Riding has MANY health benefits! Whether you are young or old, or somewhere in the middle, riding is a great form of exercise, strengthening, and maintaining/improving flexibility. It helps to take the strain off of your joints by sitting while still using all of your postural muscles and leg and arm muscles. Riding often is portrayed by pictures taken at rodeos, or videos of naughty ponies throwing children to the ground. This paints a picture of a dangerous and scary activity, but that picture is very inaccurate.
When you have the right horse, with the right human, riding can be a very safe and enjoyable activity for people of all skill sets and physical prowess. In fact, horseback riding has been rapidly growing as a recommended form of physical therapy for mentally and physically disabled children and adults, as well as for some recovering from injuries. This is because the motion a horse produces in its rider at the walk is the closes you can get to the motion of actually walking on your own. It also helps loosen the muscles in people with cerebral palsy that might not be able to straighten their legs or sit up straight. Because every joint is moving all the time, riding can improve mobility in stiff joints when done regularly.
Physical benefits of riding include: Better coordination, Strength and Flexibility, Core Strength, and mental/emotional stability.
Riding can be great for the mind. Though you aren’t physically moving forward, but asking and allowing an animal to move for you, you are constantly needing to use your brain. A rider with an easily distracted mind soon finds him/herself able to concentrate for longer periods of time on the task at hand. It can be a great developer of critical thinking skills. If a rider switched horses or environments on a regular basis, they learn to differentiate between scenarios and use creativity to help them make the right choices for riding in the moment. Because horses are like humans, in that they can have bad and good days, sometimes the rider needs to be able to read the horses body language and adjust their riding accordingly. Riding increases your minds capacity for multitasking as well. as you learn more and more you are able to do more things at the same time.
Here are a few sites for more about the health benefits of riding!
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