Liz Burgess Equine

13/01/2025

12/01/2025

19/12/2024

We have a few spaces left on our Christmas Eve pony day ☃️🎄The perfect way to start Christmas 🎅🏼🎅🏼
Www.deepdenestables.com


18/12/2024

Please share if you’re in ROI or NI - or know someone who might be able to help. Thanks

🚨**URGENT FOSTER HOME NEEDED**🚨

LHPR Biscuit and Star need a Foster home ASAP!!

We are completely full at HQ and have no viable foster homes offered despite our constant appeals 💔

Through no fault of their own or the fosterers - Their current fosterer cannot keep them any longer and they need to be out by the weekend ⏰

⭐They don't need to be fostered together.
🍪Short or long term foster homes welcome

⭐If any of our lovely previous fosterers or adopters have a space for a few weeks in their home that would be amazing!

🍪Or if anyone in Leinster, who has the space and an equine premises number please get in touch!

Can anyone give them a loving and warm place to sleep for Christmas? 💔

They are absolutely stunning and sweet girls and deserve all the love 💜

Please PM the page if you can help 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

09/12/2024

Breaking news: Denmark may become the first country to ban the double bridle. The Danish Animal Ethics Council, which is part of the Ministry of Agriculture and in place to advise the minister on necessary legislation for animal protection, has officially made the suggestion that curb bits be banned by law alongside draw reins, riding behind the vertical, tight nosebands, and any use of the whip which can be characterised as hitting and any use of the spurs which can be characterised as kicking.

Read or translate the official letter here:https://detdyreetiskeraad.dk/Media/638693250252120201/Henvendelse%20til%20FVM%20om%20hestesport%20051224.pdf

Photo by Crispin Parelius Johannessen. See more photos here: https://tinyurl.com/49xbr2n5

03/12/2024

Hopefully this is not new news to my riders, but some great homework here from the Rider Mechanic to enable the feel of recruiting those thighs! Interesting to note which of the 4 is most challenging to attain.

Correct use of thighs continued...

… Isometrics

One of the most misunderstood concepts of riding is around the correct muscle use required to have 'still' legs and particularly the muscle use of the thighs. Isometric muscle use means that the 'muscles are engaged without movement' and it's use creates stability.

Often the instruction to rotate the rider's thigh inward gets misconstrued as a pinching, or a holding the thighs on the saddle by squeezing inward. This action only serves to 'clothes pin' a rider, or make them pop up. The secret is to use isometric muscle contraction to become a framework around the horse, similar to an A-frame.

Using hands on resistances can help riders feel how they create the opposing forces within their leg muscles to develop this stability in isometric muscle use. When you fire your muscles isometrically, no length of muscle is lost so the added bonus is you get the ‘look’ of that beautiful long, still leg.

Let's try this exercise. Sit to the edge of a chair in an 'on horse' position. Put the palms of your hands on the outside of each knee. Create a resistance with your hands by gently pushing your knees towards each other, but don't let your knees close, notice which muscles fire. Then put your palms on the inside of each knee and push them outward but resist and don't let your thighs widen. Notice which muscles fire with this resistance. Next, put your palms on the tops of your knees and gently push down while resisting upward with your thigh and notice which muscles fire. Lastly, put your hands under the back of your knee and pull up while resisting that force with your thigh. (The last two are tricky to get a good feelage from a chair but if you can get someone to safely do these resistances to you in the saddle it is very worthwhile).

Finally, see if you can apply all four of these resistances at once (add them one at a time till all 4 are applied), without using your hands to create the resistance, just imagine it was there and notice the extreme tone that is created in your thigh. So you push out against an imaginary resistance, then keeping that feel, pull in against an imaginary resistance. Keeping both of those imagine lifting up into an imaginary resistance, then pushing down/back into an imaginary resistance.

This will take practice but keep at it. The goal is to get a sense of how your thigh becomes like an iron bar so it frames your horse rather than squashing him. This is what riders we deem 'talented' are doing without any conscious thought.

