Looking for advice on keeping my hands steadier! I’ve picked up a bad habit of my hands posting with me after a hiatus from riding, and desperately want to fix them. Any specific exercises or tools are appreciated, I got a grab strap for my saddle to warm up with my hands on it but it’s a bit low, and have tried a neck strap but found it tricky to get the positioning/grip on it right since I was just using an old stirrup leather. TIA!
thumbs on top, elbows in and touch your knuckles together. This makes you use your core better!
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Imagine your hips posting THROUGH your hands.
As you get stronger this will be easier.
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Bridge your reins or use a very small crop under your thumbs. I had a 9" one for this purpose. I have also heard using a spare bit to help. I never did that one.
Then really focus on them for 2 to 5 mins a ride to change your muscle memory. Then focus on your core off of the horse. Yoga really helped my hands.
Ride in someone’s old pickup down dirt roads/train tracks/corn fields with a mug of hot coffee in each hand. You’ll learn very quickly what it feels like when your hands have to move independently from your body 
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Hands that “post” usually means locked elbows. Work on softening your elbows and keeping them low and “attached” to your pelvis - close to your ribcage but breathing. Elbows should softly open and close as you post, and they can only do that if they are unlocked.
Mary Wanless has this imagery lesson: Visualize bungee cords attached from the inside of your elbows to the top of your pelvis; your elbows should breathe and softly open and close as you post, but should not lock or get too far from your rib cage. This often happens when shoulders are locked forward with tension and chest is slightly collapsed; elbows poke out and are tight. Bringing your sternum up and your collar bones apart will allow your shoulder blades to softly drop down, with elbows hanging softly right in front of the top of the pelvis, but don’t arch your back and lock your elbows and shoulders down!
Imagine you are holding a tray of dishes in front of you (but with thumbs in top); this will stabilize your core, keep your elbows down, and keep your hands in front of you and carried. As mentioned above, allow your pelvis to go between your elbows as you post.
The stronger your core and the more flexible your ribcage, the easier it will be to do this!
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As above. Remember you have elbows.At the rising trot they can stay fairly stationary if you’re rising properly coming up and forward through your whole pelvis.
In sitting trot with every stride your elbows still stay soft and givey.
At walk and canter your arms and hands have a bigger follow of the head.so your elbows still close to your sides,but moving back and forth, have to work harder.
Plastic champagne glasses full of water can be most helpful to remind to you to keep thumbs up and give.
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This can be practiced while sitting in a chair. Sit a bit relaxed in the chair, letting your seatbones fall into the chair. Yes, this will put into a chair seat which you don’t want while in the saddle, but the chair exercise will help you develop muscle memory for how your ARMS are supposed to work when in the saddle. (And it will help you develop strength and muscle memory in your core and pelvic muscles.)
Hold your arms as though you are holding reins - upper arms alongside your body, elbows close to your ribcage, hands in front with thumbs on top. Keep your entire arm soft and relaxed as tension will cause you to tighten and make it physically impossible to do the exercise correctly.
Then, using your core and pelvic muscles, lift your pelvis up and forward almost as though you are posting but keep your seat in contact with the chair. Keep your elbow softly attached to your ribcage (envision that elastic band or bungee cord connecting elbow to ribcage or point of your hip). Do not allow your hands to rise up as your seat rises but rather to follow the motion FORWARD - not throwing away your hands, but keeping the “elastic” attachment through your forearms to your elbows to your ribcage or hip.
I learned this tip from someone who had studied for a while with the guru of body movement, Eckart Meyners, and it did help me when I became a re-rider some years back.
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Pilates, barre, yoga… Anything that improves your core and independent use of arms/hands.
Start carrying trays with glasses of water on them around the house to learn to use your arm as a shock absorber.
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Hands are the result of what your shoulders are doing, via what your core is doing, believe it or not. Shoulder function is a result of how strong your core is. Hands are a function of how well your shoulders are functioning.
A weak core either cause you to use your arms to brace and pull, or it causes you to stiffen your core in an effort to be more stable which then removes the suppleness of your arms and therefore your hands.
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If you have access to an Equicube, it’s magic for this.
