Lower leg position

Think of releasing your knee, and pointing it slightly away from the saddle at this stage. This will enable to you to bring your lower leg into contact, with the inside of the calf, which should wrap lightly round the sides and always stay there - it should not keep coming off the horse's side, which is what you so often see, particularly in rising trot, as the rider rises, the lower leg pings away from the side.

A good exercise to tone and strengthen calf muscles - you need strong calf muscles in order to have controlled legs - not to grip the horse like nutcrackers! - is to get a large beach ball, and place it between your calves, then squeeze, release your muscles, and repeat, etc.

Try using the strap across the D's as I suggested, and be so careful to let your hips be moved forward and back, as if on an arc.

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Back ache from riding

Your instructor may be trying to get you to force your lower leg back, which will make you overarch your lower back and cause strain. If your ponies are big enough for you to ride, I suggest that you practise riding without stirrups, let your whole leg hang down from the hip, and actually point your toes down, as if on ballet points. Hold that for around thirty seconds or so until you start to feel it pulling on your inner thigh muscles, then release - you should feel a stretch, but don't do it until you feel the burn, as they say, which will do you harm.

Just practise it in walk first, then try a few steps of sitting trot, and I mean a few! Then back to walk. This will help to realign you, but gently. The biggest problem is that most saddles pull you out of balance, and then cause you to find ways to compensate, which is not easy, and can often cause back problems. Most saddlers need to learn about riding, before they design the very tools that are supposed to assist, not hinder us!

I am glad that you have a seatbone saver, because this will enable you to sit closer to the pommel, and enable you to develop the ear/shoulder/hip/heel line of balance without doing your seatbones a mischief!

Good luck, and let me know if this helps

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On the Hackamore

I like the hackamore too, as many horses will go very happily and lightly in them, but they are every bit as severe and more so in uneducated hands, as any form of curb bit. Indeed, Alix Etherington, the leading expert on bits in the UK, whose father owns the bit manufacturers Abbey and John Dewsbury here in England, would not manufacture me even a milder one that I had designed, because she knows of several incidents where the horse has sustained a broken jaw as a result of misuse of the hackamore. As you say, any bit is only as mild as the hands that use it, but knowledge of how to use a curb, whether it is a Pelham, or Kimblewick as we call them here, is the key. The curb should never be used with leverage, and when the rider knows how to activate the reflex point in the lower jaw, it will achieve instant relaxation with no force whatsoever applied.

I have proven this time and time again when taking lecture demonstrations and clinics here and abroad, and am often presented with horses whose mouths have been abused in the snaffle, leaving the bars and corners of the mouths devoid of sensitivity. The riders all have resorted to sawing the horse's head down into place, because that is often what they have been taught to do. I can transform the horse's way of going in a couple of minutes, and have done it hundreds of times in public, so have proven that it works. What is more, I can put the rider back on board and teach them in minutes to achieve the relaxation, of the jaw, and then to back it up with the leg, so that the horse connects 'through'.

More often than not, the bit I will use to achieve this is the rubber Pelham, with only an elastic curb chain of the variety used by show ponies. You then have a mullen mouth bit, with no nutcracker action, and an elastic curb, which in the case of most horses will easily activate the reflex point. It is therefore a very mild bit indeed, and one in which the horse yields very easily, even with a comparatively inexperienced rider on board.

The snaffle bit is not the mild instrument that everyone thinks it is. The fatter the bit, the less damage that it will do, but often the less the horse will respond to it, making many riders use force to achieve the desired head carriage, which results in the front end being reeled in and the rider developing biceps like a prize fighter. I had two students here from a well known continental Grand Prix riders yard last year. The first had been told by him to take up weight training, as her arms weren't strong enough to hold the horses head in, the other had been told to take up a contact until she felt her arms were going to break, until the horse gave in and yielded. Not all will. These are the ones that I get to work with when they are standing up on end and going over backwards, or ones that I am asked to assess for the International League for the Protection of Horses, where they sometimes get £20,000 dressage horses who have been so brutalised that you can't even get on their backs.

Show riders how to use a mild curb with finesse, as my old trainer used to call it, and the horse will work willingly. Check out the review of my book by a rider from Florida on amazon.co.uk, who describes the transformation in her eighteen year old horse after putting him in the Pelham. I have instances like this on a weekly basis. Most often, you can put the horse back in the snaffle once he has easily understood the release of the lower jaw.

I have had few horses who object to the taste of rubber, and find more who dislike the very bland taste of plastic bits or have a tendency to chew the latter. I use a rubber covered bit with a metal core. I do not have trouble with horses chewing them, and if I did, I would not be stupid enough to persevere with making a horse go in anything that it was patently uncomfortable in, or was developing bad habits in.

