"I put her in a circle at a steady, slow pace. try to sit on my seat bone, try to relax, try to breath, yet i bob, jiggle, shake, rattle and roll. Pretty embaressing that i can’t do this. HELP!!
Someone told me you need to round your back while keeping your legs long… is this right, does this make sense. Someone else told me your ankles should bob as you put the weight out of your stirrups and into your seat. Does that make sense…"
The above would not be a good way to learn to sit the trot. Especially not rounding your back, ‘sitting on your pockets’, ‘rolling your hips under’, etc. That turns you into a bowling ball in the saddle, and bowling balls don’t have shock absorbers, they just bang up and down. Your body only absorbs the motion if your back is in a normal position, and relaxed.
Don’t TRY to do anything, don’t TRY to make circles with your hips, don’t TRY to rolll your hips under, just sit on the horse and relax and let yourself be moved.
Not sure what your seat ‘bone’ is. There are two bony points toward the back of your ‘sit’, and there is the front of your ‘sit’ that’s near the pommel. Your weight should be evenly distributed - not too much on the front, not too much on the back of your ‘sit’.
I am not sure why you expect to learn to sit the trot without ‘bobbing’, and ‘jiggling’. That is normal. First you have to get loose and relaxed, then you worry about making it a little more smooth or elegant looking. If you try to do that too soon, before you’re really loose and soft, it won’t work.
You should be TRYING to flop and be loose and bounce up and down. Stop trying not to do that. Relax about it. Never worry about what you look like or what people think.
Many people who ride hunt seat don’t learn to sit the trot. As a hunt seat rider, you may have spent a long time in a hunt seat position, with a firmly braced lower leg and ankle, toes turned out, heels pushed way down, and ankle c0cked. Even at the walk and trot the position isn’t designed for sitting the trot. That is great for galloping and jumping, but interferes with sitting the trot.
The first thing is to loosen up. Drop your stirrups, loosen your leg up completely, drop your toes down if it helps, and try to get the side of your leg next to the horse, instead of the back of your leg. Let go your ankle and let everything move. I’m not sure who said this, maybe Bill Bond…‘try to find the saddle with your a**’, LOL. In other words, many people tend to hover over the saddle, or push themselves back up on the cantle away from the deepest point of the seat of the saddle, because they stiffen and brace in the stirrups. So ‘try to find the saddle with your a**’, LOL. The ‘sit like a jockey’ exercise can help if you really bring your knees way up above the saddle so they meet.
Don’t slow down your horse, not if you want to sit the trot for dressage. It makes it harder to sit, more ‘lumpy’ and more ‘two piece’ than one single rhythm, and it avoids the most important thing, which is to get so you don’t CARE if you bounce around, you just relax and go with it and get down into the saddle, instead of ontop of it.
I do miss the days of hunt seat riding, but ‘back in the day’, we spent an awful lot of time learning to sit the trot, riding without stirrups, and jumping without stirrups and without reins and being longed, and well, doing exercises that today are considered ‘only for dressage’. AH…back in the caveman days.
