So today we answer the question “why do the
Whitakers, Nick Skelton etc. ride with their elbows sticking out?”
I say we. I mean me, but you know join in
any time.*
I’m slightly fascinated with the “Whitaker
elbow.” In the 90s we all did it and as I just wrote up some old notes (see 12 things I learnt on my first Tom Whitaker lesson) it sprung back to
mind again. Conventional riding position has your elbow fairly flat to your sides, giving you a fuller range of arm length and more effective shock absorption.
It allows your hands to follow the horse’s mouth, giving a soft contact. Yet in
show jumping, particularly in old school riders, an outward elbow is common –
think John Whitaker – or any Whitaker – Nick Skelton, Tim Stockdale etc. I’ll let you do the Google work.
So what’s the advantage?
First let’s recap the conventional position
and hopefully head off any angry commentators.
Conventional
position:
If like me you have a short arm this gives
you extra reach for the horse to lengthen his neck. It also gives you more degrees
of freedom (elbow, shoulder and wrist), and better motor control, so you’re
more able to move your hand as necessary to keep rein tension constant (follow
the horse’s mouth). It’s genius, it works and I’m not here to argue against it.
Same scale with arm (glenohumeroid) more flexed and elbow
more extended, and look how far the hand has moved. Brilliant.
Elbows Out
What happens if we turn our elbows out? To
imitate this posture we’re both abducting the arm (moving it away from the
body) and rotating it so that the elbow swings forward. What happens then is the
shoulder and back muscles are stretched, opening the rib cage (pectoralis) and pulling
on your spine (rhomboid major). This also activates your core muscles (which include
spine stabilisers, diaphragm and the abdominals) to stabilise the spine and rib
cage.
Graph
for people that like graphs. Confusingly here negative adductions (to the left) mean movement
away from the body, which increases pull on pectoralis major.
Elbows
out is often used in “power poses” which are meant to give a confidence boost or psychological
lift and I suspect this is partly as a back widening effect, and also partly
as opening the ribs improves breathing, which in turn calms the physiological (fear)
response. I’m speculating here.
Sadly for any type of riding, soft hands are basically
everything and this posture definitely puts your soft hands at a disadvantage so this isn’t a recommendation.
Try now just moving your hands forward and back towards an imaginary horse’s
mouth in the elbows-out and elbows-in positions and feel the resistance that turning your elbows out causes. However personally I often adopt a “sit tall, elbows
out” posture for at least the first fence or two if I’m feeling nervous when I’m jumping,
and for me and my horses it helps. At my (low) level of refinement the thing that helps my hands the most is a stable core with relaxed arms so if turning my elbows out a little even just reminds me to do that then there’s another trick that I have.
Disclaimer
*
This is a real quick and dirty “I should be cooking dinner”
set of calculations based mostly on the musculo-skeletal modeller’s
perspective of the effects of turning out the elbows, not anyone’s actual reasons. Happy to hear more applied or considered thoughts. Also I’m not
really allowing for the full 3D aspects here and if there’s one
cardinal biomechanics rule it’s always be very, very careful if you’re not in
full 3D. It’s easy to measure and analyse things in 2D. Easy, and almost always
wrong. In this case I have looked in 3D but only in a static sense. Similarly in places I say shoulder joint, when I mean one or all of the four girdle joints, and so on, because let’s not get carried away here and hide behind confusing terminology in place of accuracy. If there’s
interest in this beyond my dinner-time musings I can always actually run some movement
data and model it properly!