Your back is not the problem. Your back is the one paying for it.

Riding asks for something genuinely unusual, and it's worth naming precisely, because the precision is where the fix lives.

You need a pelvis that follows the horse. An upper body that stays quiet and independent of it. Legs doing a third thing entirely. All of it in rotation, all of it asymmetric, all of it responding to an animal that has its own opinions about the next four seconds.

Now consider what "core strengthening" usually means. Planks. Crunches. Something on the floor, facing up, holding still. Every one of those trains your trunk to resist movement. You have just spent an hour needing yours to absorb it, in three planes, while remaining relaxed.

There is nothing wrong with a plank. It just answers a question nobody on a horse is being asked.

What I look for first with riders is hip rotation, and it is very often the thing that has gone without anybody noticing — because a rider is fit, and fitness lets you hold a compensation for a long time before it complains. The back is the loudest structure in the chain, so the back is what you feel. It's seldom where it started.

The groundwork lives in the hip and glute work and balance and control. The clinical detail, if the back is the part that's shouting, is in chronic back pain.

If you've come off, there are two separate things to deal with and only one of them tends to get an appointment.

The first is whatever the tissue actually did, and that gets assessed, imaged and treated. The second is that your nervous system has now met the ground at speed and has updated its file accordingly. That second one shows up as guarding, as a seat that won't soften, as a body that braces a quarter-second before it needs to. It is not nervousness and it is not something to be talked out of. It's a protective response doing exactly its job, on information that is now out of date.

Changing it takes graded exposure to the specific demands of riding — on the ground first, where the variables are yours to set. That work is most of what Cognitive Functional Therapy is for, and it's described properly in how the method works.

Sessions are 60 minutes for the first assessment, then 45 to 60 one-on-one with me at 1800 Glenarm Place downtown. If what you have needs a physician before it needs me, I'll say so in the first half hour.

So the sport is rotational and asymmetric and responsive, and the preparation everyone recommends for it is symmetrical, still, and on the floor. Once you've seen that mismatch it's difficult to look at a plank the same way — which I'm aware is an inconvenient thing to have done to your Tuesday routine, and I'd apologise except that it's true.

Anyway. You know it now.