Dante's Spook & My Riding Video Analysis (And Yes, Strength & Conditioning Fixes This Stuff)

By Someone Who Isn’t Afraid to Put Herself Under the Microscope

You know that feeling when you watch a video of yourself riding and think,“Ah yes, behold: the elegant, harmonious partnership between horse and rider…—or in my case, a woman unintentionally demonstrating the biomechanics of a folding deckchair”?

Yeah. That.

I recently posted a video of Dante spooking.

But the interesting bit wasn’t the spook.It was everything that caused it… and everything that happened in my body the second he shot sideways.

Let’s talk about what it actually showed — and how strength training fixes it — in a way that doesn’t involve fairy dust, feel-good fluff, or pretending riding is just “heels down and core on”. Because it’s not!

1. The Hand Dependency I Didn’t Want to Admit

Before the spook, Dante was leaning on the contact like a toddler holding your finger so they don’t fall over.(Yes, I thought we had “connection”. No, we did not. We had “security blanket”.)

He felt soft enough, he was in a baby frame, still developing balance and posture, and if you just glanced, you could easily label it “nice contact”. But if you look closely, the reins weren’t simply a channel for energy from behind; they were a balance rail. He was using my hand the way some people use a banister on the stairs: not just for guidance, but for survival.

So when I softened the rein—when I gave away that banister, just a little—he did exactly what a young, slightly insecure horse will do:

Boom. Instant spook.

From a biomechanics and behaviour point of view, this is completely logical. Rein-tension research shows that horses ridden with higher, more variable contact show more conflict behaviours and more reliance on the hand, while those in steadier, lighter contact display fewer evasions and steadier rhythm. The horse’s mouth and poll are highly sensitive sensory zones; if they become the primary source of balance information, any change there feels like the floor dropping away. No wonder Dante went, “Where did my safety rope go?” and teleported sideways.

That’s not just about the horse. It’s about me. Because the more I stabilise myself via my hand, the more my horse learns to stabilise himself there too. A dependent hand creates a dependent horse.

This is where strength training sneaks into what looks like a purely “riding skill” issue. A rider who is truly independent of the reins can stay centred, balanced and organised without needing that contact as a crutch. A rider whose trunk and hips are under-trained will always be tempted to use the reins for balance—subtly, unconsciously—and the horse will oblige.

You don’t fix “leaning on your hands” by thinking soft thoughts about your fingers.You fix it by building a body that doesn’t need the reins to balance in the first place.

2. What Happened After the Spook: My Posterior Chain Went on Holiday

The spook itself wasn’t the problem. The interesting part was the couple of seconds after he jumped sideways, when I was steadying him and regaining control.

On the video, I did a lot of things right: I deliberately stayed off his now tense back, resisted the urge to clamp with my legs, and kept my torso tall with my core engaged but not concrete. I wasn’t water-skiing on his mouth, I wasn’t drilling him back into the corner, and I didn’t sit like a sack of potatoes. So far, so good.

But then we zoom in.

In those early trot steps after the spook, while I was re-organising him, my weight pitched slightly forward. My lower leg drifted back and my pelvis stopped sitting over the stirrups and started chasing my hands. My body stayed “engaged”… but not necessarily organised.

This is where the posterior chain comes in.

If your glutes, hamstrings and deep spinal extensors are strong and well-coordinated, they act like a built-in shock-absorber and anchor. They let you hinge at the hip while your centre of mass stays above the stirrups, even when the horse scoots or loses rhythm. If they’re not, you get exactly what my video showed: you can cope with the spook, but your body leaks forward, your leg slides back, and suddenly your hand becomes a lot more important than it should be.

Posterior-chain work isn’t about deadlifting a house for Instagram. It’s about having enough strength and endurance through the back of your body that, when your horse jump-shies at imaginary demons, you stay over your feet rather than getting tipped towards the neck and dragged onto the reins.

Most riders think “I need a better seat.”Often, what they really need is stronger glutes and hamstrings.

If you can do three sets of fifteen squats but you’re still water-skiing on your horse when he looks at a leaf, you don’t have a “seat problem”. You have a posterior chain problem.

3. I Thought I Was Giving a Subtle Finger Aid. The Video Disagreed.

Once Dante and I were back in trot and no longer pretending the arena contained dragons, I did something else that felt absolutely beautiful at the time.

I was convinced I was giving a nuanced, invisible rein aid: a tiny inner-finger adjustment, a whisper on the contact that only he and I knew about. In my body, it felt like the kind of refined communication we all crave.

And then I watched the replay.

What I felt as:

“a quiet, classical, finger-only inside aid”

was, in reality:

“my shoulders protracted and rolled in, my elbows flared like chicken wings, and my hands drifting left and right in a way that absolutely no horse on earth would describe as ‘subtle’.”

In that footage, it wasn’t my fingers talking to Dante.It was my whole shoulder girdle shouting.

This is where the upper body strength story begins.

If your upper back, scapular stabilisers and rotator cuff are underpowered or overworked in the wrong pattern, your shoulder blades don’t sit quietly against your ribcage. They wobble. They drift. They tip forward and round in. Once that base is unstable, the arm can’t produce fine movement without dragging the whole shoulder complex along for the ride.

