West coast eventers are gearing up for the quickly-approaching 2021 season, and it’s become tradition for many riders to book a lesson with their favorite upper level rider as a part of the Galway Downs Annual Fundraising Clinic. This year’s clinic is scheduled for January 22-24 in Temecula, Ca. and will feature learning opportunities from over 25 of the West coast’s top trainers.
This is the 23rd year of the fundraising clinic, the proceeds from which are used to fund facility and cross country course improvements at the sprawling 240-acre property located in the heart of Temecula’s wine country.
Riders who sign up for a lesson will participate in two lessons with their trainer of choice; the entry fee also includes stabling from Thursday, January 21 through Sunday, January 24. Featuring among the trainers this year are:
Hawley Bennett-Awad
Auburn Excell Brady
Rebecca Braitling
Barb Crabo
Nick Cwick
Gina Economou
Jessica Hargrave
Emilee Libby
Olivia Loiacono
Katy Robinson
Lisa Sabo
Tamie Smith
…and many, many more!
To sign up for lessons with the trainer of your choice, click here. Riders can also book additional nights of stabling and order hay and shavings on the entry form.
Britta Pederson works with a client using resistance bands. Photo by Sally Spickard.
There’s no getting around it: riding is tough on the body. As with any sport, the wear and tear brought about by the physical exertion as well as any injuries that may occur can wreak havoc on even the healthiest rider. But ask any rider what comes first: horse care or self-care, and you can predict what their answer will be. All too often, we neglect the wellness of our own bodies and minds in favor of that of our horses. Britta Pederson of The Performance Refinery in San Diego, Ca. is out to change this notion.
Take a moment to think of the physical irregularities that show up in your riding. Perhaps you struggle to keep your shoulders down and back, or you can’t seem to weight the right seat bone as well as you can the left. Now think of how these might transfer to your horse’s way of going. As with riding a bike, any shift in balance on the part of the rider can affect the straightness and direction of the horse.
Q&A: What can I expect in an Equiformance S.M.A.R.T Rider Clinic with Britta … ???
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👀 Full On & Off Horse…
When riders attend a clinic with Britta, a Registered Senior Physiotherapist & Equestrian specific Performance Trainer from New Zealand who has also competed at the Advanced level of eventing and Grand Prix level of dressage, they’ll experience a hybrid format, one part riding instruction and one part bodywork.
Britta takes a teaching break to work on a student’s weak points. Photo by Sally Spickard.
“The notion of taking care of our horses’ bodies is important, but this doesn’t mean you should set yourself aside,” Britta explained. In order to effectively correlate our body’s function to our riding, Britta incorporates basic anatomy into her instruction. She’s also patented the concept of using resistance bands to encourage lengthening of a rider’s body and proper application of the aids while working on the flat – a topic we’ll dive deeper into in a future article.
Britta works with each rider individually to identify their physical strengths and weaknesses, astutely pinpointing a source of a problem and working to correct the issue through physical therapy.
But first, it’s important to know where you need to improve and how riding affects your body. Generally speaking, Britta says, a lot of rider issues stem from the following areas:
Weak Core Stabilizers These could one or a combination of any of the following: Lower Abdominals/Obliques/Glutes/Mid Back
In today’s society and the nature of our sport we spend a vast amount of time, both in and out of the saddle, in anterior chain-dominant positions. Think mucking stalls, wrapping legs, jump schooling in two-point (hello hip flexion), replying to emails, and working from home online behind your workstation.
“One fairly simple way that we can combat these demands placed on our bodies is by making sure that we are as stable as possible from our innermost core levels,” Britta says. “This takes a little bit of thought and assessment of where your weak areas are and then putting a plan in place. Core stability work should only take up two or three days and 20-30 minutes of your time … and you can get creative, meaning minimal equipment required. A Stability Ball will be your best friend as it can see all levels of core training from beginner to advanced.”
Some Level 1 & 2 exercise ideas for core conditioning:
Poor Hip Mobility
Restricted Hip Joints are a common complaint and pathology that Britta often sees in the clinic setting. “If you have poor range of movement here it will affect your global musculature activation and ability to move your pelvic girdle efficiently over fences,” she explains. “A ‘stuck’ pelvis can limit your lower leg effectiveness and indirectly your balance.”