At first this will feel stiff and artificial, but if you keep practicing it will fade into your unconscious competence and just be a part of your everyday riding. This piece is a prerequisite to being able to suction your horses back up - yup, its a thing!!😉

In the photos below, note the tone and texture of my leg and how it lays flat to the saddle. You can see how an observer may surmise that this leg is 'gripping', but it is just isometric muscle use and inner thigh rotation from the hip joint. Also notice how the knee points down in a nice kneeling position. Using the mantra ‘toes up, heels out and thighs on’ will help keep this position. It takes practise, but before long you will have that nice steady leg we all envy!❤️

PS. For the reader who wanted me to address lower legs, I will cover that tomorrow, but know that the same principles of isometrics applies.😊

01/12/2024

Regardless of the style of riding that you prefer or Practice… whatever it is maybe riding young ones , trail riding, competition from polo to campdraft to whatever it is that you pursue ..
My sensational Sunday suggestion is to think about your seat and how it moves or doesn’t move in time with your horses movement .
Rising to to trot is a basic element of riding that most of us learn when we start out ..this is a wonderful example of moving your seat in time with the horses movement..
How much or how little we rise can greatly influence the length of stride , but how about the sitting trot ..
Can you absorb the movement of your horse’s body through your core ?
And then can you speed you horse up or slow it in the sitting trot and … keep your torso still so that your arms and hands are not bouncing around .?
What about the walk , can you speed up and slow down the walk by exaggerating the movement of your hips ?
Can you brace your hips and slow your horse down?
Do you always have your hips braced ?
If so you’re getting in the way of your horse’s movement ?
Same with the canter
Can you speed up the canter by exaggerating the movement of your hips , can you slow your horse down by slowing the movement of your hips ?
Are you always braced through the hips and inhibiting the horse’s movement at the canter ?
Think of a dance partner who is braced through the body ??
Kinda hard to boogy with yeah.
And then what about the angle of the hips .
Do you ride with a posterior tilt ..ie sitting back on your pockets like you’re on the couch??
Do you ride with an Anterior tilt , ie hips tilted too far forward or a neutral position where you’re sitting evenly on your seat bones allowing for posterior and anterior tilt when required.
Anterior tilt is common when we’re asking the horse to go , posterior is common when asking for a stop ..
Are you always saying stop or go with your seat but sending a different message with your hands and legs ..?
Have a think and a feel about what messages are you sending to your horse via your seat ..
And if you want to seriously improve your riding take a deep dive into learning all about this topic , get lessons, watch utubes , be aware of your seat constantly throughout your ride …
You’ll definitely improve as a rider and the communication that can occur between the horse and rider via the seat is immense .
Credit to the unknown artist:)

27/11/2024

Worth a read. This is why we suction up to help the horse!

If I could change one thing in the teaching of riding, it would be that riders would understand the importance of supporting their own bodyweight, and coaches and instructors would acknowledge it as vital to the horse’s welfare, and ability to function well under saddle.

The ideal is to sit in such a way, that not only do you distribute your weight evenly and thoughtfully over the horses back, but also create a positive influence that allows space for the horse to lift and engage his back, to find his own ‘neutral spine’.

In very simple terms, think of the horse’s body like a suspension bridge. The stanchions of the bridge are his shoulders and hindquarters, and his spine is like the road bridge in between.

If his back becomes hollow, then the bridge is soggy and the stanchions collapse inwards. Imagine adding a dead weight to the bridge that it was not designed to carry, (ie, the rider) and the bridge is further going to collapse. This analogy describes the situation that is far too often the norm for ridden horses, that not only are they coping with their backs being chronically hollow, but also trying to carry additional weight in that hollow.

Firstly, it’s important to understand how the horse has evolved to carry his own bodyweight, before we add that of our own and the saddle.

