Clinic Report: Suzanne Galdun

By Meghan Gantz

This article was nominated for the 2025 GMO Newsletter Awards for first person experience articles for GMOs with 75-174 members. It appeared in the North Woods Dressage Association newsletter, The Accent, June 2025.

Over the winter, I had the good fortune to ride not once, but twice, with rider biomechanics expert Suzanne Galdun. The clinics took place in November and January at Spring Hill Farm in Duluth, where I lease Leah Nelson’s 16-year-old Fresian Sporthorse mare, Elessar. As is common with dressage, I learned a great deal from some seemingly simple, straightforward concepts. We are very grateful to Suzanne for braving our cold winter more than once to come and teach us, and for making learning so fun and easy. Thank you also to our clinic organizer, Leah Nelson of Sweetwater Equestrian and Spring Hill Farm, for hosting such great events!

To start, Suzanne takes a good amount of time with each rider to assess them as they sit on the horse after warming up. The first things she noticed about me were the very things I was hoping to work on! First, I have a slight anterior pelvic tilt. If you aren’t familiar with this, imagine your pelvis as a bowl holding water. Ideally, your bowl of water would sit level and no liquid would tip out of it. Many people, however, have an anterior (forward) tilt, meaning the front of the bowl tips down, allowing water to slosh out the front. Some degree of this is pretty normal, and good posture and strengthening can go a long way to correct it, but one consequence of this slight forward tilt is that my lower back tends to want to hollow. To counteract this, Suzanne had me visualize an imaginary diagonal line between my sternum (breastbone) at the front of my chest, down through my torso to my sacroiliac (S.I.) joints, which are the joints where your hip bones (ilium) attach to the left and right sides of your sacrum (a triangular bone in the center of your back between your spine and tailbone). In my relaxed state, the imaginary line in my body prefers to be long and therefore more vertical. Suzanne challenged me to press outward with my low back and forward with my sternum so the imaginary diagonal line could shorten and become more horizontal. The image of a front placket of buttons pointing toward a braid midway down the horse’s neck was helpful in remembering to push forward with my sternum.

By instituting these small and seemingly minute changes, my abs were able to fire much more effectively. Another way to view this change was that I needed to focus on keeping my pubic bone forward enough that my pelvis not be in an anterior tilt, while simultaneously keeping my sternum over the pubic bone. Another helpful image Suzanne gave me was to imagine the shape of a diamond; within it, the pubic bone at the front, the seat bones at either side, and at the back, the tailbone. She said to imagine pulling that diamond forward in the tack using the muscles of the pelvic floor. To help me with keeping my low back in check, she had me imagine a buckle on the central belt loops on the back of my breeches and to press against it. Along with that great visual, she instructed me to pull my tummy wall deep and to breathe behind it. I have to admit, it sometimes feels like rubbing your belly and patting your head to do all this while maneuvering a half-ton horse, but the visuals truly are the key to synthesizing the information and applying it!

After a bit of assessment at the trot, Suzanne had me halt Elessar and place both legs in front of the saddle, just as you would if someone were changing the length of your stirrups—which, surprise—Suzanne did! It is in this position, with femurs horizontal and lower legs hanging vertically, that I actually begin some rides in order to find a more neutral placement for my pelvis. From there, I can drape my legs down while maintaining the pelvis placement. After shortening my stirrups a hole, Suzanne assessed my legs by moving them around as they hung down naturally. To give you a bit of context, I have hip pain on both sides, but especially on the right. A couple years back, I discovered that I had a labral tear, an injury where the ring of cartilage around the hip socket is torn. When I met with a surgeon about having it repaired, I was told that a full hip replacement was likely going to be the best course of action for me, since there were a lot of issues with my actual hip joint (impingement, ball not fitting properly in the socket, cam defect, bone cyst — it’s a lemon, really). Still being in my thirties, I was hesitant to take such a drastic measure at my age, so I tried alternatives. In the end, I found that the best thing for me was a whole lot of physical therapy and strengthening, and thankfully, to keep riding! While Suzanne moved my left leg around, she asked whether my hip pain was limited to my right hip (it isn’t). She could tell that my adductor muscles in the inside/back of the thigh were really trying to hang on and grip the horse due to weakness in my “front line.” Moving to the right leg, she could feel that my calf was quite strong but there was not enough recruitment of said front line, which left the back line holding on, resulting in tension in the front of the hip.

