The Performance Refinery - Ride.Lab Academy

Braced vs. engaged. They may feel identical until you can tell the difference.

Last post we addressed why engagement is non-negotiable. Here's what it actually looks like when your body has to do something with it.

Bracing locks you rigid, and your horse meets a wall. Engagement holds the frame while things move. That's stability under motion, and it's what a following seat is built on. Here’s 3 drills to highlight awareness, lotion your motion & build your control ✋🏼

1️⃣ Pelvic clocks. Find your Neutral. I show you how both a chair seat & fork seat restricts your range. Find 12-3-6-9 from each direction so you can feel where your pelvis likes to hide and can bring it back to centre.

2️⃣ Pallof hip CARs. Band pressed out and resisting the twist while the hip draws its full circle. One side moves, the other holds eg alternating leg aides.

3️⃣ Hip airplanes. Start supported on the roller, then go free. Hinge and rotate through the standing hip. The goal is control, not wobble.

Train these and your core develops its ability to engage while your pelvis follows the horse & your leg elicits an aide 🦵🏼

This is some of our Foundational RideLab core methods in three moves.

October is nearly upon us and it’s about to get mighty SPOOKY 🦹🏼‍♀️. Hit follow so you don't miss out on our next series 📍

You’re sitting the trot, your trainer yells “engage your core,” so you squeeze everything. Now the horse feels like a wall and you’re bouncing more, not less ✋🏼

That’s because you braced instead of engaging. They’re not the same thing.

🔒 Bracing = rigidity. Locked, gripped, breath held. Your body stops moving, so it can’t follow the horse.

🌀 Engaging = control while you keep moving. Your pelvis follows the horse, and your core systems are what lets it follow without collapsing. They work as one system.

Here’s the part most riders never get taught … Remember the float from last week? Every stride, you come down out of it. Before your weight lands in the next footfall, your core has to catch you and control that descent.

That’s eccentric control: your muscles lengthening under load, like lowering yourself slowly into a chair instead of dropping down into it.

Without this control access, your pelvis slams into the front of the saddle. Every. Single. Stride. Your horse will feel every one of those landings & soon enough starts to brace their own back as a protective shield 🛡️

So engagement isn’t optional, and it isn’t bracing. It’s the control that catches you, stride after stride.

📌 Thursday: three exercises to help build that eccentric, moving control. Follow so you don’t miss the set of continuation on our Rider’s Foundations series 👀

🎥 Elena Dotoli Photo & Film
👚 Sync Equestrian

Sitting the trot isn’t holding still. It’s absorbing movement in all three planes at once. Every stride, your pelvis is doing three jobs ⬇️

→ Sagittal: it absorbs the vertical bounce as the horse’s back rises and falls ↕️

→ Frontal: it shifts weight side to side with each diagonal pair ↔️

→ Transverse: it rotates a little to follow the roll through your horse’s barrel 🔁

And then the part nobody talks about: the moment of suspension 🔃

For a fraction of every stride, both diagonals are off the ground and your seat is momentarily unweighted. What comes next is a landing. Your deep core and pelvic floor have to control that deceleration so you receive the horse’s back instead of getting caught by it. That’s not bracing, it’s timed, graded eccentric control. If you don’t have that pelvic control your pelvis will meet the front of the pommel with force ❌

Circle back this Thursday when we drop 3 exercises to work on your seat mechanics.

🎥 Elena Dotoli Photo & Film
👚 Sync Equestrian

Before you blame your horse for the shoulder that keeps falling out 👉🏼30-SECOND PELVIS TESTS

1️⃣ Prone hip hike: 3-point kneeling, roller between thighs. Hike one hip to the ceiling, then the other. The side that barely moves = restricted rotation. Free up that side

2️⃣ Standing hip hike: posture sling from shoulder to opposite heel (the resistance keeps your core engaged). Hike one hip up and slightly back toward your ear, then drop it down, slightly in front of midline. Both should feel fluid

3️⃣ Seated tilts: on a foam roller or stability ball, roll your pelvis forward and back. Only one way is easy? That’s your flexion/extension limit. Aim for controlled freedom both ways.

Everyone has a side. This is a screen, not a diagnosis. If anything hurts, get assessed. Build the range on the ground before you ride it.

Did any of these catch you out? 📩 Pin it/Practice it/Ride it 🐴

Comment RIDELAB and I’ll send you the educational Rider Pelvic planes PDF 👇🏼📫

“It was never the stirrup leathers”

How you can quick test a true leg length discrepancy from a crooked pelvis and what to do from there

You have punched a new hole in one leather. You have swapped irons. You have had three people watch you from behind on the centre line. And still, every ride, the right one feels shorter.

I want to be clear about something before we go any further: the leathers are almost never the problem, and neither, most of the time, is a genuinely short leg. But “most of the time” is not “never” and the riders who fall into the exception spend years being told to just sit straighter while their body is doing exactly what a body does when the two halves are not the same length. So let’s do this properly. Here is how to work out which one you are.

Before we get anatomical, let’s name the pattern. Riders with a persistent hip-height difference tend to report some cluster of the following:

〰️One stirrup that feels chronically longer, no matter what the leathers say
〰️Collapsing through one side of the waist, usually with the ribcage drifting the opposite way
〰️Circles that drift consistently in one direction
〰️An outside rein you can never quite keep on one side
〰️Saddle that migrates to one side over a session
〰️Uneven wear on the stirrup treads, or one boot scuffing the flap more than the other
〰️Your trainer saying “more weight in the right seat bone” for four years running

None of that tells you why. It tells you the load is unequal. The why is what we’re sorting out.

Two very different things wear the same costume. The single most useful distinction in this whole topic:

1. Structural (anatomical) discrepancy, when the bones are actually different lengths. The femur, the tibia, or both. It is measurable, it is real, and no amount of stretching, mobilising or "realigning" will change it.