He has two systems, one for grazing and resting, and one for browsing, socialising and locomotion, which I will describe very briefly.
As a herbivore, consuming vast amounts of vegetation and water, his gut can become very heavy to carry around. In fact, the gut area of a horse can weigh around 300kg! However, horses have a very clever labour-saving way of coping with this.

Their intestines are slung inside a large bag of fascia (called mesentery) that is attached to the supraspinous ligament at around L2 of the lumbar spine. The supraspinous ligament runs along the back and then becomes the nuchal ligament as it runs over the withers and extends up the neck. When the horse lowers his head below the height of the withers, the withers act like a fulcrum, and as the ligament becomes taught, it starts to pick up the weight of the entire gut, purely by leverage and without any muscular effort. How cool is that?

However, when his head is above the height of his withers, this system does not operate so well, and instead he must engage his hindquarters, abdominal, lumbar, thoracic sling and neck muscles to carry his whole body, which we more commonly know as self-carriage.

So, having understood how the horse carries itself without our weight, what happens when we sit on their backs?

Well, if we add ourselves as a benign and relaxed passenger, we just become a burden to the middle of the suspension bridge, and it starts to collapse, which appears to the eye as a hollow. It also feels like you are sitting in a hollow, but for so many riders that I meet, they have become acclimatised to this hollow and have stopped noticing it, as if it is the norm.

Over time this will cause muscle wastage and chronic skeletal imbalance, plus a big loss of athletic performance. (Yes, it can be often seen in competition horses as well as happy hackers!)

I will often give a horse a belly lift while their rider is sat onboard, which allows the rider to gain a perspective on how the horses’ long back muscles should feel if its abdominals are correctly engaged and pushing upwards. As the horses back sinks back down after the belly lift, it becomes clear how the hollow has become the norm.

A good question to ask yourself is, what does the surface of my horses back actually feel like? Does it feel toned and pliable, like it could lift and support me, is it flat and tense, or is it hollow and squishy like an old sofa? Is it level on both sides? Of course if you aren’t sure how your own body feels, then you are not likely to be able to notice the horses body, which is why so much of my work is about developing riders to be able to feel and notice this physical interface, which has a great deal of nuance to it.

So what can we do to make ourselves less of the problem and more of the solution? Firstly, it’s important to be balanced over our seat bones in a shoulder-hip-heel alignment and stabilised against the forces acting on our bodies. Then the answer lies in our muscle tone, and probably a lot more physical effort then most riders want to acknowledge, in order that we can create some ‘suction’ over the horses back as opposed to ‘deflation’!

Think of the poise and control of an ice skater or ballroom dancer. They look relaxed, but also very light and balanced, in the same way that talented riders do. In the sequel to this post, I will explain the ‘how’ of supporting your bodyweight and creating suction on the horses back.

To subscribe to my free blog, direct to your inbox, click here ⬇️ www.horseandridercoach.co.uk and click on free stuff!

23/11/2024

DRESSAGE SOLUTIONS: To help you stay stable in the saddle while still allowing for your horse’s movement …

When you sit on your horse, imagine that you are the center tower of a suspension bridge. You have cables that stretch both forward and backward to various points on your horse’s topline that allow for movement between you and the cables. This helps to create balance, self-carriage and collection in your horse while you remain stable in the saddle.
~ Stephany Fish Crossman

Crossman is a USDF bronze and silver medalist as well as one of only nine accredited coaches for Mary Wanless’ Ride With Your Mind Biomechanics System in the U.S. Currently is based in Okeechobee, Florida, Crossman also cohosts our Dressage Today Podcast.

🎨 Sandy Rabinowitz

22/11/2024

November 22, 2024

It’s just that simple for horse people.

22/11/2024

Take two minutes to download our Horse i app 🤳

We use incident data to:
🚓 Work with the local police to deliver close pass operations
🪧 Put up signs in your local area
📚 Hold workshops with drivers in hotspot locations

📲 Recording any incidents you have been involved in will help us drive real change.

Help us to make your local roads safer 👉 https://bit.ly/47hWM1a