle.
Improves Flexibility
While it seems like you sit in a relatively static position, flexibility plays a big part in riding. When your hips are tight, your seat, pelvis, and low back can't move as dynamically. This can cause you to block your horse's movement without realizing it. Luckily, yoga involves a lot of stretching. Especially when you first start you will feel a lot of tension leaving tight muscles and over time you will grow more limber.
Especially for riders who spend a lot of their day sitting at a desk, a regular stretching routine can improve performance. Yoga can help you loosen your hips and promote supple movement through your low back and seat allowing better communication with your horse.
Increases Body Awareness
We've all struggled to follow our instructor's commands at one time or another. Whether it's keeping our heels down, putting a leg back for a canter depart, or releasing over a jump, it can be hard to coordinate your body in motion. Riding gives us a lot to think about at one time.
Yoga also asks practitioners to move certain body parts through specific movements while leaving the rest still. This is great practice for a rider who has to keep tabs on their entire body while controlling a 1000 lb. animal. Regular yoga practice can help you get better at moving each part of your body separately. This increase in body awareness can make coordinating aids on the horse a lot easier.
Promotes a Better Mindset
Breathing sits at the heart of all hatha yoga practices. As yogis work to merge movement with the breath, they reach a state of extreme concentration. This meditative state can help us gain mastery over our minds, improve focus, and give us the power to control fear. With practice, you will learn to tap into your breathing to reach a state of calm focus.
The power of the breath can also be harnessed to control intrusive thoughts and ease anxiety. This is especially helpful for competition day when nerves tend to get the better of us. Yoga will teach you how to quiet your mind and focus on your breathing to help relieve stress and bring you back to the moment so you can perform at your best.
Yoga boasts numerous benefits for riders. If you struggle to feel strong and secure in the saddle, adding some yoga to your workout routine can help you improve as a rider and promote a healthy body for years to come. If you want to improve your riding, give it a try!
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