Join the club, if you find you are having difficulty with sitting when your horse is on the trot. All too many riders who are getting trained in the sitting trot face problems maintaining their seat. Lots of these riders have learned the hard way that their seat bones often fail to be where they should be: on the saddle. In actual fact you can start to learn to sit the trot amazingly if you try out some simple tricks. The results are likely to be fast.

To start with, let’s redefine the word ‘sit’ in the context of the trot. Many riders presume this word indicates passivity. They’re wrong. You are not meant to sit like a brass Laughing Buddha while on the sitting trot. You can enhance your position a heap if you change your idea of the sitting trot: think of it as a process that actively involves you, too.

Poor sitting trots feed on themselves and degenerate further with time. The whole problem starts with the down movement. The ride fails to stay in rhythm with the horse; he begins to drop into the saddle as the saddle starts its journey back up. The result is a clashing reunion of rider seat and saddle. A pony subject to that sort of impact has a tendency to stiffen up. He will collapse his back, and when a pony does this, the trot becomes a gait that’s impossible to sit.

You can properly sit the trot just when you learn how to closely follow your saddle’s up and back down movements. This task is all the more challenging because you want to learn how to do it on your seat bones.

The positive side of the entire thing is that you don’t need to put your horse to any trouble while you get yourself tuned into sitting trots. Take it out on a tough chair of wood instead. Sit on the chair with your face to its back, and ensure that the chair is in contact with both of your seat bones. Tighten and loosen each of the seat bones alternatively, so that one seat bone is up when the other is down. If you find you’re not able to do this, you most likely have puny muscles in your butt; though it is also possible that your hips and your back could be too tight. You can bring this area of your anatomy to full strength and suppleness with some stretching, yoga or pilates.

Once you are finished with the chair, it is back to your pony. Sit straight, your back should be straight up over your hips and your seat. Follow your horse’s movement with one seat bone at a time. Don’t curve your back, and keep your hips soft and flexible to enable you to follow your horse’s movement closely. If you have correctly aligned your body, your legs should be well relaxed with the impact being cushioned by your in time motion.

Horses are Heather Toms passion and she enjoys sharing her extensive knowledge through her 100s of articles with other horse lovers, like all things about western apparel