Creating a checklist to start every ride will help improve both your position and balance before you ask your horse to work. In dressage, rider position and balance affect everything—your horse’s rhythm and tempo, his longitudinal and lateral balance and his willingness to go forward and come back. Being balanced in the saddle will also make your aids clearer to your horse.

But as we know, finding and keeping your balance on a living, breathing, moving animal is an enormous challenge. Some people compensate by hanging on to the reins or gripping with their legs or tightening with their back. The result? The horse is heavy; he won’t go forward or he won’t bend.

For almost as long as I’ve been riding, I’ve focused on my posture and balance. If my horse starts to get a bit heavy or gets behind my leg, I always go back to finding my position in the saddle and ask myself how I could sit better to help my horse’s balance.

To help me with this, I have a specific checklist that I go through for every ride. You can create one that works best for you and your horse, but my personal checklist is as follows:

• Is my base of support correct or have I collapsed forward or back?
• Are my lower abdominal muscles engaged enough to maintain the three-point contact?
• Do I feel a good connection in my second group of muscles that stabilize my base, which is from my belly button to the sternum?
• Is my sternum elevated softly so that my chest is open and my shoulders are softly back and down, connecting my elbows down to my hips, extending to soft lower arms?

At the beginning of every ride, go through your own personal checklist for the first few minutes to find your center of balance and connect your postural muscles. Once you’ve done this, you’ll start to feel how your horse is moving on any given day and notice the following:

• Is there a lack of swing through his rib cage or is he swinging more in one direction than the other?
• Do you feel tightness in your horse’s hips or shoulders?

A good walk around the arena on a loose rein with your feet out of the stirrups will show you so much before you even pick up the reins. This will help you formulate a plan for your warm-up to improve the suppleness of those areas you feel need attention that day. You’ll discover what you need to work on to balance your horse before you start working on more advanced exercises.

Train Your Body to Work With Your Horse

To become more effective riders, we have to look at the parts of our bodies that don’t move in harmony with the horse. Some of us have tight legs; others have tight lower backs, braced hips or rigid arms. All these issues inhibit the horse’s ability to move freely. I have a longer waist, so maintaining a neutral spine and not allowing my back to hollow when my horse loses his balance and comes against the contact is a challenge that I continually work on.

When I look at a horse and rider, I look at how they move together.

• Does some part of the rider look disconnected or imbalanced or does she interfere with the horse in some way?
• Is she sitting on her seat bones, and does the middle of her body stack above her hips?
• How do her legs drape around her horse?
• What about her head position?

I like to see a cohesiveness in the movements, that the joints in the horse’s body look like they’re working together with the joints in the rider’s body. Horse-and-rider combinations usually reflect one another’s dysfunction, so a horse with a tight back often has a rider with a tight back and/or hips. Or a horse that is pulling usually correlates to a lack of balance in the rider or the combination of horse/rider.

If a rider has a good seat, a good leg position and an engaged core, that rider is more likely to be effective. Riders sometimes try to find their balance by squeezing their legs or driving with their seat instead of allowing the horse to come up to them. You create expression, balance and suppleness in your horse through your good position and by not losing your place of balance in the saddle even if your horse loses his.

Your horse will always follow your weight. So if you’re sitting out of balance—for example, heavier on one seat bone or collapsed through your hip—the horse will generally follow your weight, no matter what your leg or hand may be telling him to do. It’s the job of the rider to communicate her aids clearly to the horse. And it’s the rider’s responsibility to know how much of an aid she is using and what the response is from the horse.

Correct Posture as a Way of Life

Many of my students work at desk jobs or drive long distances to get to the barn and it affects their position on the horse. It’s very difficult to sit correctly in the saddle if you’ve been sitting for a long time in front of a computer or behind the wheel and often results in your head being a bit forward, a collapsed core and rounded shoulders. Awareness of proper spinal alignment throughout the day is so important. It will help train the muscles you need in the saddle.

Strength training, Pilates, stretching and many other activities are absolutely beneficial to balance muscles that you over- or underuse when riding. Your core muscles can be strengthened outside of the saddle, but be mindful that you strengthen them in the saddle as well. Keeping a healthy balance of work in and out of the saddle will give you many years of comfortable, fun and effective riding and alleviate a lot of structural issues for you and your horse.

Takeaway Tips:

• Create a checklist at the beginning of each ride.
• Loosen your hips, legs and lower back at the start of your ride.
• Be aware of your posture throughout the day.

For More:

Check out “Dressage Position 101 With Shannon Peters” for her exercises to help loosen up your hips, legs and lower back at the start of every ride here.

About Shannon Peters

Shannon Peters is a popular clinician and teacher as well as coach to her husband, three-time dressage Olympian Steffen Peters. Shannon began riding and competing in Western and saddle seat in her native Michigan. College took her to Boulder, Colorado, where she developed a successful dressage training business before moving to San Diego in 2002. After Shannon married Steffen in 2004, the pair started SPeters Dressage in San Diego.

A USDF bronze, silver and gold medalist, Shannon is a three-time national championship competitor: on Luxor in 2007 when the two were crowned Reserve National Champions Intermediaire I; on Flor de Selva in 2009 when they took home fourth place in the Intermediaire division; and on Akiko Yamazaki’s Odyssey in 2011 after winning the Grand Prix Special at the Del Mar and Burbank CDIs in California. With Jen and Bruce Hlavacek’s Westphalian gelding, Weltino’s Magic, Shannon won Reserve National Champion in the 6-year-old division at the 2008 Markel/USEF Young Horse Championships, and Steffen won team and individual gold medals at the 2011 Pan Am Games in Guadalajara, Mexico.