First Published in Horse and Rider Magazine

Are you looking for ways to improve the bio-mechanics of your riding? Could you use some training which will increase your balance and stability? Would you love to own a horse but cannot afford to? Would you be willing to settle for the next best thing? Or are you temporarily grounded, and wanting some off-horse activity which has the potential to enhance your riding?

The answer to all of the above lies in a gymball. Very cheap to keep, they take no feeding, and no mucking out. They roll you off, but they never buck you off. For - as you will realise if you let yourself loose on a ball - the vast majority of horses are courteous enough to hold you up when you lose your balance, whilst gymballs are not! I was introduced to gymballs by Anne Howard, a friend and colleague in California who is a physiotherapist as well as a rider and teacher. Her physiotherapy practice specialises in patients with back problems, and gymballs are commonly used for patients who need training in spinal stabilisation . One of the reasons for this is that playing with the balls is so much fun that patients actually do their homework. Exercise that makes you stabilise your spine strengthens the muscles which surround it, and this often leads to a reduction in pain for those who are recovering from injury.

Having stronger supporting muscles around the spine also makes you far less injury-prone - and it develops your riding technique, along with the skills of balance and stability. Another useful feature of the balls is that they give very immediate feedback about how well you are doing. (So do horses, but interpreting their feedback can be a little tricky!) Balls are more straightforward, and they help the brain learn in the way that it was designed to, making the learning process streamlined, efficient and fun. For the brain works most effectively when it learns through a cybernetic process , and this requires a knowledge of the goal and feedback about how "warm", "hot" or "cold" you are in relation to that goal. (Do you remember the child's game of "Hunt the Thimble"? This is the ultimate cybernetic learning process.)

All the learnings you made as a very young child - as you began to walk and talk, and explored the world through performing all kinds of mischief - followed this trial-and-error format. But sadly, our education system is such that you may never again have functioned from such an optimal state. You can give yourself a small example of cybernetic learning, however, by standing on one leg, with the other knee bent and your foot off the floor. How still you do stay? Do you really remain dead in one place, or can you feel tiny movements in your ankle and foot? As you practice, those movements will become smaller, for you are learning by trial and error (and at an unconscious level) how to maintain the ideal balance point. A ballerina is obviously so skilful at this that even when on pointe she does not wobble and over-correct as you do: but your brain will begin learning from even a short period of practice, and you will soon move closer to this ideal.

In teaching riding, my aim is to set up a cybernetic learning process for my pupil, showing her how to continue that process on her own. Initially the rider needs me to help her get on track, and to show her what the goal is. (You would be amazed at the proportion of riders who are aiming for completely the wrong feeling.) I also interpret horse-language for her, so that the feedback from her greatest teacher becomes comprehensible to her. (You would be amazed at the proportion of riders who blink and miss it.) Riding is a far more complex skill than balancing on one leg - or balancing on a ball - and unlike those skills it takes both conscious (left brain) and unconscious (right brain) learning. However, the value of the balls is that they need no interpreter - and whilst playing with them will not turn you into a fully-fledged rider, they are well worth the investment of some time.

The first sequence of photographs shows myself and two pupils working with a 95cm diameter ball. This is so large that when blown up, it will not fit through a door way - and thus it is really only suitable for learning institutions. For safety reasons, it must always be used with a spotter (just visible in the background) who can roll the rider up onto the ball, and catch her if she falls backwards. When on this ball, many people find that being unable to touch their feet to the ground puts the question of safety uppermost in their minds, and nervous riders are often nervous ball-balancers! Grass is a relatively easy surface to stay in balance on,

As you can see in the next photos, balancing is not quite so simple as I have made it look above! If you look closely at my axis, however, you will see that I have not yet found the ideal spot where I am dead on vertical.

Not surprisingly, people lose their balance on balls just as they do on horses; so Sheila, who you see here, has a tendency to close the angle of the hip joint too much, tipping forward and sliding her backside backwards. She has just about conquered this in her riding - but it came back to haunt her on the ball. As is usual with a rider who is on this ball for the first time, she was so unstable that I was rarely able to let go of her without her beginning to roll off so fast that she could not catch herself!