To test your own body, try this Hip Mobility Test and Drill:
Overactive Quads & Psoas (Hip Flexors) & Short Adductors
“One of the main muscle groups that are tight in jumpers, due to jumping positions and the eccentric control needed as a rider from your hips/legs to slow your body on landing, are your quadriceps and hip flexors,” Britta says. “If these become highly overactive, they can lead to lower back pain and poor core function. See the images below for good Hip Flexor (a), Quad (b) and short adductor stretches (c):
Line drawing of man kneeling on one knee doing hip stretch. SOURCE: Based on EMuscsk_20131030_v0_006. Used in 901819, 90608, 90644_4 version in 13A12046.
Another element of The Performance Refinery that riders find useful is Britta’s Equiformance Program for fitness. Fitness is a key element of success in the saddle – much of a rider’s ability relies on core strength as well as upper and lower body stability in order to effectively apply aids. After the coronavirus pandemic surged this year, Britta doubled down on her efforts to expand the Equiformance Program, making use of a dedicated app to create and distribute customized workout plans. Each plan is tailored to the athlete’s goals, schedule, and level of training, with workouts that can be done with minimal or no gym equipment needed.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be diving in deeper with Britta to explore the concept of rider biomechanics and fitness – and her innovative training method using resistance bands. We’ll also bring you some additional content with exercises you can do out of the saddle as well as some advice for making 2021 your best fitness year yet.
I don’t know about you guys, but the First Monday vibes are STRONG with me today. A whole two weeks without Zoom was a special treat, and although I was supposed to use it to work on a manuscript and definitely used it to learn to play chess instead, it was a nice little swamp of totally unproductive time.
But I’ll be gearing myself up for the day, week, and year to come today by making myself an enormous latte, sticking on some motivational power ballads, and thinking about what I want from this year – regardless of what it may throw my way. I’m not a big resolutions kind of gal, but I do love a list – and every year, I try to set myself achievable goals for things I really, truly want to take from the year to come. Every time, one of those goals is to cover an event I’ve never been to, and I was so lucky to manage two of those in 2020 despite everything. This year, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I might finally get to come over and see Kentucky for myself. Here’s hoping!
National Holiday: It’s National Spaghetti Day! Fitting, really, because going back to work will require some emotional carb-loading.
Your Monday Reading List:
Where equine fitness is concerned, sometimes the ‘old’ methods are the best. US Eventing has republished a 1987 article by Tad Coffin that’ll teach you how to prepare your horse for Novice and Training level competition – perfect if you’re starting to plan out a fitness programme ready for spring events. [Conditioning the Event Horse at the Novice and Training Levels]
When it comes to riding and competing, you either win or you learn. Actually, scratch that – even if you win, you usually learn something, too. Canadian showjumper and all-round legend Ian Millar shares his advice for how to make sure you’re the best learner you can be. [Ian Millar on How to Always be a Successful Student]
It’s the time of year for revisiting poignant and powerful stories, and even the New York Times is joining the club. Here, they revisit their long-form piece on US-based Irish showjumper Kevin Babington, who suffered a catastrophic spinal injury at the Hampton Classic in the summer of 2019. He reflects on what he’s learned, how he’s adapted – and how his world might yet change. [A Top Equestrian Paralyzed in an Accident Sees Hope in a Coming Treatment]
New Year, new us…? Hopefully? Let’s not get to ahead of ourselves. Everyone come in nice and easy. All 2021 needs to do is be better than 2020, so the bar is pretty low. While some things may change this year, we know #EventerProblems won’t! Keep ’em coming by sharing yours the hashtag #EventerProblems.
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We’re now three whole days into 2021 and that means eventers are beginning their mass exodus south for the first few months of the season. While most head to Aiken or Ocala, many eventers take this opportunity to sharpen their dressage and show jumping skills in Wellington. Phillip Dutton has used this strategy in the past, and we will look forward to seeing him back at events come March.
National Holiday: National Chocolate Covered Cherry Day
You know the feeling, when you have been incredibly hungry and finally take a bite of food? Satiating your hunger feels instantaneous. You feel better immediately. But when you think about it, your feeling better immediately is sort of strange. It takes minutes for us to start digesting the food, and hours for it to enter our bloodstreams as useful calories and energy for our cells. So why do we feel better so quickly?
In short, it’s because our minds are playing tricks on us. Our mind knows the sequence of events: after that bite of food, our body will start to feel better in a few minutes. So basically our mind takes a shortcut and tells us to start feeling better before we actually do. This NYT article called “Your Brain Is Not For Thinking” (great read; highly recommend!) sums it up well, using a term called “body-budgeting”:
Your brain runs your body using something like a budget. A financial budget tracks money as it’s earned and spent. The budget for your body tracks resources like water, salt and glucose as you gain and lose them. Each action that spends resources, such as standing up, running, and learning, is like a withdrawal from your account. Actions that replenish your resources, such as eating and sleeping, are like deposits.
