Horse Riding Case Study
A growing proportion of clients come to us with back, neck, shoulder or hip problems. On enquiring about their hobbies and leisure activities many state they regularly horse ride. Symptoms can be caused from mucking out, lifting heavy water buckets or hay bales, picking out hooves and often riding itself.
Problems can be caused by a particular function or activity. For example, maintaining a deep seat through riding transitions or being as effective on one rein as the other. Often, there are functions that riders endlessly repeat time after time.
Finding a specific treatment programme to suit individual requirements is something we pride ourselves on. To enhance our own understanding, we will often watch our clients participating in their sport, i.e. riding their horse. This shows us just where to target their training and how much stronger or more loose a specific part of their body needs to be. This ultimately prevents future problems and injuries.
When we prescribe patients' treatment exercises, carrying these out at home is an important part of a rapid and successful recovery.
Tracy's Story
When Tracy (not her real name) originally came to us for Physiotherapy on her back, she had little idea as to how much benefit she would gain in terms of her riding, alongside becoming pain-free and feeling better about her improved flexibility and strength.
Initially Tracy was unwilling to tell us that she had a horse and rode most days - she feared we might tell her she must stop riding!
Once we had asked key questions, we were able to get on with the immediate task of addressing the mechanical cause of Tracy's back pain - a sacro-iliac joint dysfunction. This was causing her to alter the movement in her lower back resulting in muscle spasm and underlying weakness in her stability muscles, not to mention considerable pain.
Gentle hands-on techniques cleared her joint block in her sacro-iliac joints restoring her range of movement, thus reducing her muscle spasm. We then set to work on restoring and improving her deep muscle stability, keeping in mind exactly what she needed to be able to do in order to continue to take care of and enjoy her horse.
Towards the end of her treatment, it was becoming difficult to see the remaining imbalances that Tracy described she was feeling when she rode, so I went along to watch her schooling her horse, with her riding instructor present to discuss what was happening.
As a physiotherapist I was interested in why she was dropping her right shoulder and gripping up with her left leg and her instructor was concerned with her apparent inability to maintain canter on the right rein. Working with her instructor we found some powerful visual and verbal cues to help her fire up the right muscles whilst on her horse.
As she already had a good working knowledge of these muscles from the work we had done in the clinic, she was easily able to make the transition and apply all she had learnt to a far more complex pattern of movements.
So, from a back pain she feared might prevent her from doing the one thing she enjoyed, she was transformed to a rider confident to go out and work with her instructor to use the muscles and movement she now possessed.
When I saw her recently at a competition she asked me "why don't more riders do something to help themselves to ride better?" In many cases, people simply don't realise that help is out there, even if they are not experiencing aches and pains. Ultimately, we all have our weak spots - wouldn't it be ideal if we could overcome our specific physical limitations and improve our riding?