Where's your leg?

Good evening, everyone. How are you all?

Today I wanted to talk to you about exercises to improve your leg position. I am the sort of rider who typically has a lot of issues in getting my legs to stay in the proper position. They move too far forwards, they wiggle and back when I was first learning to canter they flapped around quite a bit too! I was and still am far away from the control elite riders demonstrate, but over my years of riding I have realised that there are lots of little exercises that can be done to improve my leg position. I've opted to focus on three in this post. They've really helped me improve my equitation and I hope that they will be able to help you too.

The first and perhaps most obvious exercise is riding without stirrups. I know, I know. It's not the most pleasant thing in the world, especially if you have a particularly bouncy horse, but it does work wonders. If you can open your pelvis up then you'll be sitting deeper in the saddle (and there's no harm in having a more secure seat. Yes, Snip, I'm thinking of you!) and your encouraging your legs to hang long. By swinging your legs backwards and forwards from your knee and then hip, or by catching your ankle and pushing your knee downwards, you're loosening up all your joints and stretching your leg muscles. That's why when you take your stirrups back, you quite feel as though they can go down a hole or two. More importantly, your leg is more likely to fall naturally into the position its supposed to be in. I could go into a great level of detail about all the different mini-exercises within riding without stirrups, but I think I'll make that into a separate blog post at some point.

If its a sneakily rising heel that is getting you in trouble with your instructor, then the second bit of advice I would give to you is to stand on the bottom step of a flight of stairs, with your balls of your feet against the edge. Once in position, push your heels downwards. You can do this one leg at a time or both at the same time. It's really whatever you feel comfortable with. You don't need to do it for long, but doing this daily will encourage stretching and hopefully you're heels will start to stay in a more appropriate place. If this still isn't helping you keep your heels down, then I have this other piece of advice which my instructor told me a year or so ago and has helped me greatly; rather than imagining a weight in your heels to keep them down, imagine that there is something connected to the front of your boot pulling your toes up. It sounds strange at first, but try it and I think you'll be surprised!

The third pearl of wisdom I will share is this; stand up in the stirrups. This is, without doubt, the exercise that has made the biggest difference for me. This is perhaps partly due to the minor conditioning of the previous two finally encouraging my heel to stay down, but standing up in the stirrups is what has really made a different to the placement of my leg in  its entirety. I'll be the first to admit that I have very little balance, but it is completely fine to use a neck strap/chunk of mane in helping you stay upright. By walking around whilst standing up, and throwing in a few transitions up to and down from trot for good measure, some sort of magic occurs and you'll find your legs are naturally in the correct position. This happened to me a few weeks ago, and I was absolutely thrilled because I felt like I could ride reasonably well (for those of you who have problems with riding position, I'm sure you'll understand!). The absolute best part of this exercise, for me at least, is that my legs were still automatically moving to the right position a month later!

If you have any exercises, please let me know! I'm always looking to improve my riding and if your technique is particularly inspired, I may include it (with credit, of course) to the future blog post about non-stirrup riding exercises.

Until next time,
EquiHolly