Three key pieces your workout needs this month!

Hey Athletes!

We are halfway through No Nonsense November now! Have you been doing stirrupless work? What about gym work? How are you participating?

I wanted to give you a bit more information about what I focused on when I built the exercise plan for No Nonsense November. I always find understanding the why helps motivate me to do things because I like to see the big picture.

There are a few main areas that I focus on that you can too (and it doesn’t have to be November for you to work on these types of exercises)

1) Building the abductors (outside of the leg) - we often think the opposite when riding, that we want to have a strong grip with the inside of our legs. Trust me, I grew up being taught this too! Now my belief is that gripping is actually the opposite of what we want to do in the saddle. When we grip, we are tight, and we are tight, we can’t flow with the horse’s movement. Grip strength is a bandaid solution and often we unintentionally build it by being unbalanced, nervous, or dropping the stirrups before we are ready (leading to both the aforementioned problems). So I do a lot of exercises with the minibands that encourage the outside muscles of the leg and the hip so that we aren’t overusing and overdeveloping the inside muscles.

2) Hip mobility - ok this is a given all year round. If you have been around here a while, you probably already know that I recommend everyone do 15 minutes of stretching daily. The videos I put in FitRider almost all include a lot of hip flexibility and mobility exercises. When we do stirrupless work and we want to flow with the horse, we need to make sure there are no parking breaks on in our body. In addition to stretching though, mobility requires strength through deeper range of motion, there are also many exercises that work the hips and the glutes so you can maintain that supple form required to flow.

3) Upper body attunement - when we are unbalanced (which can easily happen when we drop the stirrups), we often go searching for it with our hands. Even when we think everything is going well, our hands might be telling another story. Many of the exercises I include in November require that we slow down and think about what our hands are doing, and focus on moving them independently of our body. Particularly the hands to core connection. It practices being tense your core while releasing our hands so we can be more forgiving on our horses mouth.

You may notice that I don’t specifically say we do balance exercises, and well this email is getting long enough so that’s an explanation for another day. However by focusing on all these things, we should see great improvement in balance without having to spend any time on a wobble board or doing balance specific exercises.

So whether you are doing NNN or not, try thinking about the above points next time you are doing your workout.

Have you included these elements?

Cheers!

-Sarah