Otherwise a longer neck strap or a piece of mane to hold while you practice opening and closing the elbows. Are you a desk jockey and have tight shoulders? If so that’s where it’s coming from. I have the tight shoulders so have to compensate with softer elbows. Cause I just can’t get my shoulders to slide down and relax.
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Try putting your pinkies under the saddle pad. Or - get two grab straps, attach the end of each one to the d ring on either side…then each strap is long enough to hold on to
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IMO, quietness comes from developing communication in a more gross manner than the end product. Let your joints know that they are able to move by making large flexions/changes of bend/moving the shoulders around to learn HOW your hands coordinate with your legs. Make these bends/flexions (gasp) starting with your arms - so your entire arm on the bend side will move back from the shoulder and elbow. Then, add your leg. Once comfortable with that, change back to (correctly!) asking for a change of bend/balance with leg first, then hand. Do this in all 3 gaits plus (especially) posting trot.
If you stick with the gross bending/moving the shoulders about for a while without worrying about what your outside rein is doing or how ‘quiet’ your hands are, as you come back to correct amount of bend supported by leg, you’ll find you’re carrying your hands instead of trying to keep them quiet.
There is nothing worse for making disruptive hands than focusing on keeping them quiet. All the tension that goes into worrying about them causes stress which causes physical tension which causes joints to stop working properly.
Think about ballet. It takes time to develop the ability to balance on one set of toes. That is not developed by repeatedly standing on the toes while concentrating on balancing. The balance to do so is developed through slow, purposeful movement that develops the strength and suppleness required to balance.
Other exercises that will help are if you can be longed on your horse or if you can ride with one hand - arm circles, torso twists, shoulder circles, hands on shoulders, etc. When you can do them all smoothly at all gaits, you’re on your way to having broken the connection between balancing your torso and using your arms. Once that’s done, your body will allow you to feel what your arms and hands are doing and the balance you have developed will allow you to make corrections to your arms and hands.
It’s all less about being still or quiet and much more about better developing balance and learning to make large smooth movements that will modify down to hands that are able to listen and communicate.
One random thing that helped me was standing by a table or counter, holding on to the edge of the table with my thumb on the top, then raising myself up and down (squat a little, stand on toes, whatever to get an up and down motion) and feel how I needed to have my elbows and how it felt to let them open and close softly. Probably looks dumb, but was a huge eye opener to what still hands and giving elbows can feel like.
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Even better, if you can secure a resistance tube/band at hand height, and sit on an unstable surface like a yoga ball. See if you can “post” while keeping only a light tension on the resistance tube. Practice giving it forward at different times in your posting, both hands, and each hand independently. You can also advance to kneeling on the yoga ball. It takes long time to be able to get to posting motion while kneeling, but just the kneeling really trains your body to correct balance through the core muscles, and then you can work on independent hand/arm control around that. Standing on the flat side of a Bosu ball and doing similar exercises, like small squats holding a light weight in front of you, etc.
I’ve been doing the Dressage Rider Training series the past couple years, and one thing she works on, which has really helped my stability, is the diagonalizing strength movements - like from yoga “cow” position, extending one arm and the opposite leg would be one example. I found that I had muscles in my upper legs, glutes and core that had to learn to fire because they were basically turned off and letting muscles around them do all the work. Now that they are more active, everything is working better, which, as others have noted above, leads to quiet hands.
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One exercise that really helped unlock my elbows and shoulders was to simply bridge the reins in my outside hand and let my inside hand just hang down. Hold the reins in front of and above the withers. Now just trot and canter around like that. This prevented me from balancing on the reins and really gave me a feel for steady contact through relaxed upper body and a soft following seat. It’s just an immediate tension reliever. Plus you have to steer with seat and legs.
Another fun one is to alternate two-point and sitting canter to practice maintaining the exact same contact.
Both these exercises are fun, build relaxation, balance and an independent seat and encourage soft contact. As a bonus, you can do them on your own.
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Have your trainer put a whip across both hands and post with it without dropping it. Helps with prioperception.
Core strength- not just planks, side planks. They suck.
Body work on shoulders and arms.
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I try to warm up like this every ride. Stops me from fussing and nit picking and over bending and all the other things not conducive to a good warm up, and lets my horse enjoy a stable contact.
It shows how much of my hand motion/signaling is entirely unnecessary, too. A stable contact the width of their mouth, and add leg. Boom, it comes together.
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