Today's Lesson
Blue Rider Therapeutic Riding
When you have a chronic illness, especially neurological and/or autoimmune, you tend to grow weary of the repetitive cycles of improvement and decline. It is very important that you have practices that help restore your body’s strength and functionality and also very important that you work with people who believe in your capacity to progress towards these goals.
At Blue Rider stables I can count on receiving both of these essential elements.
Often I progress very quickly, sometimes after just a few lessons. Sometimes it develops more slowly and I do not notice the shifts until they build on each other. As I said the illness is chronic and can be unpredictable.
Recently I noticed some amazing and very rapid improvements. My body has lost a lot of fat and muscle due to my illness and my glute muscles had completely disappeared, leaving nothing but loose skin. The skin that is loose is less than half of what it was and I have developed a muscle again.
The change was noticable after just three or four lessons. Now I have some muscle and some definition. I asked Christine at Blue Rider how she accomplished this...
“We started by unfreezing your sitz bone on the left. When you had more stability there, we rotated your femur, and then got you looking up to load the gluts more. Now we are working on aligning the shoulder, ribcage and arm. All the while breathing and not ignoring the steps that went before.”
In addition to riding and holding onto the girth she had me ride a short distance with my hands placed on my head, and then with my arms stretched out like wings. Both of these positions allowed me to feel the synchronous movement of my hips with the movements of the horse I was riding, Fritz. All the while, focusing on Becky riding and working on Svadi in front of me to keep my head up and my spine and diaphragm in the correct posture.
Ultimately Christine and Becky are training me to use my body as it was intended and to overcome the compensatory movements I have developed.
Can’t wait till next week!