Don’t worry about ‘heels down’. It’s not necessary. Bear with me…
What is traditionally correct is having your weight down, ideally into your lower leg and into your heel.
But the actual important thing is to have your knee down. If your weight is in your knee, and your knee is pushing down, then it doesn’t matter where your lower leg is.
I realize this might sound funny to just about everyone who has ever attempted to learn to ride, but you’ll find that it does work. This came to me in two very different ways: (1) by watching the best rider I’ve ever seen, show jumper John Whitaker, and (2) by injuring my psoas muscle on the left so badly that for about a year, I’d intermittently lose control over my lower leg while jumping.
If you watch videos of John Whitaker or even look at still photos of him, you’ll see his lower leg is often flying up the horse’s side. His knee is always down. He has the best balance of anyone I’ve ever seen on a horse, yet his lower leg is not what you’re taught in lessons.
I puzzled over the lower leg thing for years, until I had a bad crash and tore the crap out of my left psoas muscle. When it healed enough to jump again, I could keep my weight down in my knee, but my lower leg appeared to be independently owned and operated and not by me. My friends were horrified by my flying leg. I was surprisingly comfortable and balanced – so long as I had my knee down. Eventually, I got my lower leg under control, but from that point on, always focused on ‘knee down’ rather than ‘heel down.’
(A European coach I rode with also didn’t advocate heels down. For him, correct was weight on the ball of the foot on the iron.)
When I’m teaching beginners (or more experienced by kick-and-go type riders) who are learning to have a proper leg, I always go to knee down rather than heel down. ‘Heels down’ often makes them brace, which makes the leg rigid and useless when it really should be soft. ‘Knee down’ keeps the leg against the horse and helps keep the rider’s center of gravity with the horse.
When I explained all this to Mike Plumb, who’d overheard me telling someone ‘knee down’, he made some kind of typical-Mike caustic remark. But then a few weeks later, he was giving a lesson to a young teen who was having trouble with her leg and I heard him telling her to think about keeping her knee down. Ha!
So maybe don’t worry about the heels. Make sure the ankle is soft enough to be a shock absorber, make sure the weight is down into the knee and then into the lower leg. Maybe ankle flexibility exercises will help over time, but if your foot position isn’t affecting your balance on a horse, then it’s not really a problem, And if you’re worried about the #1 most important thing in horse riding – how good you look in pictures – then you can always take a deep breath and jam your heels down when someone’s pointing a camera at you.