Nick, on the other hand, has lost his balance on the side to side plane, in a way which mirrors the asymmetry he is still struggling with in his riding. Since people always collapse to the inside, you should be able to work out from the photograph that the right rein is far more problematical for him than the left, where his spine remains far closer to vertical. On this photograph, he has rolled beyond the point where he can correct and get himself back onto the top of the ball, and I am about to catch him and heave him up there. Soon he will roll less and correct more easily - and by the time he has discovered how to hold himself on the top of the ball, he will have gone a long way towards discovering how to hold himself on the top of his horse.

Another rider, who did unusually well during his first go on a ball of this size, realised how all the corrections he had to make to maintain his balance were tiny movements in his hip joints. These allowed him to return to the "sweet spot" dead on the centre of the ball, where you can sometimes remain still for a few moments before you begin to wobble again. These wobbles are a mass of tiny cybernetic corrections (and over-corrections) which bring you back to centre of the ball (or send you straight past it so that you fall the other way!). Through this, he realised where his hip joints were, and began to appreciate the role that they must play both in stabilising the body, and in absorbing the movement of sitting trot. He rode the next day extremely well, mindful of the part of his body that needed to move, and which he felt he had previously been "locking up".

The bigger the ball, the harder it is to balance, and for most people, a 65cm ball (the "thoroughbred ball") is the most practical size, since this will allow you both to balance (as above, but you will not need the spotter) with your feet off the floor. However, you can also to do exercises which require them on the floor. 55cm (the "pony ball") may suit you better if you are under 5ft, and 75cm (the "Warmblood ball") works well for people over 5ft 10ins.

The ball needs to be blown up with a small amount of "give". (If you blow it up hard and leave it in a warm place, it will need a top up in a few days. That should get it just right, although it will again need more air in time). Begin the balancing exercise by sitting on the ball in an "on horse" position, and placing it in a doorway so that you can catch yourself as you roll. You can also put one or both feet down on the ground whenever you need to. Soon you will not need the extra support, and if you balance on the ball in front of large mirror you can refine your skills using visual as well as kinaesthetic feedback.

The next exercise is "marching". Sit on the ball with your feet on the ground slightly in front of you. Then lift one foot. This may sound like it should be really easy; but believe me, it is not so simple as it as your naive logic might suggest! For it requires you to maintain upper body stability whilst on a changing base of support. If you think about it, you will realise that this is just the same challenge that we face in riding.

In Fig 4, I have done a good job;

but here in Fig 5 I am demonstrating the most common problem. For most people find that they cannot lift one (and sometimes both) feet without their upper body moving. And guess what.... you will have trouble with your spine going off axis in the same way that it does when you ride.

One of my more committed and inventive pupils practices this exercise in front of a large mirror with a sticker on it, and she begins by lining her nose up with the sticker. This makes any deviation of her spine extremely obvious! In doing the exercise you may find that one leg feels far heavier than the other, and you may know before you begin that you will not be able to maintain your stability! Each person's "kinks" are so individual and complex that we all show a slightly different variation on the theme: for asymmetries cannot just be explained by handedness, or by the concept of a "strong" side and a "weak" side. It is helpful, however, to think of the spine like a flexible mast which is supported by guy ropes.

If the ropes have uneven tension, this is bound to pull the spine off axis. So if I as your riding instructor tell you to "sit straight" but do not address the issue of the "guy ropes" I have no grounds to expect that you could possibly obey my command! Sadly, this is where a large proportion of teaching fails in its aims. Although we may never have a full explanation for the origins of your asymmetry, doing the "marching" exercise helps you discover how to stabilise yourself equally well over both sides of your body - and shows you how to solve the same problem in your riding. You can involve your conscious mind by recognising the feeling you have to create and giving it a label, like "closed on the right"; or you may find that an image ("like a Greek pillar") suits you better. Then use the image or the label to help you recreate this same feeling as you ride.

