A couple of weeks ago I met up with my sponsor Victoria at Sports Massage and Injury Treatments to go over some exercises that I can start doing to improve my strength and flexibility for riding. If you are anything like me then we tend to spend most of our time looking after our horses, ensuring that they get the best possible treatments and forget how we as riders are such major influencers to our horse’s way of going. Many of us are aware that if we are tense then this can travel down the rein to our horses, however we never think about the individual muscle groups that are tense or not as strong, meaning the messages being sent to our horses are blurred and not as clear. This post is about strengthening and engaging the glutes, it also includes exercises to stretch the hip flexors! 1) Bridge- To perform this exercise you lay on your back with both feet on the ground, you then lift your hips in a rolling motion to engage the glutes. This exercise helps strengthen and engage the glutes. For this exercise I do 3 sets of 10 reps and held the position for 5seconds and started increasing the time when I started to find it easier. 2) Reverse Clam- For this exercise you lay on your side with your legs bent, ensuring your heels, hips and shoulders are all inline. You then engage whichever glute is pointing upwards and open the leg. For this exercise I do 3sets of 10 reps each side, holding the position for around 2seconds. When first trying this exercise with Victoria we found that my left glute was quite significantly weaker than my right. To show how this impacts my riding, when riding Seb my younger horse his weakest and most inconsistent rein is his left, sometimes making our left give and retake mark two points lower than the right...! 3) Straight leg flute- This exercise is very similar to the reverse clam, however keeping your legs straight, still engaging the glute pointing upwards. For this exercise I do 3sets of 10reps each side. Again when trying this exercise I found the left glute a lot harder to engage, I found it was really important to think about engaging the muscle and concentrating on keeping the correct position. 4) Hamstring dynamic stretch- This exercise stretches the hamstring, something that I am not very good at...! For this exercise you lay on your back with your legs bent, the best way to describe it is like you are sat on a chair but on its back! You then alternately move each leg in a cycling motion. This exercise is for 30seconds 5) Lunge hold and Lung Oscillate- For this exercise you kneel in the lunge position and engage the glute that is opposite to the knee that is pointing upwards, this is held for 30secs on each leg. To increase to difficulty you can stay in the same position but push into the engagement each time and release, this is done for 30seconds on each leg. 6) Hip flexor and Hip flexor with stretch- This is also in the lunge position but with the front leg extended out slightly meaning you are stretching the hip flexor, you can hold this for 30seconds on each leg and then bend at the knee and hold it to your bottom to increase the stretch, this is held for 30seconds on each leg. In the extended lunge position you can also stretch the opposite arm up and across to the knee that is pointing up to stretch the muscles that runs from under your quadriceps up the side of your body. These are my favourite stretches as afterwards you feel really lose in the hip area. The tightness in this area is caused by the life that most people lead now, hunch up looking at their phones. This position is really not helpful to the extended leg that is needed in dressage. I was able to carry out these exercises correctly with the help of my sponsor Victoria at Sports Massage and Injury Treatments, these exercises are to help the riders position but if you do have an on going injury or pain, book an appointment with Victoria!!
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