Your brain keeps track of your budget, they explain:
The scientific name for body budgeting is allostasis. It means automatically predicting and preparing to meet the body’s needs before they arise. Consider what happens when you’re thirsty and drink a glass of water. The water takes about 20 minutes to reach your bloodstream, but you feel less thirsty within mere seconds. What relieves your thirst so quickly? Your brain does. It has learned from past experience that water is a deposit to your body budget that will hydrate you, so your brain quenches your thirst long before the water has any direct effect on your blood.
Sophie Leube and Sweetwaters Ziethen TSF. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
Here is the key phrase in that description for me: [your brain] has learned from past experience. It is fairly obvious, when you think about it: we have a brain, so we remember things. We have a trove of past experiences on which we draw when encountering new experiences.
We’d do well to think about allostasis when training our horses, not in the sense of being hungry or thirsty, but in the sense of understanding that the brain processes information about how the body is feeling even before the body reacts. If we can keep this in mind, lots of our problems in training and competition begin to make sense. Let’s take an example. A horse has felt stressed by a new movement he is learning on the flat. He can do it pretty well, but the next several times the rider prepares for the movement, the horse’s brain shuts down and his body tenses, even before the rider gets a chance to ask for the movement. The horse’s body isn’t actually finding anything physically hard in the moment, but his brain is predicting that it will be. It has learned this from past experience, and it is creating a roadblock for the body.
There’s an interesting phenomenon that often happens when moving horses up the levels that didn’t make sense to me for a long time. When a horse first moves up, often she’s very successful—jumping clear, for example. But the next time she competes at that level, she doesn’t do very well. Sometimes the rider needs to go back to the lower level to regain the horse’s confidence again. But why did the horse do so well that first time she moved up? Possibly because her brain didn’t know what her body was going to feel, so she believed she could do it. Afterward, she might reflect and think, “wow, that was really hard!”. This is when riders and trainer have to think about what the horse is thinking. This is when they have to make sure the brain is on board with the body. I had a coach once who told me to always try to make the horse think he was superman, even if he wasn’t the most scopey or talented horse in the world. You build a superman by never making anything seem too hard. The brain leads the body, so the brain has to believe it’s possible.
There is so much guesswork that goes with training horses, especially since no two horses are really the same. These are living, breathing animals with feelings and apprehensions; with different attitudes and different strengths. If we can wear the lens of a psychologist as well as a rider, we can begin to understand their thought processes and get access to their amazing physical capabilities.
A little video to wish you all a very Happy New Year and also introduce something a little bit different for me in 2021. I'm going to have a go at doing a video diary to give you all an insight into my life – good and bad! – through 2021. Well out of my comfort zone here as this isn't something I have ever done before!😬🙈
Please follow along and share with your friends if they might be interested too. Anyway hopefully something entertaining and educational all in one!😁👩🎓🤞
Happy New Year and all my best wishes for a safe and successful 2021.🍾🥂🥳
Piggy x
#PiggyMarch #TeamPiggy
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The first of January is also a prime moment to percolate on new ideas, grand plans, and goals for the year ahead, and it’s been so exciting to see top riders dropping teasers for the year ahead. One of the most welcome updates came from superstar (and possibly the nicest person in the sport) Piggy March, who ushered us all into 2021 with the announcement of her new video series. We’ve enjoyed William Fox-Pitt’s vlogs so much over the last year that this is extra-exciting news — and there couldn’t be a more soothing gal to help us get this year underway.
Go Piggy, go eventing, and above all, go forth into this new year as your best and boldest self, regardless of what we may all still have to overcome.
Tamie Smith & No App For That. Photo by Kim Miller.
Whether or not you subscribe to the idea of New Year’s resolutions, the idea of a “fresh start” brought about by the turning of the calendar is enough to get any goal-oriented individual thinking about what’s next. On the opposite side of the see-saw, however, lies the inherent fact that in life, things tend not to go according to plan. Add horses into the mix and, well, you might be better throwing a handful of darts at the wall in hopes one might stick.
All of this to say: making – and keeping – resolutions tends to be…challenging. Indeed, statistics show that about 80 percent of resolutions made on January 1 tend to fail. If you’re struck by the depressing nature of that statistic, you aren’t alone – but there’s also hope. We had a conversation with renowned sport psychologist Daniel Stewart, well-known for his work within the equestrian community, to help our fellow eventers set their “GPS” for the year ahead.
