Building a stronger seat through bareback sitting trot work

I have been riding for most of my life, but it took me a while to realise that the longest conversations I have about my own riding happen when Archie is tied up at the tie-up bays, munching on a net of lucerne while I scratch out the sweat marks under his saddle. More often than not those chats are about the bits that are not quite working. My core has always been the weak link. After a busy winter of cross-country training and a few heavy days at a regional event, I started to feel it in my lower back halfway through every test. A coach I trust suggested something I had been avoiding for years: practice sitting trot without a saddle.

That single change has reshaped how I ride, how I warm up, and what I expect from my own body in the warm months of an Australian eventing season. There is nothing glamorous about it. It is sweaty, unglamorous work in a sand arena under a blazing sun, often with the flies landing on the bit rings. But the gains have been real, and they have translated into cleaner transitions, a quieter contact, and a happier horse beneath me.

Why I left the saddle behind

The honest version is that I was tired of getting away with a weak core because the saddle was holding me up. The tree, the panels, the deep seat, the blocks on the flap, all of it does an enormous amount of work for the rider. Strip that away and you suddenly discover which muscles were actually firing and which were just leaning on leather.

Sitting trot without a saddle asks your pelvis to follow the horse's back through a three-beat rhythm. The movement is not huge, but it is repetitive, and it is the repetition that trains the deep stabilising muscles along the spine. Those are the muscles I want to be using in the show ring. I want them to be automatic, because in a moment of pressure on cross-country the last thing I want is to be thinking about my own posture.

A few years ago I had a young horse come back from a spell with a sore back, and my vet sent me some reading on joint health research that reminded me how much a young horse's skeleton is still forming. Sitting deeper, riding lighter, and protecting his back became more important than chasing a personal best. I came back to the bareback work soon after, and I have kept it in the routine ever since.

Setting up the work in the arena

I do most of this work in my home arena on a property just outside Scone, in the Upper Hunter Valley of New South Wales. The footing here is a mix of river sand and crusher dust, and I water the arena most evenings during summer to keep the dust down. When the temperature pushes past thirty-five in the arvo, I shift the session to first thing in the morning. The flies are still around but the bit rings are not so hot to touch.

I usually ride in a soft cotton halter with a lead rope as reins, or in a leather bridle if I want to work on the contact. The halter is easier for the early stages because I am not tempted to fiddle with the bit and I can focus entirely on my pelvis. A bareback pad is a good halfway step if you are nervous, but I prefer to ride on a folded numnah or directly on Archie's back. A folded sheepskin pad gives a bit of grip without sliding, and it washes easily after a sweaty session.

I keep the session short. Twenty minutes is plenty, and I would rather do three good ten-minute sessions across a week than one long slog that leaves me walking like a stiff-legged crocodile for two days afterwards.

The rhythm of the walk first

I never start a bareback session in trot. The walk is where I learn the horse's back, and where the horse learns mine. I spend at least five minutes on a long rein, just letting the movement come up through my seat bones. I think about the rise and fall of his barrel as he breathes, and I let my lower back soften rather than brace.

Once I feel a steady rhythm, I add some shoulder-in on the wall. This is where the Australian sun becomes a useful tool, because a long shadow on the arena surface gives me a line to follow when I do not have mirrors. I work on keeping my inside seat bone weighted and my outside seat bone light, then I ask for a few steps of half-pass across the diagonal. If I lose the rhythm I drop the rein and start again.

After that I add transitions within the pace, walk to medium walk to collected walk, and I count the footfalls out loud. Old trainers used to call this sitting to the rhythm, and it is just as useful now as it was fifty years ago. By the time the walk feels boring, I know my pelvis is working with Archie rather than against him.

Moving up into sitting trot

This is the part of the session where most riders reach for a saddle. I have learned to build it in layers. The first trot set is only four or five strides, on a twenty-metre circle, on the softest rein I can manage. I think about driving my heels down and letting my hip angle open and close with each stride. The goal is to let the pelvis absorb the movement, not to fight it.

