Teaching Students to Post the Trot:
Part One

It took me forever to learn how to post. I think I spent six lessons flopping around like a sack of potatoes on my poor lesson horse’s back before I finally grasped the concept.

Shh. Don’t tell anyone.

I’m in good company, though, and posting is one area in which many riders have difficulty early on in their careers. Later, if they haven’t learned to post properly, this issue can follow them the rest of their riding lives.

If you have been teaching riding lessons for any length of time, you know how difficult it is to teach students how to post. It’s extremely hard to explain and even harder to translate into practice.

Where My Riding Instructor Failed

I didn’t have the best riding instructor when I first started taking lessons. She was a college student just trying to pick up some extra cash, and she wasn’t exactly devoted to her students.

Now that I’m a riding instructor myself, I know where she went wrong in teaching me to post. Rather than starting from the ground up and showing me the logistics of posting, she just sent me off at the trot and hoped for the best.

Not the best way to teach.

I’ve discovered that teaching students to post is much easier if you start at the walk rather than the trot—in fact, I recommend starting at the halt with you by the student’s side. Otherwise, many riders will learn to post incorrectly, which is almost as bad as not learning to do it at all.

Function Follows Form

Students will often try to post from their feet in the stirrups, which will lead to rising and falling in the saddle but won’t lead to correct posting. It is imperative that you teach students how to post from the legs and core rather than from the balls of the feet.

Stand next to your student and have him stand up in his stirrups using his feet. His knees will straighten and his back will be bowed slightly backward as he tries to maintain his balance. Explain that this is not the way to post, and that doing so will result in instability.

Let him sit back down again, then have him grip the saddle firmly with the insides of his thighs and drop his stirrups. Then tell him to lift himself out of the saddle using those muscles instead.

Make sure he realizes that this is still not a correct post, but that it’s closer than standing up in the stirrups. We just want him to feel the difference.

Ask him to sit back down again and take back his stirrups.

This time, we want him to use the outer thigh muscles to post at the halt or walk. We want him to tighten his butt muscles as he lifts himself out of the saddle, then to sit gently back down with his outer thigh muscles remaining taut.

This is a correct post, and he should be able to feel the difference.

Your job as a riding instructor is to show students how to do things correctly from the very beginning. This is difficult at a trot when the student is fighting for balance as well as correct technique. Teaching students to post at the halt and walk will remove the confusing aspect and let them focus on style.

Look for Part Two of this article next week on teaching students to post on the correct diagonal.

You might also like:

1. Teaching Students to Post on the Correct Diagonal
2. Teaching Students to Sit the Trot
3. Teaching Your Students to
   Mount and Dismount
4. Teaching Your Students to Mount and Dismount
5. Teaching Students Proper Balance

About the Author: Laura Jane Thompson is the Chief Equestrian Officer of Riding Instructor University and the Feature writer for the horses section at Suite101. She believes that any horse business can succeed provided its owner practices smart strategy.

Tagged as: diagonal, post, riding instruction, riding instructors, riding lessons, teaching students, trot