If you watch riders like my husband, Steffen Peters, or Guenter Seidel, Helen Langehanenberg or Ingrid Klimke, you’ll notice that their bodies seem to exactly match their horses’ movements. They move with their horses as a unit, as if their core structures are working together. That should be the goal for all of us. It’s our job to work with our conformation and that of our horses to find our core strength and balance in the saddle and maintain them every single time we ride.

In dressage, rider position and balance affect everything—the 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 more clear to your horse. But as anyone who rides knows, 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.

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 your 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.

In Part 1 of this two-part series, I’ll explain why sitting for too long can impede your position and provide mounted exercises that you can incorporate into every ride to loosen up your hips and lower back and to help you activate your core without overusing the wrong muscles. Plus, I’ll offer exercises and posture tips that you can practice out of the saddle to offset the time you spend at your desk.

Impediments to Correct Position

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: Their heads might be a bit forward or their core is collapsed and their shoulders rounded. 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.

Sitting for extended periods tightens your hip flexors, hamstrings and quadriceps—the very muscles you need to be flexible and supple in the saddle. When these muscles are in a contracted state for too long, it weakens the glute muscles, limits hip mobility and puts undue stress on the lower back. 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.

For dressage riders especially, working to adopt correct posture as a way of life can also go a long way in improving your position and ability to use your aids independently. If you have a desk job that requires you to sit for long periods of time, try the following:

• Be aware of your posture throughout the day to avoid slouching or crunching your neck while looking at your computer. (There are even “posture correctors” available that can help you maintain proper spine alignment while sitting or standing, such as the ShouldersBack® by EquiFit.)
• If possible, break up your day with exercise. If your gym is nearby or your office has workout facilities, sneak in a workout on your lunch break. Or simply go outside and take a walk. If you’re lucky and work from home, do a Pilates or yoga session (there are lots of free yoga and Pilates videos available on streaming apps).
• Stretch as much as possible!
• Yoga, yoga, yoga: You’ve heard it before, but yoga works miracles to help you stretch key muscles, tendons and ligaments and give your spine all of the twisting and stretching necessary for proper alignment and posture in the saddle.
• Participate in exercise “snacks”: Get up from your desk every 30 minutes and walk around for 3 to 5 minutes.
• Try a standing desk. Available in a wide variety of styles and price ranges, most standing desks are convertible, meaning they give you the option to stand or sit. When using a standing desk, however, make sure you don’t inadvertently lean into one hip or the other; try standing with a wider stance to make sure your weight is distributed evenly.
• Use an exercise ball for part of the day. Sitting on an exercise or stability ball while at your desk can improve your core strength and posture.

Exercise 1: Loosen Your Hips, Legs And Lower Back

Every day when I get on my first horse, I do an exercise that I also encourage my students to do. Most of us get in the saddle, put our feet in the stirrups and off we go to ride, not taking the time to recognize tension in the hips, legs and lower back. Try this to loosen those areas:

1. Sit in the saddle and drop your stirrups.

2. Draw your legs up and over the top of each side of your saddle, close to the pommel. From there, grab the pommel with one hand and the cantle with the other and pull your hips as close to the pommel as you can.

3. Let your legs drop back down against your horse’s sides. You will feel a big stretch in your hip flexors, psoas (the muscles that connect your lower back to the top of the thighs) and inner thigh muscles and, quite possibly, a lot of tightness the first few times you do it.

 4. Continue to feel your legs stretching down and try to find the three points of contact in your seat as you walk on a loose rein around the arena for 15 minutes.

The Importance of Engaging Your Core

The higher you move up the levels, the more core stability you need, but being able to separate the parts takes awareness. For instance, your legs and arms will try to balance what your core doesn’t balance. So when a rider has a core instability somewhere—it can be in the pelvis, the midsection, the upper chest or the upper back—it always affects what her arms and legs do. Once you have a strong base of support, your legs and arms can independently give an aid without your body pitching forward or back.

In her book Centered Riding, Sally Swift talks about the building blocks of an effective position. Being able to isolate the muscles in your lower and middle abdominals is key to maintaining proper alignment, as does being able to open your chest muscles and contract those of your upper back. Working toward balance and symmetry in these muscle groups leads to a rider who can use independent aids from supple hips and legs as well as soft rein aids from a balanced upper body.

Keeping your pelvis in balance in the saddle requires that you engage your core muscles, but for every rider that’s a very different feeling to attain because everyone has a different conformation and body type. 

When I walk off on my horses for a training session, I think about three areas:

1. My lower core muscles from my pubic bone to my belly button, which stabilize and allow my lower back to relax and absorb the horse’s movement and keep my pelvis engaged toward the pommel.

2. My middle core muscles between my belly button and sternum, which stabilize the midsection.

3. My sternum upward through the top of my head.

Exercise 2: Engaging Your Core

So what does it mean to engage your core? Every rider needs to find his or her deep core muscles without leaning back or bracing. Starting at the walk, try this exercise to attain the feeling of engaged abdominals and a neutral lower spine:

1. Find your neutral lower spine in the saddle by starting with the first exercise to loosen your hips, legs and lower back.

2. Engage your lower abdominals to feel as though there is a bungee cord pulling your hips toward the pommel, maintaining the feeling you just created with the leg exercise.

3. Without bracing, maintain that positive tension of the bungee cord in your lower abdominals. Then engage and lengthen your abdominals from your belly button to your sternum. I find this to be one of the more difficult things for most riders to do. You should feel like you are balancing your body toward your horse’s ears to create the feeling of going with his movement.

4.You should feel as if you could easily lift both legs off the sides of your horse while maintaining the correct abdominal posture.

5. This proper alignment of pelvis and spine should also create a rider that doesn’t clench her buttock muscles or grip with her legs or arms for balance.

Coming soon: In Part 2, we’ll look at how you can improve your leg position and develop soft, supple contact.

Thanks to Zoetis for our coverage of the 2026 FEI World Cup Finals. It includes lead-up events, rider interviews, competition reports, photos and more!

For More:

• Read more about our coverage of the 2026 FEI World Cup Finals in Forth Worth, Texas, here.
• To read more with Shannon Peters on Dressage Today, click 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.