When I started, I would grit my teeth, grip with my thighs, and bounce for about three strides before giving up. The breakthrough came when I let my lower leg hang long and quiet. I focused on the feeling of my seat bones making small circles on either side of the spine, rather than on trying to stay perfectly still. Sitting trot is not about stillness. It is about quiet, rhythmic absorption. Once I accepted that, the bouncing mostly stopped.

I work in sets of four or five strides, then walk on a long rein, then repeat. After two or three of these sets I usually feel my lower abdominals switch on. That deep ache is the feeling I am chasing. If the back of my neck starts to tighten, I stop and start again the next day. Pushing through with a clenched jaw is a fast route to bracing, and bracing is the opposite of what I want to teach my body.

Common mistakes and how I fix them

The first mistake is gripping with the knees. When my calves are tight my pelvis locks and my lower back starts to hollow. I think about wrapping my legs around Archie's barrel without squeezing, the way you would hold a child on your lap. Another cue I use is to lift my toes slightly so I am not pushing my heels down with force. Heels that are gently weighted come from a relaxed ankle, and a relaxed ankle is what allows the pelvis to move.

The second mistake is leaning back. I catch myself doing this when the trot feels too bouncy. The instinct is to brace against the movement, which puts the upper body behind the motion and puts Archie's hindlegs under more strain. I bring my sternum forward, think about a slight forward tilt from the hip, and let the movement carry me rather than push me.

The third mistake is doing too much too soon. I have a friend who tried to do a full forty-minute bareback session in her first week. She could barely walk down the stairs the next morning and was out of the saddle for a fortnight. It is a humbling exercise. The first month is really just a handful of minutes each session, and even now I treat a ten-minute block as a big effort.

Adding variety with poles and small hills

Once the basic sitting trot feels established, I like to add gentle variety. A row of four raised trot poles on a circle is a brilliant way to challenge the core without exhausting the horse. I set the poles about one and a half metres apart, walk Archie through them a few times so he understands the exercise, then ask for sitting trot. The slight lift over each pole makes the pelvis work harder, and it stops the session from becoming repetitive.

I am lucky to have a small hill on the back of the property. Long, low gradients are part of the Australian landscape, and they are brilliant for the final ten minutes of a bareback session. I ride straight up the hill in walk, balancing with my core rather than the reins. Then I come down, asking for a few steps of shoulder-fore to keep the shoulders straight. Downhill work is where I feel my lower back working the hardest, and it is also where I notice the biggest improvement in my cross-country position a few weeks later.

If the day is really stinking hot, I swap the hill for work on the long lines in the round yard, with Archie on a circle and me in the middle working on my own balance on a balance ball while I watch his trot. It is a different kind of core work, but the principle is the same. The muscles I use to sit quietly to Archie's trot are the same muscles I use to hold my own balance when life tries to throw me off.

What I have noticed after eight months

The change has been slow and steady. My coach at the Melbourne Three Day Event base at Werribee commented a few months ago that my midline looked different in warm-up, that I was less wobbly through the transitions. I do not notice it myself most days, but on the days I skip the bareback work for a week or two, the difference becomes obvious. My back aches sooner, my contact gets heavier, and Archie starts to hollow slightly.

I have also noticed changes in Archie. He has always been a sensitive type, and a rider who sits quietly with a soft back is a much nicer experience for him than a rider who pokes or grips. I think he works better in the arena because the connection is clearer. We are not eventing superstars, and I doubt we will be heading to Adelaide Horse Trials or anywhere fancy any time soon. We will probably be packing the float at some ungodly hour and heading off to a small interschool event at one of the regional pony clubs, the kind where the canteen runs out of sausage rolls by ten in the morning.

That, for me, is the point. Bareback sitting trot work is not a magic trick, and it is not a fad. It is a simple, dirt-cheap way to build the kind of core strength that makes every other part of riding easier. It works in a sand arena in the Hunter Valley, it works in a rented indoor school in outer Melbourne, and it works in a borrowed paddock while the kelpies bark at the crows. Wherever you ride, a few minutes a few times a week will change the way you sit, and that changes the way your horse goes.