Tiana Coudray and Cabaret. Photo by Tilly Berendt.
The GPS Approach: Goal, Problem, Solution
“For starting the new year, there’s a technique called ‘GPS’, or ‘Goal, Problem, Solution,” Daniel explained. “Everyone has goals, short and long-term. And generally, they say that the majority of goals are only 60 to 80 percent likely to happen. If a goal is 100 percent likely to happen, that goal is not ‘uncomfortable’ enough. So there is going to be something between you and your goals: a problem. And what we do too often is focus entirely on the goal itself, closing our eyes and becoming blind to the problem standing between us and that goal.”
For those who try to subscribe to a manner of positive thinking, this problem-focused mentality seems counter-intuitive. Let’s look at this concept in riding terms – and yes, it is as simple as it sounds.
“Say my goal is to learn how to do a flying change,” Daniel said. “The ‘goal’ is to do the change. The ‘problem’ is that my horse doesn’t yet do flying changes. The ‘solution’ is to start working on these changes. When you begin to incorporate work on half-halts, simple changes, canter departs, and so on, then the likelihood of achieving that goal develops. By identifying and focusing on this problem, you then achieve the goal.”
Having the courage to be vulnerable, to truly identify the ‘problem’ part of the equation, Daniel says, is the sweet spot. “This is the one exception to the rule of thinking positive,” he explained. “We have the courage to be vulnerable and allow ourselves to search out problems that stand between us and our goals, and when we identify that problem we work entirely to solve it. It’s when we lose that vision and it’s only all about the goals that we never solve the problem.”
Erin Kellerhouse and Woodford Reserve. MGO Photography Photo.
Finding Our Fears
In his forthcoming book, his fourth on equestrian sport psychology, Daniel writes about a deeper side of mental coaching. “My first books were more pump you up, cheerleader type books,” he explained. “This one even surprised me; it goes deeper into mindfulness and awareness and the need to have a definition for our rational and irrational fears. The book addresses some deeper concerns – envy, shame, fear of failure, making mistakes – and I do my best to deliver the important information in such a way that perhaps we can see some brightness and humor attached to those things that make us fearful.”
We’ll dive more into the concept of fear and how it affects us as riders in a future column, but for now take a moment to go a little deep within yourself. It may feel uncomfortable, but ask yourself these questions:
What do I fear as a rider?
What do I fear as a human?
What are my short-term goals for the new year?
What are the problems standing between me and these short-term goals?
What are my long-term goals?
What are the problems standing between me and these long-term goals?
Write these answers down – this helps not only with accountability but also helps you separate swirling thoughts from logical reasoning. Coach Stewart will be contributing to future columns here on EN on the topic of improving our mental strength for riding, so stay tuned for much more.
If you’re interested in learning more from Daniel Stewart, you’re in luck! He’s currently booking virtual webinars aimed at helping all riders find their true potential. Click here to learn more about booking or participating in a webinar.
I’m declaring it now, the theme of 2021 is gratitude, because we will really appreciate all of the things that we missed in 2020, as well as incorporating all the good things we learned from this year. Plus, we can always practice more gratitude, and sharing it together makes the world a better place.
News From Around the Globe:
Start the new year by getting your horse’s engine revving, in a good way. You don’t even have to wait to get on and ride, you can begin with exercises on the ground. Helping your horse engage his hind end in an active way benefits your dressage score, as well as benefitting your jumping phases too. [Get Your Horse’s Pushing Engine In Gear]
We’re giving away a copy of Jane Savoie’s Dressage Between the Jumps, and there is still time to enter! Click here to learn more and submit your entry.
Stars, they’re just like us! One of the many wonderful things about equestrian sports is that upper level professionals have just as many oh sh*t moments to share as we do. Check out these stories from Louise Serio, Anne Kursinksi, Margie Engle, and more about their own personal big time whoops on horseback. [Whoopsie Daisy]
After a rare disease claimed three of her limbs (and nearly her life), Jessica Thoma is back in the saddle with big goals. Jessica Thoma is a lifelong equestrian whose world got turned upside down in 2018. Beginning in the spring, she battled a mysterious ailment that began with a rash, joint pain, fatigue and nausea. She saw a slew of doctors but it wasn’t until she fell gravely ill months later that she finally got a diagnosis: Polyarteritis Nodosa, a rare disease resulting from blood vessel inflammation. Now, she’s back on the horse and says they were integral to her recovery. [I Don’t Think I’d Survive Without Horses]
