Biomechanics for the Equestrian

Move Well to Ride Well

Debbie Rolmanis

• Publisher: J A Allen
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781908809858
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Equine Veterinary Science

Do you struggle with pain, a lack of mobility, or a position in the saddle that just won't improve? Do you ever feel like you cannot find the right exercise routine to help your body and your riding, let alone fit it into your busy schedule? Biomechanics for the Equestrian will show you how to prepare your body for life in and out of the saddle by changing the way you move throughout the day. Discover what is causing your lower back pain or the stiffness in your hips and learn how you can move yourself away from discomfort and towards performance, without having to find extra time in your day. Key topics covered include: the physiology of movement; understanding your body; the riding connection; alignment; expansion breathing; mobilization; strengthening and integrating exercises into a busy day. Working with the mechanics of the human body and how we were all designed to move, you will learn how to build a sustainable and functional body that can sit in the saddle with comfort, strength and balance.

Part 1

Your Movement Story

If you spend any time at all thinking about the human body, from what you see to what lies beneath your skin, chances are you will consider it as a collection of parts – organs, tissues, systems and limbs that operate independently from each other and which largely perform tasks without a whole lot of input from you. However, if that were the case there probably wouldn’t be a need for this book. The reality is your body responds to everything you provide it with, and it also responds to everything you don’t provide it with in terms of nutrition, hydration, emotional well-being (stress, fear, anger) and movement. As an adult, you will be well versed with the basic needs of a human body: good nutrition from a healthy and well-balanced diet, sufficient daily hydration from clean, plain water (0.033ml for every kg of bodyweight if you weren’t sure) and most of you are probably all too aware of how stress doesn’t always serve your body positively. What is rarely touted as a life-giving essential is the basic human need for movement. You might know you need to exercise, yes, but the prescribed hour a day at the gym, or a thirty-minute run, or a class once a week, or riding your horse (although better than not moving at all) is only one tiny chapter of your movement story; it’s similar to knowing you should eat your greens, but greens alone do not make a complete diet.

The modern exercise prescription is not a complete movement diet for the body and to understand why it’s not enough, it’s time to look at the physiology of movement.

1The Physiology of Movement

Movement relates to the positions you have your body in all of the time. How your body is organized determines how it copes with the loads that are placed upon it and therefore what shape the tissues of the body are in. You are loading your body all of the time, which means you are shaping your body all of the time; whether you are sitting down or climbing a mountain, your body is receiving and responding to loads like a lump of clay being moulded into a shape. The form that you create depends on the way you move, how often you move and how differently you move. The shape of your body today, from the position of your spine to the direction your feet point, tells its very own movement story and, as a rider, this is the story your horse will read when you get in the saddle. So, how is it that your shape is dictated by movement? To understand how to create a shape that serves you, it is first necessary to take a look at cells.

CELLS

Your body is a matrix of cells. Every tissue and organ in the body is made of cells. They run in your blood, they form skin and hair, they make and destroy bone, they build and deplete muscle mass, they fight disease, and they help to organize the body in time and space. They are everywhere, all of the time, and they are all connected to one another via a supportive and behaviour-regulating scaffolding known as the extra-cellular matrix. This means that whenever you move a limb or change the configuration of your body parts, you are also adjusting the arrangement of your cells. This cell influence is happening all of the time because of loads. From how you hold a pen to how you sit on a horse, to the loads created by the tension of your waistband, you are constantly providing input to some area of your body. Nothing goes unnoticed and every movement has a reaction. The movements you make (and don’t make) are quite literally shaping your body.

EXTRA-CELLULAR MATRIX

The extra-cellular matrix is made up of proteins and polysaccharides (carbohydrates). Its function is to bind cells together and regulate a number of cellular activities.

The effect of load on cells

Loading is the process by which cells receive, sense and translate physical forces and express these loads as your unique human form; from the shape of your bones to the length of your muscles, cells control it all. The body evolved to thrive on movement, and this is confirmed via cell behaviour. Cells require a consistent (and fairly constant) amount of squashing, bending and general deformation of shape not only to stay healthy, but to stay alive. Without any mechanical input or use, even with the best nutrition, cells will not survive. How this shows up in real terms is seen in your posture, your bone density, your muscle mass and the location of your muscle mass. The shape of your body today tells a story not only about what you have been feeding it, but also how you have been loading your cells.

Your body is receiving mechanical stimulation all day, every day. It receives it if you are sitting down, standing, riding, walking or grooming. Your cells are affected differently depending on the shoes you are standing in, right through to whether your trousers are a little snug around the waistband. If you sit down all day your body will adjust differently than if you were standing or walking all day. If you ride eight horses each day, the shape of your cells and the cells you utilize will be different from those of someone who has never sat on a horse, and if you ride after some time off you will certainly know all the new cells you have loaded the next day!

When you think about loads, it is also necessary to consider loads that impact all of your senses. Sensory organs receive loads via pressure (for example, eyes), skin receives loads via touch through clothing and shoes (with new loads experienced as blisters) and your musculo-skeletal system is constantly dealing with the loads imposed by gravity.

The human body is multi-dimensional, meaning that it is made from a range of parts that all contribute to how it functions as a whole. Each joint and soft tissue requires specific movements to keep them healthy, and this can only be achieved if the body is moved in a variety of different ways on a regular basis. It is the variety that ensures that all the cells of the body receive some mechanical input so that they stay alive. Problems, such as pain and lack of mobility, occur when your movements all use the same mechanics and therefore only target the same cells. Walking the same way and carrying things the same way, all the way through to always brushing your teeth with the same hand, will squash and bend some cells and leave others untouched. This imbalance of cell ‘care’ creates an environment of tissues with great strength next to tissues of profound weakness. If you look in the mirror and have rounded shoulders, or you look down to your feet and your knees are facing towards each other, you are looking at the results of an imbalance of cell loading. If every picture tells a story, so too does every human body: its very own story of how much, and how little, the cells have been affected by how they have been moved.