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Cruelty in the horse world

Hopefully, through better education, we can start to shame the others who do think of the horse as a sort of four legged bicycle into the realisation that they are living, feeling , creatures. If we can start to educate riders at the bottom rung of the ladder, which is who Mike has aimed this site at, then it is bound to start to filter further up the pyramid.

I received a tape for one of my video lessons that I do for people, from someone who is coming for a workshop with me in October. She has two lovely ponies, has been an instructor herself and is desperate to learn to train and ride them in the humane, Classical way. So, for the last two years, she has had fortnightly lessons from a Classical teacher. I was shocked, deeply shocked, when I saw the riding taking place on this tape, even more so than when I found out who she had trained with. The poor pupil told me that she has given up having lessons, even now doubts whether she is fit to ride her pony out hacking.

She felt that she could no longer teach, regularly cried after her lessons because she could not believe that what she was being made to do was right.

This Classical instructor, had also told her that she wasn't strong enough, despite being a fit eight stone and five foot one, and advised her to take up weight training to increase her upper body and arm strength so that she could hold her horse together better. Now, I have heard this said by a top Grand Prix competition trainer in this country, but never would I have expected it to have come from this Classical trainer.

I am more than ever determined to set up this teaching foundation, whereby we can train other teachers in the 'Enlightened' way. And this poor woman who sent me her video will be one of the first ones invited to join us for the teaching course, if only I can get the funding.

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Position in rising trot?

The most important thing that you can teach any beginner is how to stay on. This is not achieved by saying 'Sit deeper', or 'Relax your lower back' or 'Go with the movement'. You might as well recite the Lord's Prayer in Outer Mongolian, for all it means to the average novice. It is perfectly possible to teach a beginner to sit to the trot, and rise to the trot in balance, in less than an hour, not by meaningless standard statements, but by showing them, hands on, exactly HOW to synchronise their movements with those of the horse.

In order to sit to the trot, try sitting on a stool for this exercise. Firstly, flex in your back so that your spine hollows in. Then straighten your spine again, so that it is flattened, not rounded out, just straight. This is the range of movement which allows the rider to absorb the movement of the horse.

The trot is a two time rhythm, so the back must be flexed in and out in the one, two rhythm of the trot. Essentially, by doing this, you are shortening your spine by flexing it in, the same amount that the horse's back rises, and by straightening it again, you are lengthening the spine again, by the same amount that the horse's back is falling- result? This is only part of the movement. Remember that the horse's back does not move as one piece, but in two halves. Your seatbones need to rise and fall individually with the two halves of the horse's back, just allowing them to do so, not making a conscious effort, which will result in you moving more than the horse.

So, on your stool, flex your lower back in (not too far) and at the same time, think of pushing your right hip bone a little more forward than the left. You will feel your seatbone rock onto it's front edge (your seatbones are shaped like the rockers of a rocking chair). Now straighten your spine again, allowing your hipbone to return to upright. Flex your back in again, and allow the left hipbone to advance a little. Then straighten the spine again. Now put it all together in sequence - do this counting , one. two, three four, repeatedly, flex in your spine, advance right hipbone, straighten spine, advance left hipbone, straighten spine, etc. etc.

Throughout, make sure that your ribcage is supported upwards, so that your upper torso remains completely still. I do borrow Sally Swift's analogy of imagining that you have a bungee rope attached to your head, so that you are stretched tall, but elasctically, not stiffly. In the way described above,you will be mirroring the horse's walk. If you imagine your legs attached to your seatbones, it will feel as if you are walking on your own two feet. Now move on to sitting trot. Same thing basically, only twice the speed. Count one, two instead, this time, and flex and straighten the spine and advance and level the hips in two time, not four.

When you go to try it on the horse, be aware of the feeling of your seatbones walking with the two halves of his back. Try sitting trot, but do only a few strides, probably no more than five or six at a time, before returning to walk. A beginner will not have the musculature or balance to maintain sitting trot for longer than this. Gradually build up to a couple more strides, and then a few more. The frequent transitions will improve the quality of the horse's trot, so that you will not in any case find it difficuolt to sit to. when the rider starts to bounce, the horse 'boards up his back in self defence' so that he will feel a bit like an animated ironing board!

In this way, you will learn to sit to the trot so that you are moving elegantly and imperceptibly as one unit with the horse. When riders are not taught the correct way to absorb the movement, they try to do various wriggles with the pelvis or whatever to enable them to stick on. if you are not in sync with the horse, it is like canoeing up a river against the current - with one big difference, it doesn't hurt the river, but it can damage the horse's back.