How Yoga Can Help Your Seat

Can you feel your seat bones when you ride?  Do you know where they are?  Sometime they are called "sitting bones", "sitz bones",  "base of the pelvis",  "ischial tuberosity" (!).  They are where our "bum" makes contact with the saddle.  

Tightness in the hips is one condition that can affect the seat bones and their even and level connection to the saddle.

I experienced this first hand 6 years ago.  I had a riding accident and fractured my left seat bone and my sacrum.  After 5 months, I was given the green light to get back in the saddle.  I was given the opportunity to ride a sweet and safe little mare that would take care of me.  During our first test ride, I could not get her to turn left--even on a huge circle.  Turning to the right was not an issue.   But my tight and weak muscles in my hips and my fractured left seat bone were totally unable to tell her, and allow her to turn left without me pulling on the reins to get her to turn.  I had lots of work to do!

When we are uneven in the saddle, it can start to feel "normal".   We bring many issues from our day to day lives into our riding.  Our habitual patterns--leaning to one side, twisting one direction or the other, rounding the upper back and shoulders from looking at our phones, computers, etc.--will show up in the saddle and affect our riding. 

In yoga we spend a lot of time bringing awareness to the differences in our bodies from side-to-side.  We do a pose / asana on one side or direction and then notice if it feels differently when we repeat on the other side.  Or we do a sequence or series of poses and evaluate how the body feels before and after.

I believe that is why yoga is so complementary to our riding.  It gives us the opportunity when we are not in the saddle to really focus on how or body is feeling and moving.  We can then take that awareness into the saddle to improve our riding and our connection with our horses.

When our seat bones are not level and evenly weighted or if we shift both seat bones to one side or the other in the saddle, it definitely affects our horse.  If we aren't level in the saddle, they have to compensate for that unevenness.  At first it might just be that a movement you are trying to do is easier one way than the other, but long term it could create soreness in your horses' back or other issues.

Part of my Yoga Teacher Training with my teachers Don & Amba Stapleton was a training that they designed called "Self Awakening Yoga."   This training focuses on experiential movements for all parts of the body to help to release tightness and tension and facilitate the movement of energy through the body.

Here is a Video of some Self Awakening movements that specifically focus on the seat bones and increasing mobility in the hips.  Click on this link to give it a try and let me know how you and your seat bones are doing in the saddle!

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