Equine Chiropractor: The Human Effect

Matt Kenna is a fully qualifi ed veterinary and sports chiropractor working with elite athletes and their horses. He is currently working providing consultancy to premiership football teams, high goal players and treats horses across all levels of polo from low goal to high goal. Based between Guards and Cowdray, he travels all over the south of England. This is the third in a series of articles by Matt on equine chiropractic topics, following on from his article in our April and June issues

The Human Effect

The importance of rider posture & balance

So, last time around, we discussed how our horses can be right or left-handed and how that sidedness can lead to training and performance issues for them. One thing we didn’t touch on is how we can infl uence and make this worse through our own lifestyle and work choices.

These are highly important to consider in the wider picture of owning horses. I turn up to countless yards treating polo ponies and fi nd their horses usually have the same problems as them. It really is worth considering your own physical balance if you are experiencing similar training problems across multiple horses such as stiffness on one side, trouble bringing the hind end under, forehandedness and total lack of performance.

As a human chiropractor, one of the biggest concerns I am presented with is poor posture and the pain that it causes. We are always told as children to stand straighter and stop slouching, keep your head up as if a string is pulling it up. However, our lifestyles these days are conducive to regressing into more of a foetal/bent over position. We wake up, to sit down and have our breakfast to get in the car, where we sit again to get out into the offi ce, whereby, you’ve got it, we sit again and then repeat the cycle in reverse after a short lunch walk. Alternatively, if our jobs are more manual, we repeat lifts and other movements on the same side, showing little thought for how we do it or what side we are doing it on. These repetitive postures cause the muscles in the front of our bodies (the anterior sling muscles) to contract and tighten because we don’t activate the back ones, which in turn, end up stretching and weakening. Add into this slouching to one side and you can understand the mess we are creating just by doing what most of our jobs entail. Many of us are severely lacking a suitable amount of movement in our days and this is affecting how are bodies are able to perform day to day tasks, let alone riding and playing polo.

When we look at how this affects our time in the saddle, any increase in pressure going through one side of the saddle compared to the other will load our horses asymmetrically and cause them to adjust how they move underneath us. Add this to a horse which favours one side, and repeat the movement of a trot, or the pressure of canter on that leg and I’m sure you can imagine the excessive pressure on your horse’s joints and soft tissue. I liken it to going on a run with a can of beans in one hand and six pints of milk in the other. It’s going to get uncomfortable quickly and quite soon, if repeated will cause muscle imbalances and relative weaknesses.

We are rarely told to do stability work around our riding, such as riding specifi c Pilates and polo specifi c prehab, yet it is something that really needs to change if we want to prolong our own seasons and those of our horses. Trainers like India Parker-Smith of Chukka Wellness offer great preseason and ongoing training programmes that will prepare you for the long and strenuous season. The old adage of “there’s nothing like time in the saddle” is still true and every hour spent there actively working on your riding and riding posture will benefi t your horses no end, as will a variety in training, and preparing for everything that your body is subjected to in a game.

The earlier you start, the more of a head start you have. My work in the Premier League has proven this point time and again. The boys come back months before the season and work on all the basic fundamentals of movement, the same should apply for polo, for the rider and the horses. I understand we are not all elite athletes, some certainly are but polo is a hobby for many of us, however, seeing the same set track day in, day out gets our horses fi t but doesn’t truly make them strong. Likewise, for us riding gets us fi t for the saddle but not truly balanced for our counterparts. Involving hacks with hill work, some pole work, basic dressage riding will help create a truly robust and stable horse that, come the season, will be able take a lot more workload. Heck, it may even make them cope with our alignments better, especially if we start to prepare ourselves and our horses properly! The teamwork should start between us and our horses before we even see a pitch.

Web: www.mkchiro.co.uk @theequinechiro @theequinechiro

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