21/12/2025
Are your seat aids contradicting your rein and leg aids? It’s a common theme!
A rider should be able to change their weight aids easily, clearly but also almost invisibly to anyone watching. It’s the secret language between horse and rider- any great rider does many subtle things with their seat when they ride, subtle to to the onlooker but clear for the horse.
I see a lot of riders who don’t understand how to use their seat or do understand but are unaware that their pelvis is tilted so their weight aids aren’t clear. The latter being very common! They’re using their legs and reins to turn and move the horse, but their seat is often doing the complete opposite of what their hands and legs are telling the horse.
When that happens, riders end up using bigger and bigger aids with their hands and legs to compensate. The weight aids are contradicting the other aids. The horse gets confused, stops listening or just always turns to his preferred rein or direction of the gate! If you want to turn right, your weight needs to be in your right seat bone — not the left.
One of the easiest ways to do this at first is to slightly lift the outside seat bone, which helps stop you collapsing to the inside, then feel the horse drift in the direction of your weight.
If a rider’s pelvis looks like the picture, it becomes incredibly hard to use weight aids effectively, and the horse is left confused about where or how they’re meant to turn. Most riders have one seat bone that’s much easier to weight than the other- it’s very common.
Once riders start using their weight aids correctly, they’re usually shocked by how easily their horse follows — sometimes it feels almost effortless, like the horse is reading their mind. Practice this off your horse on a gym ball, foam roller or hard chair. Learn to move your pelvis and weight your seat bones independently, learn which seat bone you naturally weight more easily and you’ll find manoeuvring your horse becomes much easier.
