Rehab Right
Members will find many exercises throughout the rider rehab department. Some exercises will be challenging, especially if the injury is being worked, so take your time to increase mobility and strength. Many exercises will be fairly easy to help the body reconnect their basic body movements. The point is to just do them on a consistent basis.
When we ride horses, we don’t have a choice but to use previously injured areas because riding a horse takes every inch of your body. Of course the trick and talent is to not work so hard but when you sit on a horse, there’s nothing that isn’t moving with your horse as he walks on.
If you are riding a horse, you should be rehabilitating your body as well as strengthen the undamaged areas. There’s a certain amount of protection that athletes provide themselves when coming back from an injury, granted but there will be a time to push and when to back off. You need to pay attention to this and don’t let pushing become a constant nor resting.
Active can be doing mobility exercises and simple balance exercises can help build your basic strength without the high risk. The rehab workouts are designed to use the most simple exercises with the most benefit for basic stability. Focus on doing the simple exercises for the injured or stressed area of your body. Then skip the more difficult exercises in the membership workout.
What to do if you can’t do the exercises?
Skip it!
Let’s say your injury is in the wrist and when you are holding the plank position, your wrist starts to hurt. No reason to stress, try planking with your elbows on the ground instead. Check the strength surrounding the other joints near the wrist, like the elbow and shoulder. Weak deltoids will cause the arms to struggle with the workload.
When an injury happens in one direct area, it doesn’t mean that other areas are not affected by the lay up, cast, swelling and all the other things that come with surgeries/injuries. This is a main reason for the split into the separate areas throughout this department of memberships.
Training Tip
Rehab is not a race! Proper stretching and lengthening allows releases in muscle tissue. As you move slowly through each exercise, watch alignment of area of activation. From here you can relax into the pose or stretch.
It's a rough sport
