Anyone have tips for keeping your lower leg still at the posting trot (and toes pointed forward)? I saw a video of myself and my lower leg likes to move around a lot (mainly out and in). i do a lot of no stirrups already and i don’t think my leg moves around as much.
Strength and practice. Maybe ask on the hunter jumper forum as they certainly seem to have the knack 
whereas dressage riders are more likely to have floppy legs.
If you are spurring at each step your legs will be busy. Also maybe it’s easier to keep them still with shorter stirrups?
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Maybe think of kneeling in the saddle and posting off your leg? The H/J’s keep the lower leg still through putting the heel down with weight in the stirrup and lower leg against the horse, which is great for security over jumps, but not so great for dressage.
Stiff dressage boots can help if you really have an issue. Keep in mind though, that the ankle joint acts as a shock absorber, so some movement should be expected. If your toes are turning out, the problem is more likely in your hips, and just manifesting in the lower leg.
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Put more “tone” in the back of your knee and your ankle by “flexing” so as not to be floppy. You can feel if you are doing it by putting your hand behind your knee and feeling the ligament tighten like a rope would if pulled more taught and less slack. It will pop out a bit. If you cannot feel it, have someone put her hand behind your ankle, and you put your hand behind your knee, and you pull your lpwer leg back against her hand at your ankle.you will then feel it in your knee.
as far as the toes pointing forward, check your hips. Google hip flexor/quad/psoas and you will find simple tests to see if you are too tight. You can fix this by literally rotating inward at the hips, but this is a temp fix, and being able to do it consistently isn’t a quick fix but will take care work consistently to develop over time but can be simulated by rotating inward every ride throughout.
I would strongly suggest riding with a good biomechanics clinician or doing some googling on the subject, too. Getting a body position adjustment to an ideal position is key, and riding in that position every ride is key.
The motion of the relaxed, floppy dressage leg and rider is a misnomer. The muscle tone is there and it’s the muscle tone being in the sweet spot that allows the rider to look solid on the horse and be effective. Loosey goosey is not the goal. Some of us have less tone naturally than others and have to work to create tone after being told “legs should drape like a wet towel.” No, for some of us that means they will have the floppiness of a wet towel which is entirely ineffective.
one more thing-your horse really needs to be in front of your leg/responsive. If you are having to ask with your leg every stride for maintenance of a gait, that’s too much. Each ask by you should result in a change, so if that isn’t happening, you will be chasing your horse constantly with your leg. Stop, recalibrate his responsiveness, then continue on and don’t get sucked into believing it’s your job to keep him moving. If your legs have been too floppy, he might be a bit dull to them. That might not be the end of the world until you get it figured out :).
One more thing, sorry. Imagine that there is a steel bar that goes from one knee to the other, through the saddle in the horse, and holds your knees steady.
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Spend a little time each day in two point, it will strengthen your legs. Start with a very little time;), then build up.
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Nice advice about getting the right muscle tone-- not too little, not too much. And the two-point can help, too. But I’d modify that a tad.
Also, IME, the swinging leg comes from a stiff knee. It can be hard to feel when you are going that. What can help you figure out how to put the right amount of hold vs relaxation in your knee is to alternate posting and two-point. Heck ride around switching between posting, sitting and a deep, soft two-point until you figure out how to have the same leg from the middle of your femur down.
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Are you certain you are properly balanced in your saddle? At the walk, try standing straight up. If you fall forward or back, either your saddle isn’t balanced right or you’re posting either ahead or behind the motion.
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It starts with the rider being in the correct balance in the saddle, which means that the saddle must be correctly balanced on the horse…and the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone etc, etc
Shoulder, hip, heel.
If you know somebody who owns an adjustable saddle, borrow it. Then play around with the gullet width until you find a perfect balance point. When you do it is such a solid place that you feel bionic !
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My left leg has a tendency to move forward and flop. Working with a good bio-mechanics trainer has resolved so much for me. Most of us are one-sided, so it could be a number of things, hip flexors, position in saddle, one leg shorter than the other, etc… Lots of good advice here!
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Without seeing a video, I am going to just provide a few tips I tried when I had the same problem
- Toes in - still a big problem for me. On wide barrel horses, it is nearly impossible for me to get my toes in. I am a petite person and the hip angle is just too hard because my thigh muscles are too tight. On really narrow horses, it is significantly easier for me to keep my toes pointed forward. I do a lot of hip flexor, upper and lower leg stretches. If I don’t stretch 5x/week or if I skip a week, I can feel how tight my muscles become.
I also have two bad ankles, so that really doesn’t help my case (1 broken that had screws added then removed & the other with severely torn ligaments). I did a PEMF treatment on my broken ankle and didn’t treat my right ankle to do my own test case and amazingly, my left toes pointed forward and I finally rode without pain! It was wonderful.
- Legs moving - I had this problem too. No matter what I did, I could not keep my legs still. My biggest solution? I finally bought my first saddle in 15+ years that actually fit me. The stirrup bar placement allowed my leg to finally be underneath my seat so if I put weight in my heels, my heels go down and not forward (like a chair position).