Suzanne, who turns out to be a wizard, was able to quickly connect the dots between my hip issues and positional weaknesses, and concluded that I needed my quads to be firing more. She suggested doing a squat and lifting the toes to become acquainted with the
feeling. She stressed the importance of the leg (meaning from the knee down) being far enough back, and to imagine that I was kneeling while also rotating my thighs inward and pointing my kneecaps to the ground. I still had a bit of a busy lower leg, so she had me imagine rotating each knee toward the opposite ear of the horse. That must have been the ticket, because my lower leg quieted instantly. Another great visual used in the world of Mary Wanless is to imagine yourself riding, when suddenly, the horse is removed from the picture. If you were dropped from above in the position you just had on the horse, would you land on your face, your behind, or would you be stable enough to land on your feet? Hot tip—it’s the last one—you want to land on your feet!

Back at the trot, Suzanne checked in with me on where I felt my seat bones. I reported that my right one felt further away from the horse’s spine than the left; Suzanne agreed, and noticing that my pelvis was pointed slightly left, she asked that I point it slightly right. She had me envision my belt buckle positioned slightly to the right of center, or to imagine tightening a corset positioned between the belly button and right point of hip, hopefully activating my transverse abs. Suzanne has no shortage of effective images—she said another way to think of it was to imagine moving my right back pocket closer to my spine. That imagery immediately resulted in Elessar becoming more round. The most effective visual I got from the first clinic was to imagine the sides of my pelvis as the wheels of a Segway. My right “wheel” (meaning the right hip and right side of my pelvis) are positioned in a way that is not “on-line.” The back edge of this make-believe wheel had fallen back and away, resulting in the front edge pointing too far inward. For me, shortening the distance between my belly button and right point of hip helps me to get the front of the wheel back on track, whereas thinking about my back right pocket being closer to my spine helps me in aligning the back of the “wheel.” As a result of this work, my instructor, Leah, noticed that my tendency to balance and over-position with my left hand had vanished, as I was finally working with my right side more “on-line.” Sorcery, right? Nope. Somehow, just biomechanics.

The canter work in both clinics went fairly well; I was able to effectively hinge at the S.I. joints and keep my hips moving front to back versus side-to-side, even while moving sideways such as with half pass. In the first clinic, we worked on turns on the haunches, which required me to really focus on turning the horse around the inside seat bone while keeping energy moving forward with my front line. Translation: abs of steel, sternum over pubic bone, quads on fire, and feeling as though I could ask for the canter at any moment. To complicate things further, since the horse can’t create force between itself and the ground like it can in other gaits, we must do our best to create it within ourselves. The walk is challenging since it has no moment of suspension—in other words, there’s always a hoof on the ground. However, we can try to create forward energy by harnessing the engagement and activity of the horses’s hindquarters while maintaining cadence. My goal was keeping tabs on my right seat bone while also keeping energy moving forward. It helped for me to imagine I was pushing a shopping cart forward, while at the same time envisioning each hand pulling upward on an imaginary rubber band (I visualize the band passing under the horse’s belly like a girth and up into the hands). This upward and forward movement of energy was reinforced by engaging my lats. I had been keeping my hands low in a misguided attempt at keeping the horse round, when instead, it was more beneficial for me to lift and give more in the contact. In the second clinic in January, we explored the same concept on a twenty meter circle while shortening the reins from a free walk. Elessar will sometimes invert her neck when I pick up the contact from a free walk, taking the neck from forward and down to backward and upward—cute—I know. She also has a tendency to want to jig in that transition. It felt paradoxical to me, but it helped to shift my energy from the back of my body to the front while imagining her back going up and forward over her withers. I once again had to really focus on keeping my hands and wrists up and in front of me while also pushing them toward the bit. Meanwhile, it was important to stay bent at the elbow and to draw my shoulder blades together and down — hello again, lats!

I didn’t get a chance to work on much between the two clinics due to a months-long RA flare, but to my amazement, Suzanne remarked at the second clinic that I was much more stable and consistently organized than I’d been a couple of months prior. I’ll take it! There was still a need for some pelvis rotation to the right, so Suzanne had me imagine my leg as that of a Barbie doll (in the way that they can pop in and out), and had me push my thigh deeper into my pelvis—it resulted in immediate improvement. She also tried a different approach with the issue of the right hip, where instead of focusing on the problem-hip, I’d focus on aiming the left point of hip more to the right, using the analogy of flashlights pointing forward to guide me. Another concept we discussed was the “torso box” in which I imagine my top half as a rectangular box. Another way to imagine it was that I had four rebar rods dropped through my body at the front and back corners of my shoulders, like four pilons. It was important that my torso box stay stacked and level, even when rotating my body, such as in lateral movements. As we alternated between shoulder-in and renvers on the long side, I worked to keep my shoulder blades drawn in and down while anchoring whichever pilon I needed most. Even though my focus was on the inside hind-outside rein connection, sometimes my inside back “rebar” would try to let up.

I can’t tell you how helpful all of Suzanne’s imagery has been to me—it was amazing to have her eye, as well as her insight, to help me become a better partner for the lovely Elessar — because isn’t that what it’s all about?