You can intend to give a finger aid all you like – but if the scapula is skating around your ribs and your rotator cuff is hanging on for dear life, the aid will not stop at your fingers. It will travel through your wrist, your elbow, your shoulder… and straight into the horse’s mouth as a whole-hand pull instead of a tiny modulation.

This is why riders get so frustrated.They feel like they’re being soft.The horse feels something very different.

Strength and conditioning doesn’t magically teach you feel; it gives your body the platform for feel. Mid and lower trapezius, rhomboids, serratus anterior, and the rotator cuff muscles create a stable, centred scapula. With that in place, the elbow can hang more under the shoulder, the forearm can stay in line with the rein, and your fingers can finally do what you thought they were doing all along: make small changes without dragging the rest of the arm behind them.

You cannot have refined hand aids sitting on top of a wobbly shoulder complex. It’s like trying to ice a cake that hasn’t finished baking.

You cannot have feel without a stable kinetic chain.

It’s like trying to do calligraphy while bouncing on a trampoline.

Good luck.

4. The See-Saw Shoulders: When Rotation Becomes Noise

Another mildly horrifying moment on the video was watching my shoulders see-saw. One comes back as the other goes forward, my ribcage rocks, and surprise surprise: the contact isn’t as still as it felt in the moment.

Now, in theory, I’m all for rotation and dissociation. Riders need to be able to let the pelvis, ribs and shoulders move independently; that’s what allows a correct inside hip, a following torso, and lateral work that doesn’t contort the horse. The problem isn’t having motion. It’s having motion you can’t not do.

When your shoulders are see-sawing without your permission, what you’re seeing is a lack of anti-rotation control. Your trunk can rotate, but it can’t resist rotating when it shouldn’t. Every time your horse changes gait, rhythm or direction, your ribcage makes a little extra movement of its own and your hands come along for the ride.

From the horse’s point of view, that see-saw shows up as little left–right changes, vertical bumps (god forbid bangs on the bars) and tiny but constant rein noise.

Anti-rotation training – things like Pallof presses, suitcase carries, offset loading, controlled trunk work – doesn’t exist to make you stiff. It exists to give you a choice. You learn to rotate when you mean to (for a shoulder-in, a turn, a weight shift), and to keep the ribcage and shoulders quieter when you don’t.

Put simply: mobility without control is just wobble.And wobble travels down the reins.

5. Posterior Chain

Let’s go back to the bit everyone wants to skip: the posterior chain.

When Dante spooked my whole body shot backwards, my legs slid forward like a deckchair unfolding, and I grabbed the reins. After, when he tried to dissolve into a puddle of tension under me, my leg shot back and my body went into “patch it up and carry on” mode. Nothing dramatic, nothing worth a horror compilation, just the usual rider pattern of quietly losing alignment while coping.

If the back of your body isn’t strong enough, you will:

• hinge late instead of early,

• get tipped forward instead of staying stacked,

• balance more through your hands than your feet,

• lose your pelvis position from over the stirrups,

• and watch your leg migrate forwards or backwards every time something interesting happens.

You can have the best intentions in the world about not gripping, not leaning, not water-skiing – but if your glutes, hamstrings, adductors and spinal extensors don’t have the capacity to hold you where you need to be, your technical skill is fighting with your biology.

Riding is a sport.Balance is a skill.But balance under unpredictable load – the kind of load that happens when young horses see monsters – is a strength quality.

You cannot “mindfulness” your way out of tipping forward in a spook.You cannot “feel” your way out of a collapsing hip.You cannot “shoulders back!” your way out of weak scapular control.

Strength matters.And it matters more than most riders are comfortable admitting.

6. The Honest Bottom Line

I am a highly trained rider.I know my biomechanics inside out.I coach this stuff.I can talk about scapulae, thoracic sling and lumbosacral posture until your eyes glaze over.

And even I was:

• tipped forward while steadying a spook,

• leg back,

• hand-dependent in moments,

• shoulder-protracted,

• see-sawing,

• and accidentally water-skiing.

Knowledge doesn’t save you when your body hits its physical limit under pressure.Only capacity does.

Strength and conditioning isn’t “extra”.It isn’t something you bolt on after the fun riding is done.It’s not a vanity project or a bikini-season side quest.

It is the difference between:

reactive riding and resilient riding.

Between hand-dependent contact and true self-carriage.

Between panic in a spook and balance in chaos.

Between“I hope I stay on”and“I’ve got this.”

As for Dante, he spooked, I reorganised, he recovered, we carried on.

The point of the video wasn’t him.It was the reminder that even the most experienced riders have biomechanical defaults that surface under pressure… and that those defaults are not fixed by “trying harder” on the horse. They’re fixed by changing what your body is capable of off the horse.

That’s why I train. That’s why you should train. That’s why rider-specific strength and conditioning isn’t a luxury or an ego trip.

It’s insurance.It’s clarity.It’s kindness to the horse.And it’s empowering.