Hey all!
I have been riding my mare for almost a year now and we’re heading into show season. We completed our first show and although I’m really happy with our results we got reserve champ I want to be able to improve further. We had a few errors and it was all due to speed I was kicking her on the entire time she’s very slow and calm at shows she’s always been like this I want to be able to use spurs, my coach mentioned it to me but I don’t know if I have a good enough leg for that. How do you know if you have a still enough leg? Let me know your thoughts 
Trust your trainer.
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Spurs are a refinement, not an escalator.
First, teach your horse to go forward when you ask; right when you ask. Make her sensitive to the leg.
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Trust your trainer. We used to put baby spurs on kids with a loose leg (that nothing else had worked for, we’d tried everything but they just. weren’t aware). It taught them real quick to keep their leg still because otherwise they were going Mach 2 
Try the spurs, whatever ones your trainer wants. You’ll know really quickly if you’re irritating your horse - tail, ears, head toss, or scoot. You should have to consciously turn your toe out just a bit to activate the spur, it shouldn’t always be digging in.
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How about a crop or dressage whip, and then lessons on how to get her to move off promptly?
Hi @Kayla_3.
Due to my MS I have problems keeping my lower leg still in the heat of the summer. For many, many years my riding teacher would stop me, march on over, take my spurs off because I was irritating the horse, and I would be spurless until the weather cooled down.
Then I discovered the Spursuaders (http://www.spursuader.com. Once I started using these spurs many years ago my riding teacher has never taken off my spurs. The horses do not get anxious about my legs, they feel and obey my leg aids just fine, and I, the horse, and my riding teacher are much happier.
It would also help you to learn how to properly time your leg aids. The best book I have run into about timing of the aids (hand and legs in particular) is “Simplify Your Riding” by Wendy Murdoch. I do have a quibble about how she aids for the canter since her rational is for dressage riders (I ride hunt seat, for the canter I aid with my outside aid when I sit down when posting to the outside foreleg), but other than that minor quibble I agree with her timing of the aids.
It is truly amazing how much more responsive the lesson horses I ride are to my leg aids when I wear my Spursuaders, and it is even more amazing to me that my lower leg problems no longer irritate the horse unbearably. It also saves me a lot of energy when I just have to give my properly timed leg aid ONCE to get what I want.
