Mastering the Basics: The Seat Part 2-the Aids

The previous blog post covered the position of the seat. This is extremely important for developing a balanced seat that allows you to flow with the horse through the various movements. But how do we influence the horse and actually use this seat? After all, a pretty seat that we can’t use is not very helpful, is it?

Why They’re Called “Aids” Instead of “Cues”

When we talk about riding, we often talk about giving a horse an “aid” (or series of aids) for a movement. Why do we say that instead of cues? In dressage, what we do with our bodies is supposed to help the horse perform the movement, hence an “aid” to the movement. We give them aid so they can perform the movement more easily. This differs from “cue” in that it’s not so much of a command but is a request with support provided for that request. We can teach the horse a “cue,” like training dogs that “sit” means sit or “down” means lie down, etc., but giving a horse an “aid” works more in their native language rather than going for more conditioning that the word “canter” means canter. Of course, we do give horses cues at times (like voice-training a horse on the longe and using those cues under saddle when training to clarify an aid), but aids should be our primary means of communication when riding.

Basic Aid Principles

Before going into the specific aids, there are some basic principles. One of these is to only to give an aid briefly and come back to your neutral seat. Nothing in riding is fixed or static; no muscle or aid can be held for more than a few moments without creating tension. Instead, engage your muscles and deliver the aids like a pulse, contracting and relaxing like a heartbeat, timed to the horse’s inborn dance.

There’s also an adage: as little as possible, as much as necessary. Always start with the minimum and build up from there. Every time. Eventually, your horse will become sensitized to your aids. Remember: the aids need to explain to the horse what you want as clearly as you can, not punish the horse for misunderstanding.

Remember: do not let your aids become white noise. If your hand constantly moves, the horse will learn to ignore it. Same goes for the seat or the leg. Many riders develop the bad habit of constantly squeezing with the calf or picking up the heel and bumping the horse every step, and they have no idea they’re doing it! So be conscious of every element of your neutral and ensure it is truly silent, not full of white noise.

The Leg Aids

There are a myriad of leg aids, but there are a few basics that can help make work a lot easier. One principle I teach is that the knee and thigh govern the shoulders, the calf governs the hind end. Remember, like all things in riding, there are exceptions, but this is a good basic principle to use. This means that you can turn the horse with the knee and thigh or even use both knees and thighs to pick up the horse’s shoulders briefly. This also means you should not try to hold onto the horse by gripping with the knee and thigh, as you’ll be constantly cuing the horse and adding “white noise.” Remember from the previous post: most of the motion of riding should be absorbed by the hips. The leg aids should be delivered with a soft “hug-press” of the leg, immediately relaxing again.

The position of the leg has a powerful impact; leg back can shift our balance to help with the bend, while leg forward at the girth can help with more engagement. However, the whole leg should move from the hip, not just the lower leg from the knee. Hence the hips need to stay loose so the whole leg can move and stay free, or else you end up with a tense hip and heel up by the saddle pad.

Now, when using the leg aids, you must take care not to distort your seat into bad posture to make the leg work. So no raising the heel, no turning the knees out to get legs on stronger, and definitely no kicking! All those things just make the horse (and rider!) more tense. It is better to from soft leg to whip and spur than from soft leg to kicking and gripping with the leg.

The Rein Aids

There are also a myriad of rein aids, but here’s a short list of the most common ones on a snaffle bit (the curb and double bridle are different animals altogether). At the softer end of the spectrum, there’s squeezing the fist, namely the ring finger. The rein should be pinched between the thumb and the edge of the index finger. This allows the ring finger to relax within a closed fist and then to tighten within that closed fist. An open fist is not softer than a gently closed fist, as the hand has to work harder to close and can therefore be harsher (and leave you more at risk of finger injury if the horse snatches at the bit or trips and falls). If closing within the fist isn’t enough, you can flex your wrist, pointing your fingernails at your belly. Usually, this is used for brief flexions of the neck, not for “working” the bit. The hands should only work the bit enough to occasionally ask the tongue and jaw to soften, not to force it. Brief closings of one fist or the other can help gently massage and encourage the horse to relax, while quick movements back and forth just put tension into the neck and make the horse feel artificially soft. If the neck is tight, flexing it briefly and letting it come back to neutral can help the horse learn to let go of the tight muscles (but never an excessive amount of flexing… only occasionally, gently, and briefly). If your horse is out of control and you have to make it turn, bring your hand to your hip. Crossing the rein over the center of the neck is never effective in riding and just makes the horse tense in a different area. However, the outside rein can press against the neck without crossing; this can help with a physical touch in a different area to reinforce the thigh’s efforts to move the shoulders. In this way, western neck-reining makes an appearance in its dressage ancestor.

Remember, as a general guideline: the outside rein helps support the neck and dictate the length of the frame and degree of bend, the inside rein helps to keep the horse supple. That’s not to say flexion to the outside isn’t good and helpful; I do quite a bit of it for First Degree Bending (as taught by Karl Mikolka). But as a general guide, those are the purposes of each rein.

There are many other rein aids, such as giving, shaking the rein, elevating the rein, etc., but those are beyond the scope of this post.

The Seat Aids

There are probably millions of seat aids, many of them almost personal to each individual rider. It would take a whole book to cover all the potentials, but I’ll do my best to cover the top several.

Now, there is some overlap: the base of the seat is technically from the waist to the knees, so there is overlap between the leg aids and the seat aids, and it is hard for the seat to work without the legs getting involved to a certain extent, so remember: the seat aids are not just within the sitz bones.