Then, I had to work on rebalancing myself in the saddle. How I post now is so much different than how I have posted my entire life. When I post up, I now put more weight in my stirrups, but not necessarily my heels. If my horse were to randomly disappear from me, I should be balanced in the saddle that I would land on my feet. If I put too much weight in my heels, I would fall backwards if the horse disappeared. It isn’t necessarily “standing”, but I also don’t pitch, balance, or post from my knees or thighs either. When I changed how I posted, I am not posting as “high” off the saddle either. In videos, you can see the difference in my posting from before and after.
This also helps with my toes forward too
I also think of trying to give a leg aid with my shin (the front of my leg). When I do that, I’m actually giving a leg aid with my calf and not my heel. That was my biggest learning mistake growing up. People would tell me to use my inside “leg” but I would use my heel. When I use my heel, my toe points out, my heels actually come up, and I don’t have any weight in my stirrup.
I also now think of keeping my calf on my horse at all times. But, the “pressure” can vary. This is still a work in progress, but this is what everyone meant by “keep your legs wrapped around your horse like a wet towel” or whatever. It never made sense to me until I physically put my hands under my trainer’s boots and felt the pressure, then she would do the same to my boots so I could get an idea of what I was trying to do. Now, when I give a leg aid, my leg is there and ready to do its job. Instead, I would try to keep my leg “off” the horse, since I thought that’s what you did to reward the horses. Except, it created more problems. This, in the end, also made my leg steadier because if I needed to give an aid, you couldn’t see it since it looks like my leg isn’t moving, since it wasn’t. I just changed the amount of pressure.
It has taken me almost a year to figure that out, but that was after I spent 6+ months stretching several times a week at home, at work (I have a standing desk with a half foam roller), and stretching on the horse during warm-up. And I still haven’t perfected it Sometimes I revert back to my old habits if my horse is acting up, so I’m trying to make it second nature so I can’t stop thinking about it.
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Legs sliding forward and back is something that can be fixed, but legs going in and out is mostly a function of the width of the horse and where the widest point of the barrel hits your leg.
You can stretch your hip flexors and the outside of your hips, but if the widest point is below the knee, there’s nothing really you can do to keep your legs in if you have stirrups since the stirrups create a pivot. You could try putting less weight in your stirrups when you post, or changing the length of the stirrups.
I have the same issue on only my horse as well as floppy feet in the sitting trot. Any other horses that are smaller or the widest point of the barrel is higher on me, I don’t have the issue at all.
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When you say your leg moves mostly “out and in” are you referring to a lower leg that moves rhythmically with each stride? From your description, it doesn’t sound like a “floppy leg” since it’s happening when you’re posting.
One of my students struggled with this for a long time… her lower leg below the knee, would swing like a pendulum with every stride when posting. It created a lot of “noise” and the horse couldn’t hear her aids through all the leg movement, so the horse just tuned her out. Consequently, she had a really difficult time getting the horse forward.
She struggled with trying to force herself to stop swinging her leg because she couldn’t even feel that she was doing it. And while I understand quite a bit about biomechanics in riding, I had difficulty narrowing down where it was originating. Movement in one place can often be a symptom of a problem somewhere else.
It wasn’t until I purposely tried to “recreate” the pendulum leg in my own riding that I was able to pinpoint the cause of the problem. As soon as I pinched in my knee, my lower leg started swinging like a pendulum. Voila!!
I’m not sure if this is the cause for you, but you may want to consider it. As soon as my student understood the cause, it was a lightbulb moment in her riding. And while her leg is still not 100% quiet, she has made marked improvement and she also now has the awareness to be able to work on it.
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Wobbly-legged rider here. It’s sort of my obsession.
Shorten stirrups, but not too much. Strengthen your legs, work on core stability.
This is my huge ah-ha moment that I’ve been working on around the bad weather lately. I’ve noticed that when I sit the trot, my legs position themselves better. They seem to go into the correct position, whereas in posting trot, my leg goes too far back and I’m not able to pivot off my knee correctly. So I’ve been starting my trot sitting then switching to the posting trot and trying to maintain that correct position and it has helped A LOT. Like my trainer has stopped yelling at me about my floppy legs.
I still need to work on strengthening my legs and abs more though. Really, it just takes a lot of time in the saddle, and a lot of time out of the saddle working on fitness.
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this was my lightbulb moment this year too! I never thought I was gripping with my knees and thighs until I found a trainer who broke it all down for me. I’ve worked really hard at retraining my body to open my hips and thighs while maintaining contact with the inside upper calf. Its a lot of hard work but looking at video from 12 months ago really confirms that it is slowly paying off. I used to post ‘out of my heels’ - every stride my heels would go up and down, so to prevent this I would grit my teeth and lock my leg down. Which would only create a stiff, unyielding leg so my horse stopped moving forward. It really illustrated how much our bodies influence our horses!
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If your horse is quiet and safe, but your feet in your stirrups backwards…heels in, feet clear in front(normally you put your foot in forwards into the stirrup…sorry not easy to explain!). Just walking even will show you a different muscle usage in order for your to keep your heels in the stirrups. Go to trotting when you can walk without losing them, etc.
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thanks everyone, I will try these tips. I have been trying to just set my mind to fixing it and pointing my toes in but it can be tough, especially when doing other things. I think it kind of looks like I am spurring my horse with every trot step :(. It has happened with a large WB I’m leasing and a small but wide horse/pony that I leased last year. I am wondering if my saddle is playing a part (its a county innovation) but I hesistate to buy another saddle since I am only leasing horses.
