Trafalgar Square Books

Practical exercises, enhanced with copious photographs and diagrams, show how to balance your front and back, left and right—yielding skills that simultaneously address the equivalent imbalances in your horse. Note, this book was first published in the USA as New Anatomy of Rider Connection. 

For the past 30-plus years, Mary Wanless and her bestselling Ride with Your Mind books and videos have helped revolutionize the art and science of riding horses. Now she takes her pioneering techniques—which combine a lifetime’s influences from the fields of psychology, biofeedback, neuro-linguistic programming, the Alexander and Feldenkrais techniques, Tai Chi, massage, dance, anatomy, sports psychology, and educational kinesiology—to a whole new level. In her newest book, Wanless teams up with Anatomy Trains® creator and author Thomas Myers to examine how the “fabric” of our bodies (fascia) can potentially allow us to generate both stability and what so many riders find elusive even after years in the saddle—“feel.”

Recent research shows how the body-wide “net” of fascia that both wraps each muscle and connects your skin to your bones can be the source of postural imbalances and the resulting restrictions in your movement. Wanless posits that the difference between “average” and “elite” riders lies in the quality of connection and awareness within this fascial net, and she gives us the means to take practical and meaningful steps toward addressing such issues, resulting in extraordinary change in the way we look and feel on horseback.

How to best communicate with the horse has long been pondered, studied, and deciphered. From a handler’s body language on the ground to the rider’s use of “aids” (seat, legs, reins) when in the saddle, the ways we convey our wishes to the horse are the essential foundation of the partnership we seek with him. Although the basic aids are taught at the most elementary levels of equitation, renowned classical dressage trainer Sylvia Loch feels that most riders never fully realize how their weight when mounted impacts the horse in hundreds of nuanced ways—both good and bad. Developing an understanding of “weight aids” ensures that riders cultivate better balance and “feel,” ultimately riding with more empathy and a finer connection.

Here, Loch provides an image-driven visual guide that shows how each tiny shift of the rider's weight affects the horse's balance. With the help of dozens of illustrations and fabulous color photographs, she demonstrates the minute changes in rider position that determine a horse’s comprehension of instruction as well as his physical ability to perform. With this book, novice riders will develop a much greater awareness of their own bodies and abilities, as well as those of the horse, from Day One, while more experienced riders will discover new avenues that lead to successful riding performance and fulfilling relationships with their horses.