Is your hip Hinge affecting your riding?

Have you recently started doing some off the horse exercises to try and improve your riding? A lot of people begin with lunges, squats and step ups when they’re starting out getting fit to ride. These are great exercises, but they aren’t the best ones to start out with!

I want to talk to you a little bit about the hip hinge. The hip hinging pattern is one of the most fundamental movement patterns we use in life and in our rising trot. So many people struggle to have a lovely, balanced rising trot if they don’t have good hip hinge mechanics.

Learning to hip hinge through deadlifts will really help your riding. Our hamstrings are often very weak. They’re in a lengthened position, especially if there’s an anterior pelvic tilt (check out my video on hamstrings here if you haven’t seen it already) The glutes are weak pretty much with every compensation it seems. So these are two primary muscles that we really want to get working.

Deadlifts strengthen the posterior chain and use the core muscles to stabilize, then the hamstrings and glutes drive that movement. These are key muscles and a key movement pattern we want to reinforce for our riding. Sitting down (which is something many of us have to do for long periods of time) does completely the opposite and breaks down this movement pattern.

My top tips for dead lifts:

–          -slow it down, lighten the weight and do it correctly

–         – really focus on that neutral spine because that’s what you need for the hinge in order to take the pressure off of the actual spine itself

–         – maintain neutral position of the head as well. If you look up, that’s actually going to cause more of an arch in the back

–         – think about shifting your hips backwards

–        –  keep just a slight bend in the knees

In your warm up, try a two-legged hinge pattern with no load just to mentally prep that movement pattern before you add any weight or think about going into single legs.

If your still struggling with the mechanics, think about your breathing and core connection (my reconnect with your Core series is great for this). Your hip flexibility could be an issue too, so looking the hip mobility program would be good too.

Deadlifts and hip hinges are great BUT before training them it’s a good idea to start with some planks and bridges, things to really activate the core, thinking about intervertebral stability first. So when we start the deadlifts our spine is ready to use the right muscles, which should be the core, glutes and the hamstrings. From here you can move onto squats and lunges, now you know your reinforcing a good hip hinge pattern. Your rising trot will be better and your horse will thank you for that!