GRAVITY, LOADS AND THE SHAPE OF YOUR BONES

It’s possibly not every day that you spend much time considering the shape of your bones, and you would be forgiven for thinking that they are a fixed, immovable feature of the body whose shape cannot be influenced. However, your bones are also constantly being affected by the loads the body experiences, both via gravity and via the soft tissues that act upon them.

Gravity

Gravity is constantly loading your body and is therefore always having an effect on your body. The best way for the body to resist this force in order to maintain form (and therefore function) is via your bones as they are the strongest, least malleable tissue of the body. The purpose of bones is to maintain the structure of your physical form and to realize the movement potential given to them by your muscles. Every bone in your body has a unique architecture depending on its location. As the saying goes, ‘structure governs function’ so the shape and size of each bone depends on how much load it is expected to take, and the joint with which each bone articulates dictates how much movement it has to allow.

The force of gravity occurs vertically; Newton’s apple didn’t fall off the tree at an angle. This exertion of force that can change the shape of the human body is best counteracted by resistance, and bones can only resist gravity in the best way if they are aligned vertically. When bones are stacked correctly, the loading they receive encourages more bone cells to be laid down, which increases their strength and density.

If, however, your bones are not stacked in alignment, gravity starts designing the shape of your body, often without you realizing it. If you are finding it difficult to imagine how an invisible force can create structural change, think about the shape of trees by the coast. The loads created by powerful ocean winds will bend the trees over so that they look like they are constantly in a wind tunnel. Gravity can do the same to your body.

So does any of this really matter? Well, yes. If, on the ground, you move yourself through the day in a posture that is not vertically aligned to gravity, you become like one of those coastal trees: a bit bent out of shape. You then take that position into the saddle and finding the position of your dreams becomes just that – a dream.

LOADS AND CELLS

Loads placed on the body via movement translate into loads on the cells themselves. This creates cellular data and this is where change in strength, density and shape occurs.

Loads

As well as gravity, your body experiences loads from other ‘sources’, whether it is just the load of your bodyweight or what and how you are carrying ‘things’. If you carry your loads in the same way every day, you are shaping your body in a way that will affect how it sits in the saddle. How you carry the saddle, how you groom, how you tack up, how you muck out, all matters to your body. The likelihood is you will do them all the same way, loading the same structures over and over again and leaving others unused. You now know that your movement patterns shape your body and the shape your body is in will determine a number of your experiences, such as how much pain you are in, whether your lower back greets you every morning or your shoes are rubbing on that bunion or maybe you can’t look over your shoulder.

So the question is, do you like or want the shape you are creating? How different would it be for your body if you changed how you loaded it? It doesn’t necessarily mean that one way is better than another; the important thing is that the loads are carried differently.

CIRCULATION AND MOVEMENT

Most people know that the heart pumps blood around the body to service tissues, organs and systems with nutrients, and to pick up and remove the waste that they generate. However, this relatively straightforward idea is only one part (albeit significant) of your body’s circulatory story.

It is estimated that an adult’s circulatory system is 60,000 miles long. To service the entire area requires a complex network of blood vessels arranged into an intricate web of delivery highways that start as large vessels as they leave the heart and become smaller and smaller towards the extremities so that every nook and cranny of the body is looked after.

The heart pumps blood around the body at rest with a heart rate that depends on your level of fitness and the ‘cleanliness’ of your blood vessels. It will then increase its delivery of blood flow by increasing how fast it beats as the demand becomes greater, which is what happens when the body is moving.

Homo sapiens evolved as an animal that relies on constant and varying movement for survival. Some of this movement would be slow and careful and some would be rapid and strenuous (sprints/climbing). The degree of complexity, speed and power of the movement the body was performing determined how much of the musculo-skeletal system needed to be used. When skeletal muscles are working, they lengthen and contract, sometimes slowly but consistently and at other times, such as when sprinting, much more rapidly. In times of maximum output, the muscles require a rapid delivery of nutrients coupled with a reliable waste transportation system to allow muscles to keep moving. Relying on the heart to deliver sufficient blood flow to all the working muscles under such intense circumstances would be a risky strategy. This is why the very action of muscles changing length helps to support the delivery of blood. As they contract and lengthen, blood is pulled in and then pushed out, servicing the cells of the muscle as it works. When a muscle is repeatedly not moved, the cells start to starve from a lack of input from movement, but also from a lack of nutrient delivery in the blood. If there is no change in length of the muscle fibres, there are no mechanics to help direct blood flow towards it. If the same movement patterns are performed every day, over a period of time the way the body arranges itself will show the result of cell death in the form of muscle atrophy (wastage).

Circulation is inhibited through any static positioning of the body and through direct pressure from external forces, but also from forces experienced within the body. The route your blood vessels have to take can vary depending on the geometry of your body. For example, sitting down forces the blood vessels to curve around and zigzag over the bones of the hips, creating some narrowing and pinching of the size of the blood vessel as it presses over bone. Blood is meant to travel smoothly through your veins and arteries like melted butter along a silk road! Kinks in the road or blockages (caused by plaque, or pressure from visceral fat) can cause the blood to ‘spurt’. This turbulence sends the blood crashing into the walls of the blood vessels, which can cause damage and over time may wear the walls too thin. The body decides it needs to protect the walls so it sends cells to lay down material. This creates a thickening in the blood vessel, closing the gap for the flow of blood even further. All of a sudden the body is at risk of cardiovascular disease, even though there is nothing wrong with the heart.

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