One of the most important seat aids I’ve learned through mounted fencing is the volta stabile, or “stable turn.” This term is coined by Fiore di Liberi, 14th century knight and fencing master. If you want to read a fascinating manual on fighting with some personal anecdotes that make you say “This guy was a character,” read his Fior di Battaglia, which has been translated to English and can be read for free on Wiktenauer.com (Akademia Sziermierzy made a whole YouTube series illustrating some of Fiore’s stories). The volta stabile is a type of turn originating from the hips. By starting a turn at the hips, you make a more stable turning motion, both on the ground and on the horse. It feels a lot like turns when skiing or ice skating. The pelvis turns in the saddle toward the inside of the bend, supported by the outside leg gliding back from the hip, and the shoulders corkscrew further into this turn. The stirrups shift their weight distribution a little; the outside big toe helps to push the seat into the turn, while the inside little toe takes supportive weight so that the seat can stay level if not a little lighter in the inside sitz bone. In a way, you corkscrew up from the big toe to the inside armpit. Once you get used to this volta stabile, it makes turns and lateral work incredibly easier. I’ve had students who struggled for years to understand the shoulder-in practice this volta stabile on serpentines, and then when we go into shoulder-in, they suddenly can do it with very little effort. It makes flying changes and pirouettes so much easier to grasp and perform, and the horses generally love it and become super light and attuned to the aids. I can’t say enough how much the volta stabile revolutionized my riding and my teaching, and so I feel it is perhaps one of the most important seat aids.

Another area of overlap between the seat and other aids is the upper back. The upper back can act as a rein aid, or it can act as a weight aid (or both all at once). By bringing the shoulder blades closer together, the seat is more stabilized and the hand is lightened somewhat. This makes for a very refined aid that isn’t extremely difficult to grasp or learn and can help improve the seat.

“Bracing” the core is another seat aid. In this aid, the abdominal muscles and back muscles constrict like a corset briefly to slow the movement of the seat. If you pair this with the shoulder blades coming closer together, it is a wonderful “half-halt” (which is another topic for another day). Conversely, you can relax these muscles to allow the hips to move more flamboyantly and encourage bigger strides. Notice: I didn’t say to drive with the sitz bones. This can shut down the horse’s back and cause the opposite effect, and horses I’ve ridden that were schooled in such a manner often were stiff in the backs and were sometimes a bit “dull.”

Other aids include using the pelvic floor, lightening one part of the triangle of the seat or another, and even stirrup-stepping, but these are all much more tricky to do right and are beyond the scope of a blog post. However, I’ll finish this section to note what seat aids are not: “pile driving” with one or both sitz bones, “scooping” with the tail bone, dropping a shoulder into a movement, sitting behind the motion intentionally, or contorting the body to get the horse to do something (such as turning the hips left and shoulders right to get shoulder-in right). Not all of these are intentional false seat aids, but they should be watched out for nonetheless.

Artificial Aids: Spurs and Whips

Here are the aids that sometimes make people squirm. Technically considered the “artificial” aids, since they rely on tools instead of the rider, they are the source of much consternation, but they have a very valuable use when used correctly.

The whip is usually a long stick, traditionally made of birch or quince, carried in one hand (or both) and used on the horse’s flank (though occasionally the shoulder, top of the croup, or foreleg for Spanish Walk). This is a support to the leg aids. Remember: it is not there to beat the horse! It can be useful for slaughtering horseflies, but that’s the only violent use of the whip that there should be. Many hard-core classical riders still school with quince or birch whips, and when one breaks on a horse, it causes quite a few horrified looks and whispers (realizing it’s pretty easy to do… natural wood whips are fairly fragile). So, there is a very refined aspect to using the whip. I believe it was my first lesson with Karl Mikolka that I learned how refined that can be. The most refined aid is to simply touch the horse with the whip softly. The next step is to press the whip into the side. For many sensitive horses, this is enough. If you need more, jazz hands! You want to quickly vibrate the whip with the same movement that creates jazz hands (except with closed fists) so that the whip taps the horse quickly but softly. This takes a lot of practice, so I often have riders practice tapping their boots this way until they get the hang of it off the horse. The next step are more solid taps, and if none of this works (such as with a horse that is totally desensitized to the whip), the taps increase in strength until the horse responds. If it’s not responding to strong taps, there’s something wrong, maybe with equipment or with the horse’s back or even neck. Usually by the time you go from touch, press, vibrate, tap, to Tap, it’s rare you have to go to TAP or even WHACK!

The spurs are another source of consternation. However, they are a way that riders can refine their aids. There’s nothing quite like a soft spur aid to get the horse to lift the core and shift his weight. However, they are very easy to abuse and jab. This is why it is important to practice using the leg without turning it out or driving the heel up; you want to be intentional about using the spur, not unintentional. Spurs can be used unilaterally and in slightly different areas, such as for lateral movements (eg, if I’m riding a pirouette, I may use the outside spur slightly back to keep the hind leg from getting stuck and an inside spur close to the girth to keep the horse uphill). It is important to master basic leg aids before adding spurs, but remember that it is difficult to get to the level of refinement that spurs can give you.

In Conclusion

There are so many more aids we could uncover, but these are some of the basic principles of the aids. Remember: the aids only last for a breath, if even that long. Deliver them, then return to neutral. However, it’s okay to move around in the saddle a bit; if you’re rigid in your posture, you block the horse from being able to perform. Take your time to start with the lightest aids and then add from there. I’m working on an eBook that goes into greater detail about the aids, so please keep an eye out for that when it arrives! As you start to use these more refined aids with better understanding, you’ll find that you start developing that “Grand Prix” feeling in your horse no matter the level, and the level of refinement you may have only dreamed of can be within your reach.

-Emily Wright