2. Functional (apparent) discrepancy, when the bones are the same length, but the leg presents short because of how the pelvis is sitting. Innominate rotation, a hip that lives in adduction, a scoliotic curve, a foot that pronates harder on one side. The limb is not short. The system is arranged asymmetrically.

Both produce identical complaints in the saddle. But they require completely different responses. Which is precisely why guessing is such a bad idea. The part nobody tells riders = a small difference is normal 🙋🏼‍♀️

Here is where I want to lower your blood pressure before we start measuring things. When Knutson reviewed the radiographic data on anatomical leg length inequality in 2005, the prevalence of some discrepancy was around 90% near-universal. The mean magnitude was about 5.2 mm. Roughly the thickness of a stack of business cards. And the general conclusion across that literature is that anatomical inequality does not become clinically meaningful for most people until it reaches somewhere around 20 mm (2cm). That number tho is genuinely debated. More recent reviews argue that with the right comorbidities (age, sport, hours on your feet, an existing hip or lumbar issue) changes start showing up on imaging as early as 6 mm. Riders arguably sit in that "comorbidity" category: we load asymmetrically for hours, on a moving surface, in a sport that will punish a 5 mm bias by amplifying it into a 10-metre circle.

So my honest position is this: a small difference is normal and probably irrelevant. A large one is not. And the middle ground depends on your history, your symptoms, and your workload. Which is a clinical conversation, not a blog conversation 🎙️🙊

So if your self test measures in the meaningful range, get across to your healthcare professional & book in for a full assessment ~ your horse will thank you!

Your seat bones have three positions. Most riders only tend to own one. Let’s get to WORK 💪🏼

👉🏼 Sit on your hands. I’ll show you what your horse actually feels 🐴

👉🏼 Rock forward = the bones press in hard and your weight rolls toward the front of them. Anterior tilt. This lightens the back of your seat, closes the hip/pelvis angle. We use this position as an aid when we want to lighten the back of the saddle, eg in a REINBACK!

👉🏼 Rock back = the bones disappear and you land on glute soft tissue. Posterior tilt. This is typically the classic “driving” seat. Sometimes we ‘slightly’ tip towards the back of the seatbones to lighten the forehand of the horse (when we have them already balanced on the hindleg) for things like EXTENSIONS or PASSAGE. But remember our Thorax building block stays centered. It does NOT tip in the same direction as your Seatbones aide 👀

Centre = even weight on both bones, ribs stacked over pelvis. Neutral. This is our HOMEBASE 🏠

Here’s the part nobody explains out loud: Most riders try to find their seatbones in that posterior position and call it neutral, because it feels solid. It isn’t neutral. It’s one option, which held permanently, means it stops being a cue and becomes a habit your horse tunes out & eventually shuts the hindleg down.

The job isn’t to find one correct seat and freeze there. It’s to own all three and choose between them on purpose. Neutral is your home base. Anterior and posterior are aids you elicit. Deliberately, briefly, and then you come back to your home base again.

If you can only get to one of them, you don’t have a seat aid. You have a default.

Do it now on a firm surface & then practice tomorrow in the saddle and see which position you land in when you stop thinking about it. That’s next Tuesday’s Talking Tuesdays 🎙️

📆 Hello SEPTEMBER ~ Welcome to our next Series on “The Riders Pelvis”

🙋🏼‍♀️ If your trainer says “use your seat” one more time & you grit your teeth and try to “push” because you don’t understand how your seat actually moves … this is for YOU 🫵🏼

🛞 Your pelvis is a steering wheel, and it needs access to turn in all three planes:

1 · Flexion / extension = Sagittal. Think forward and back. This is your chair seat vs. your fork seat, and neutral lives in the middle of it.

2 · Hike / drop = Frontal. Think Side to side. This is how you weight one seat bone compared to the other eg Lateral movements

3 · Rotation = Transverse. Think turning through the pelvis around your spine. This is how you follow and steer a turn without hauling on the inside rein.

Every half-halt, every bend, every turn lives in one of those three or a marriage of them all. Most of us, riders in our 20s +, have quietly lost some of their ability to independently move due to desk chairs, old habits & injuries. Which means our horses don’t get a vague aid. They get half a sentence 🙈

Watch as we delve into how the pelvis moves through all three planes, then notice which one might feel stuck in your own body. That stuck plane is exactly where your aids go quiet.

Thursday: We run thru a 20-second way to actually find your seat bones. Follow along so it lands in your feed.

Foundational Drill 2: Not just a “core exercise”

For riders, Bird-dogs can be a foundational motorcontrol drill that teaches you to …

🧱 Stack your rib cage over your pelvis
🎯 Stabilize without becoming rigid
🔄 Dissociate your limbs from your trunk
🧠 Improve proprioception and postural awareness

🐴 Why does that matter in the saddle?

Because your goal is to keep your center organized while your limbs can move independently around it.

That’s the foundation for an independent seat, better postural control, and the ability to absorb the horse’s movement rather than brace against it.

Stack → Stabilize → Dissociate → Move.

🧠 Motor control: coordinating the trunk, pelvis, shoulder and hip while maintaining a stable lumbopelvic position.

🧱 Lumbopelvic stability: resisting lumbar extension and rotation as the limbs move (add a stability ball to begin if you struggle here)

🔄 Dissociation: moving the hip and shoulder independently while keeping the trunk relatively quiet.

🎯 Proprioception: improving awareness of where the pelvis and spine are in space.

💪🏼 Endurance: the deeper trunk and hip stabilizers have to maintain the position over repeated reps or longer holds

📍I like to start with 3 rounds of 10-15reps each side to cement patterns. But begin where you can and go for quality over quantity always