In Figs 6 and 7 I am using the ball to illustrate the mechanism of sitting trot. Here, all movement takes place in the hips joints, and not in the middle of the back (even though some of you may have been taught - as I was for many years - to "wiggle in the middle" and absorb the movement that way). Anne Howard and I both independently came up with the same explanation for the sitting trot mechanism, and in this I was influenced by I research films of the dressage rider Kyra Kyrklund which I have been privy to. These used two hundred and fifty frames per second (which is exceptionally fast), and were taken as part of a PhD thesis which investigated the mechanism of the horses' gaits.

The mechanism within Kyra's body is clear. If the horse's back makes a sine wave (which is even in its ups and downs), Fig 6 is the rider's position on the "down": the shoulders are above the hips, with the feet slightly ahead of them. Then Fig 7 shows the "up", in which the pelvis moves forward and up, bringing it over the feet, opening the hip joints so that the shoulders are behind the pelvis. This puts the spine slightly behind vertical. The naked eye cannot analyze this movement well; but you can practice it slowly (and then progressively faster) as you bounce on your ball - and if you sit sideways-on to a large mirror you can again monitor yourself visually.

What you do not want to see is some of the varieties of movement shown in Figs 8 and 9, in which I have hollowed my back on the "up" and rounded it on the "down". These exaggerated "wiggles" are commonly seen - in many variations - which also include rounding on the "up" and/or hollowing on the "down"! All of these options are a far cry from the concept of "spinal stabilisation". As well as looking ugly, they do not put the rider "at cause" in the rider/horse relationship. Instead she is "at effect": this wiggly load is not carried easily by the horse, and it cannot organise the horse in the same way as the more stable rider of Figs 8 and 9. Also, since the middle of the back is not designed to be used as a joint, their long term effects can be injurious.

The next two sequences of photographs show "the prone bridge" (Figs 10 to 13), and "the supine bridge" (Figs 14 to 17). These exercises require tremendous strength, as well as good balance. Beginning as in Fig 10 roll yourself over the ball until you are supported on your hands, with your calves resting on the ball. As you strengthen, you can move the point of support towards your ankles, but begin with it close to your knees. If your wrists will not support you well in the hand position I have used, make fists and rest on your knuckles.

Then lift one leg off the ball as I have done in Fig 13. My pelvis should ideally be a bit lower, so that my spine is horizontal; but I have lifted my leg without twisting, which is good. Again, you may find one leg much easier to lift than the other, and you may soon find that your abdominal muscles get "the shakes" as a result of the effort they have to expend. As in all of these exercises, be mindful of your physical limitations, and do not strain yourself.

The inverse of this exercise, which is the supine bridge, begins from sitting on the ball as in Fig 14, and walking your legs away from it until you can comfortably rest your head and neck on the ball. Again, your back should stay horizontal and level as you lift each leg in turn. This exercise is extremely difficult - and you may even find that you cannot lift either leg! If not, try going up on tip-toe, and practice until you are strong enough to maintain your balance. This time it is the muscles of the back which come under stress, and the one thigh which is left supporting you will also do a considerable amount of work. Take care not to strain your neck as you finish the exercise by "walking" yourself back up to the sitting position from which you began.

There are many other exercises you can do with the balls (some with a partner), but these few are the most helpful for riders. The bio-mechanical issues presented by the ball are remarkably similar to the issues you face when riding, and if you play with your ball for only a few minutes a day, you will soon see improvements in your balance and stability. Many physiotherapists even believe that stabilisation training is far more beneficial for anyone than the strength training and cardiovascular exercise offered by health clubs and gymnasiums. For strength training without proper co-ordination and joint stability causes repetitive strain (of the type we want to avoid in riding). It is a basic rule of gymnastics that the movement which is bio-mechanically the most efficient will also be the most beautiful to watch. So it is in riding...... so train it, now!

The above exercises are presented on the videotape "A Rider's Guide to Body Awareness". This also illustrates the concept of "neutral spine", in which the spinal curves are balanced - as they are in the classical seat. This also helps the back to work efficiently and to withstand the stresses of riding. The tape shows exercises which give strength and independence to the different muscle groups used in riding, and exercises which stretch those muscles. . Gymballs are available from Mary Wanless