Why You Feel Straight When You Are Not

PART ONE OF FOUR

I failed my first attempt at BHS Stage 4 riding. I passed the jumping. I failed the flatwork. The reason, I was told, was that I was crooked. I had no idea.

There are things you could argue in my defence. I had undergone L5/S1 surgery - a discectomy and foraminotomy performed as a last resort because the ossified mass pressing on the nerve had caused foot drop. The nerve damage on my left side, from glute medius down, is permanent. I am a registered para-rider. These are facts, not excuses, and the distinction matters.

But the other inescapable truth, and there is no hiding behind, is that it was my RIGHT side that failed me. My dominant side. The side I had been over-using for years without knowing it - bracing, over-aiding, laterally collapsing through the ribs, pushing my seat to the left. My horse had a habitual haunch swing to the left. To this day I am not entirely certain whether that was driven by the left glute medius failing and dropping the hip, or by the right side collapse pushing the seat across. Possibly both. The asymmetry was layered, the compensation was long-established, and I was completely oblivious to all of it.

This is not a story about my back. It is a story about something that happens to riders at every level, in every discipline, on every type of horse. The correction you have been given repeatedly and cannot seem to hold. The video that does not match what you felt. The lesson where everything fell apart the moment someone was watching. The instructor who keeps saying the same thing and you keep trying and nothing changes.

There are reasons for all of it. Not excuses - reasons. Mechanistic, neurological, genuinely interesting reasons. And once you understand which one applies to you, the path forward looks completely different.

The Body You Think You Have

Your brain does not feel your body in real time the way you might assume it does. What it does instead is run a continuous internal simulation - a predictive model of where your limbs are, what they are doing, and what the sensory consequences of your movements should be. This is called the forward model, and it is built from everything you have ever done with your body.

Proprioception - your sense of position and movement in space - is not a passive signal. It is a comparison. The brain registers sensation when there is a mismatch between what it predicted and what actually happened. When movement goes exactly to plan, no error signal fires. The system is silent, because as far as it is concerned, everything is correct.

For a rider who has been asymmetrical for years, the forward model has learned the asymmetry. The crooked position is what the brain predicts. The crooked position is therefore what feels straight. Not because the rider is inattentive or lazy or not trying. Because the reference point itself has drifted.

The correction will not feel like correction. It will feel wrong. That is not a sign you are doing it incorrectly - it is the proprioceptive system in the process of updating.

This is why video is so jarring. When you watch yourself and see something that does not match what you felt, the visual information collides with the internal model and forces a comparison the body had not been making on its own. That collision - the 'I look like that?' moment - is the beginning of recalibration, not proof that the problem is insurmountable.

What it is not, however, is a quick fix. Research on proprioceptive recalibration consistently shows that the sensory map changes more slowly than the movement itself. The body can learn to produce a correction before it learns to feel the correction as normal. Which means there will be a period - potentially a long one - where the right position feels wrong, and the old position still feels right, and the only way through it is accumulated repetition with external reference.

The Overcorrection Problem

There is a complication to the recalibration process that coaching rarely addresses directly. When you first find a correction - genuinely feel it, produce it, hold it - it tends to feel extreme. Dramatic. Too much. And the natural response is to keep targeting that sensation as the new goal.

The problem is that as the fault improves, that first sensation of correction becomes an overcorrection. The forward model, adjusting from a long-habituated baseline, overshoots. The brain's estimate of where the body is does not land exactly at the new symmetrical position - it temporarily moves past it.

If you practise to that feeling, you are not training symmetry. You are training a new version of asymmetry in the other direction. Repeat it long enough and it becomes the new normal. This is why video, mirrors or eyes on the ground stays necessary throughout the process, not just at the start. Once you know what to do, maintain ongoing checks that the forward model's moving baseline is still tracking reality.

The Dressage Horse Story

After failing Stage 4, I booked lessons on an advanced dressage horse with an instructor who was also a BHS examiner. I chose her deliberately. She knew the horse would expose me. I suspect she knew that any rider not sitting in balance with an independent seat would be sending him mixed messages, and that he would answer those messages honestly.

