05/05/2023
Muscle memory and how it effects your riding.
Cross training is generally healthy, but for adults who are picking up riding later in life and/or have spent considerable time doing a different sport, the muscle memory from your other activities, is going to show up in your equitation. 
Truth time- if you have spent considerable time cycling, or doing ballet before learning basic riding/equitation, you’re gonna struggle!! Cyclists tend to tip forward and draw the leg up. Life long equestrians tend to develop stringy quad muscles, cyclists developing bulky ones…. It’s just such different muscling! Ballet dancers have anterior pelvic tilt and turn those hips way out- equestrians need to turn in to stabilize. Ballet dancers turned equestrians have a heckuva time rotating their thigh so that it lays flat on the horse. Instead, they tend to point their knees out and grip with the calves, and it can be a HARD habit to replace!!
 Once upon a Time ages ago, I had a student that (without me present) decided to ride ba****ck. Her older quiet horse wasn’t used to it and scooted. It didn’t sound like that eventful of a fall, but she was really banged up! I kept having her describe it to me, because I couldn’t understand how she received the injuries she did. Her forearm and the FRONT of one hip were horribly bruised. I had never heard of someone falling like that- especially from such a seemingly benign fall. It was just so weird to me that I suggested she practice some tumbling, so that when she inevitably finds herself hurling towards the ground again, her body find a better position to land in. (Some of you have matched the story with the picture and probably have this all figured out by now.) When I told her she needed to practice falling, she proudly exclaimed, “oh yeah! back when I played beach volleyball we practiced landing in the sand to catch a serve.” Beach volleyball- there was the answer. What the horse did, and how she initially fell was irrelevant. Her body had hours and hours of practice, landing on the front of her hip with an arm reaching out, and as her body found itself caught between gravity and sand, it assumed the position it was taught!!  That position is probably perfectly safe playing beach volleyball, where the only thing tossing you is your own power, but add on the extra Gs of getting yeeted by a horse and….. well, thankfully it was just a simple case of just walking when the horse scooted out from under her ba****ck, because had that been a hard fall from a canter, it would have been pretty bad!
Yoga and Pilates are great for riders. So is walking backwards, and swimming is pretty good too.
Honestly, once you have good muscle memory in the tack, you can then pick up other sports and most likely be fine. The real challenge is trying to learn good equitation when you have muscle memory that is particularly contradictory. 
The great news is, you can absolutely work through it and create new neuron connections, and new muscle memory. But just like in Horses, whatever you learn first has a tendency to stick! So, if as a kid you walked on your toes, you might spend years doing Huntseat equitation with your heels stretched way down, but then you get an injury, or take a riding hiatus during college, or for pregnancy, or whatever, and a few months later, you hop back on, and find out you are struggling to keep your heels down!! I personally was a jumper before learning dressage, and I will forever have jumper tendencies in my riding!! I’ve not ridden one dang time that I don’t have to remind myself to ‘sit back/sit down”. My timing and feel is quite developed from so many years and hours in the saddle riding different disciplines, and so many different types of horses, but honestly, my nine year old students have a better seat than I do!!! 🙈
All that said, contradictory muscle memory is not a limitation- just a challenge that will always be there in the background (if not the foreground at times!)
The best thing you can do is have awareness of it and accept it as a reality that you will always need to work a little extra at building, and maintaining, the muscle memory you need in order to ride well!!
