Buckle Up: Riding with Shorter or Longer Stirrups? Or Uneven Ones?

Training Your Horse

Shorter or longer stirrups? Well it depends.

It depends on your horse, your saddle, and which function you have in mind, whether you wish to sit more deeply, or perhaps sit lighter, in the direction of getting up to stand. Of course, this is all very dynamic and ever changing.

Finding the Ground
First let's look at some background. In the fourth century BC, Xenophon explained that a correct/classical dressage seat is “not that of a man seated on a chair, but rather the pose of a man standing upright with his legs apart,” so as to land on your feet and not your bum if the horse was removed.

Please click here to read the rest of the article as it appears on the Eurodressage website.