He did. I could feel the silent laughter. This horse was offering movements from me that I had no idea I was asking for - responses to pressure and weight distribution I was applying without any awareness that I was applying them. It was mortifying. It was also the most useful thing that had happened to my riding in years.

Not because being humiliated is pedagogically sound! But because for the first time, the feedback was coming through my seat rather than through someone's words. The horse was telling me by responding to my crookedness in ways my body could feel directly, immediately, without any cognitive translation required. The sensation was undeniable in a way that verbal correction could never manage to be.

By the end of the first lesson, the instructor had actively micro-managed me - where to sit, how to sit, what to stop doing with my right side, how to manage the left glute medius fatigue without compensating through the ribs. Over subsequent sessions, that external scaffolding gradually became something I owned. Conscious effort first, then something closer to automatic. Not finished - it has never been finished, and given the permanent nerve damage it probably never will be - but genuinely mine in a way it had not been before.

What she had done, though she may not have framed it in these terms, was use the horse as a constraint. A living, responsive constraint that made my habitual movement pattern unavailable and made a more functional one necessary. Not by telling me what to do, but by designing conditions where my nervous system had to find a different answer.

Which Problem Do You Actually Have?

The reason this matters beyond my particular story is that 'you are crooked' or 'fix your position' is not one problem. It is at least three, and each one has a different mechanism and needs a different approach.

The first is the proprioceptive problem described above - you do not know, because your internal reference point has normalised the asymmetry. No amount of being told will fix this, because the information is not reaching the body in a form it can use. What is needed is external feedback delivered in a way the nervous system can actually receive - and sometimes, as with an advanced schooled horse, that means bypassing the cognitive system entirely and going straight to the body.

The second is a motor acquisition problem. You know the correction is needed, you may even understand it intellectually, but the movement pattern does not yet exist in your nervous system. You cannot produce it reliably off the horse, let alone on one. This requires training design to help fix a position problem, and it points toward a completely different intervention and why I am so passionate about skill acquisition and strength and conditioning. Riding is a skill. Skills are built - and the way they are built determines whether they hold up when it matters.

The third is an access problem. The pattern exists. You can find it. But under pressure - in a lesson, at a competition, when someone is watching, when the horse is more difficult - it disappears. This is the nervous system under perceived threat making a different set of priorities, and it is not fixed by trying harder.

Parts two and three of this series address both of those in depth, along with what training off the horse can and cannot do, what motor imagery is actually for, and how the horse-rider relationship itself changes what is possible.

Did I ever pass my BHS Stage 4 riding? You will have to wait for Part Two to find out.

References

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Block, H.J., Lee-Miller, T. and Block, H. (2022) 'Conscious awareness of a visuo-proprioceptive mismatch: Effect on cross-sensory recalibration', Frontiers in Neuroscience, 16, 958513.

Davies, M., Stone, J.A., Davids, K., Williams, J. and O'Sullivan, M. (2022) 'Can't jump, won't jump: Affordances of the horse-rider dyad underpin skill adaptation in showjumping using a constraints-led approach', International Journal of Sports Science and Coaching, 18(1).

Fitts, P.M. and Posner, M.I. (1967) Human Performance. Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole.

Gandevia, S.C. (2012) 'The proprioceptive senses: Their roles in signaling body shape, body position and movement, and muscle force', Physiological Reviews, 92(4), pp. 1651-1697.

Kim, H.E., Morehead, J.R., Parvin, D.E., Moazzezi, R. and Shadmehr, R. (2018) 'Invariant errors reveal limitations in motor correction rather than constraints on error sensitivity', Communications Biology, 1(19).

Mesagno, C., Harvey, J.T. and Janelle, C.M. (2012) 'Choking under pressure: The role of fear of negative evaluation', Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 13(1), pp. 60-68.

Mutha, P.K., Sainburg, R.L. and Haaland, K.Y. (2011) 'Critical neural substrates for correcting unexpected trajectory errors and learning from them', Brain, 134(12), pp. 3647-3661.

Wolframm, I.A., Bosga, J. and Meulenbroek, R.G.J. (2013) 'Coordination dynamics in horse-rider dyads', Human Movement Science, 32(1), pp. 229-238.