Why you should relax those glutes when riding

There is so much to learn as a rider. If you don't concentrate on activating your core, you should relax your legs and shoulders. You should think about an active lapatuki (I have no idea what that is in English). When you finally relax those legs, you should pay attention to your pretty heavy head. When you at some point align your head with the rest of the body you will probably get some feedback on your unsteady hands. And if it is not those hands, you need to focus on your eyes and what kind of gaze you are working with (soft or strong). Not to mention the activation of the pelvic floor and what to do with your gluteal muscles, more commonly known as your but.

I easily activate my gluteal muscles when I ride. I have been thinking about it a lot but I have not been quite sure if I should activate my glutes when riding and if I should, how much should they be activated? Most of the time I am however completely unaware of how rigid I sometimes get when riding and a lot of the times the rigidity can not only been seen in the arms and legs but directly in the stiffness of my but.

Lately I have been working a lot on activating the pelvic floor while riding and it has been a great help for my seat. Today I went for my weekly Crossnature practice with fantastic personal trainer Anna Markelin early in the morning and we did an exercise where she asked us to activate the pelvic floor. I then asked her about the activation of the glutes and Anna said that once you activate the bum and it becomes very rigid, you might loose the activation in the pelvic floor. We also talked how important it would be to learn to activate the pelvic floor in riding while keeping the gluteal muscles relaxed. Once we get rigid in the bum we don't sink into the saddle but rather stay on top of the horse or get a bit up from the saddle as seen in the picture above.

Very interesting indeed. I am wondering how much of my rigidity comes from my legs and how much from my gluteal muscles in the picture. What do you think? And how do you feel the gluteal muscles affect your riding? Do you keep them relaxed or rigid? I would love to hear your thoughts on this in order to learn more.