07/26/2026
This from Ritter Dressage.
When I was young, I was very preoccupied with the form of my seat, partially because it was the common focus of seat lessons back then. We tried to achieve a certain look, or a certain form, even at the expense of becoming rigid or forcing our bodies into this form.
I also worried whether my torso was vertical or whether I was leaning forward, and whether my pelvis was rotated properly in the right direction. In lessons with my teachers at the time I found out that my body awareness was not a reliable indicator. Sometimes I felt straight, but I was actually leaning forward, or I thought I was rotating my pelvis, but the horse wasn’t bending or turning properly. In other words my body was not doing what I thought it was doing, which is a common problem, I think. My proprioception was like a measuring instrument that wasn’t calibrated properly.
Then I realised that my horses would always give me feedback on everything I did. Every time I changed anything in my seat, they would change. They would either get better or worse. It didn’t take long to notice that the horses would not necessarily go correctly when I thought that I was sitting correctly (“by the book”). So I started to experiment with my pelvis and torso in all 3 dimensions. I tried to ignore what my body was telling me and only to observe the horse’s gait and posture. Was he going freely forward, or rushing, or sucking back? Was he bending through his entire body, or was he only bending his neck, or was he counterbending? Was he on the bit and through the back, or was he inverted or curled up? Was the rein contact even on both sides, or was it heavier/harder on one side than the other? What changed if I changed my seat? And vice versa: sometimes the horse changed on his own. Then I asked myself: what did I do to deserve this? What changed in my seat in the 3-5 strides before the horse changed?
Through these experiments I was able to develop my seat into an effective tool for communication. There were many surprises along the way. I learned that I had to rotate my pelvis much more than I had thought in order to obtain a good bend. I had been too focused on sitting still and on invisible aids that I wasn’t moving enough with the horse. I remember situations in which I felt oddly twisted like a pretzel, but my horse was happy, on the bit, through the back, and bending.
Obviously, my body awareness was lying to me. After a few days the odd feeling went away and I felt normal when the horse was happy. That’s when I decided not to worry so much about how my seat felt to me, but to go only by the horse’s feedback. My new mantra became: Nobody cares how the rider feels. The only thing that matters is whether the horse feels good.
It also occurred to me that perhaps being objectively vertical or “straight” might be counterproductive in some situations because the horse and I are both asymmetrical, and we need to become functionally straight and balanced together as a unit. This could mean that sometimes I have to be off center in order to compensate for my own crookedness or the horse’s crookedness, or both.
