hello a question. what are beginner horse riders tending to sit on if not their butts? why do they need to be so frequently reminded to sit on their butts?
Because they don’t! Most humans have DOGSHIT POSTURE and are EMBARRASSING and GHASTLY TO BEHOLD.
The natural instinct of the Untutored Monkey in Distress is to tip forward shambolically, clinging to the ancestral tree, like a bereft shrimp. This is the unhandsome posture in which people answer emails, sit upon fellow-creatures, and, regrettably, attempt to flirt.
It is clearly mildly frustrating for any horse to tolerate this clinging-to-the-neck behaviour. In addition to the lack of decorum, you’re forcing their neck to hold your bodyweight. They can’t hear your signals and you are constricting their movement, like a child who accepts a piggyback ride, and then throttles you.
Correct posture, I’ll quickly remind us all, is SHOULDERS OVER HIPS. The weight of your upper body should be balanced through the spine which means OVER THE HIPS, you horrid shrimp. 🦐
This posture is so rare, and so alien to basic humans, that it feels like a synthetic adjustment. Many untutored humans genuinely struggle to connect their body with this instruction. A rider in a position of calm connection feels - to a common lay person of poor posture - to be leaning backwards.
So riding instructors say: sit on your sitbones. Lean BACK. Sit on your BUM.
It’s like the common riding instruction to put your heels down. in truth, the correct posture for hunt seat and other active disciplines is flat-footed. You have to scream “heels down” to get the Average Body to assemble their skeleton into a connected, responsive posture that will feel INCREDIBLY artificial to them - but the “correct” pose isn’t “heels down”!
