Not only does it look terrible my butt flies out of the saddle
my neck gets all tense and it's really hard to ride! All right hello everyone i'm Amelia today's
video is about looking up so recently i did a few surveys and i found that one of the most common
rider position problems is looking down so put a comment down below let me know yes hello i look
down when i ride i do it personally for sure and it is a really bad habit so first of all why do we
look down i think a lot of the reason that we look down is because we're trying to rely on visual
instead of feeling so everything we do in our life i think it's something like 70 of the input to our
brains is from visual and so when we're riding we try to like look at what our hands doing look
at what our horse is doing as opposed to feeling what's happening and this is actually bad because
it's faster to feel and to react to feeling than it is to look at it visually so it's actually
going to speed up your reaction times when you try to feel your horse more as opposed to
looking at your horse so a couple of things um the first thing the first reason that it's important
that you look up and i'm going to turn to the side is that when we ride we want to have your
ear shoulder hip heel alignment this is like one of the basics of your rider position and when you
look down that alignment gets out of whack so like if i look down like this like you can see
what that does to me is my ear is in front of my shoulder my shoulder is back and it might cause
you to either like for me it causes me to lean a little bit forward some people might lean back
so you can see how much looking down affects your alignment when you're looking down like
this and you're no longer in neutral spine you're not going to be able to absorb the motion of the
horse correctly so let me just demonstrate quickly the difference between looking up and looking down
so i'm just going to sit here at the walk and i'm going to really focus on looking up
one thing that i really have to think about that helps me with my looking up and my alignment is
to actually think about bringing my ear back over my shoulders so um a lot of times what we
do is that we kind of go like this and like our chin comes too far forward so when you can think
about kind of bringing your chin into your throat kind of like you're making a double chin and and
bringing your skull back that's going to help to get the correct alignment and one thing that
i really like to do that helps remind me to look up is to look at the trees and look at the horizon
so let me just pick up the trot here so here i'm looking up i'm looking at the trees i'm looking
at the skyline now here i'm looking down and like there's a huge difference in my seat when
i look down so let me look up again like here i can really feel my seat swinging and following
nicely with my horse now when i look down it's such a big difference like my
whole entire spine and back is affected when i look down good boy so i have this like special
little pair of sunglasses that i have created i'm gonna walk over to the camera person so
i saw this thing of people making these sunglasses with the bottom half blacked out to help you
stay looking up so you can purchase these but i decided to just make a pair
the sunglasses are from the dollar store i always get my sunglasses from the dollar store
because when you're around horses you're always breaking them and losing them so
get a pair of sunglasses from the dollar store and then i just took two pieces of duct tape and
blacked out the bottom part of the sunglasses so this is a little tool to help remind me
to look up and i'm going to give it a try here let you know what you think so basically
what this does is it makes it so that you cannot look down and rely on looking at your horse
and i was trying to ride with these earlier so i definitely think that that there's
a point like it would be useful to try this out i encourage you guys to give it a try
and just see if it works for you because it does make you really aware of how much um you look down
because like when i was riding around here i kept like trying to look down but since the bottom part
of the glasses are blacked out you can't basically all i can see are his ears but i can no longer see
my hands so i think that riding with these glasses is kind of a good tool because it just makes you
aware of how much you want to look down to see what's going on what i don't like about these
is that i do think that when you're riding like you need to glance down and kind of check in
with your horse's neck position and also with your hand position so when i have these glasses on
basically all i can see is my horse's ears and the horizon when i don't have these glasses on
i'm going to take them off and kind of go through with you what i'm looking at
so when you ride you want to have what we call soft eyes so soft eyes are where you're kind of
perceiving everything around you and if like let's say for example that i'm riding a 20 meter circle
basically i alternate between hard eyes and soft eyes so hard eyes are like when i get
to the center line here i look at b and make sure to get my horse pointing towards b then
once i know where my next touch point is on the circle i have soft eyes where i'm looking around
and in my soft eyes i'm you know looking at what's going on i'm looking at the trees
i'm looking at the horizon periodically i'm glancing down at my hands and my horse's ears
so i'm not staring down there i'm just glancing down so i'm checking like that my hands are even
i'm looking a little bit at my horse's neck and making sure that it looks like he's round
and then i'm looking up again and looking at the horizon so i think that the way that you
use your eyes is really important that you look up and around glance down look up and around
glance down and it's important when you glance down that you just use your peripheral vision
to glance down and you don't actually like have to rotate your head downward so
i've been trying really hard to look up more because it's such a bad habit
and it does really affect your horse's way of going your ability to sit in the saddle and follow
the motion and it also puts your weight on your horse's forehand so like when you're looking up
like this it gives a much more uphill picture to your horse if you look down like this
it puts your weight on your horse's forehand and it's going to make
them look more on the forehand so let me just demonstrate that quickly with him
in the canner once okay so here i'm looking up i'm thinking about keeping my butt in the saddle
moving with him glancing down and then looking ahead to the next touch point
now if i look down you're going to see a big difference so if i'm staring down at
his head like this not only does it look terrible my butt flies out of the saddle
my neck gets all tense and it's really hard to ride
so go back to looking up putting my butt in the saddle swinging my hips good boy oh boy
so the moral of the story is that you should look up when you're riding let me know if this
video is helpful be sure to subscribe to my channel i make a new video every wednesday
and check out the description there's some awesome freebies down there for you a free
mini course on rider position and one on confidence as well so thanks so much for watching
bye