Quick Tip Tuesday: Sitting or Standing?

What are we really doing?

When I first started out riding, one of the things commonly said was "You want to be balanced so that if the horse were pulled out from under you, you would land standing."  (As opposed to falling on your tushy!)

What I've really come to appreciate over the years is that we don't sit on the horse.
We stand around around it.

This is very similar to how you stand when you use a T bar or J bar at a sky resort.  It's also how those folks doing the 'Roman Riding' are getting about.  Those feet are dancing around underneath them and they still stay upright.

Accomplishing this requires enough 'structure' in the leg to remain upright and enough 'elasticity' in the joints to allow for uneven terrain under the foot.

While riding astride, there is a major difference, though.  The feet, hopefully, while mobile in space, are not on totally disconnected paths.  They are, hopefully, united as if they are on a teeter-totter so that they exactly mirror each other. 

On the horse, we don't plan to bend the joints (jamming your heel down will catapult you off the horse!) (So maybe don't do that.) Our legs and hip girdle encircle the horse like a belt that rotates at the same speed and distance (rate) as the horse's sides move. It would be like they are spray painted onto the horse and move with the horse's skin.

So as one foot goes up, the other goes down.  As one goes forward, the other goes backward.  As one swings left, the other swings left!  LOL!  The whole teeter totter goes left or right, so both feet would go left or right at the same time.  The teeter-totter doesn't shrink or grow in length.

If you have irons, this means your 'point of contact' with the horse will be the irons.  Some folks like them to be perpendicular to the sides of your feet; I like them at an angle.  Either way, you will want them below the bubbling spring.

If you haven't got irons, ie you're riding bareback on with a saddle pad, you would use the same point of contact only you'll have to keep track of it mentally.

And we use our leg joints differently than how we often practice riding when on the ground.

When on the horse, the joints - ankle, knee, hip, iliosacral, are *allowed* to open and close as necessitated by the horse's movement.  No more, no less.  We don't actively open or close them.

So if the horse takes a stumble or hop-skip, we can absorb it in those joints, leaving our body relatively unaffected.

This is true whether sitting, posting, half seat, two point, or jumping.  When 'sitting' we want our sit bones aimed at the ground, and, yes, they are touching the saddle, but we're not sitting on them.

Now you experiment with it! 

An exercise for finding this feel is:

• 4 strides posting -- this refreshes your body as you rotate through the other steps!
• 4 strides two-point or light-seat/half-seat 
• 4 strides, or as many as necessary, to find the elasticity in your joints to find your way to the horse's back
• initially -- as soon as, like immediately, you touch the saddle approximating a sitting position, post.
  ie. go back to the first step and cycle through these steps several times until:
• eventually 'sit' 1 stride, 2 strides, 3 strides, etc -- 'sitting' only as long as everything remains elastic and balanced.

When you've got it, you will feel your weight drip through heel.

Lynn

4/25/23