How to Do a Posting Trot on a Horse

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Kelli on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you some tips and techniques that I use when I'm trotting and jogging my horse. So I'm going to move right to a posting trot. I would explain to you a little bit what that is before I go into it. So basically when your horse is outside, leg goes forward you are going to want to be coming up and sitting down with the horses motion. This is called the diagonal. If you are posting when the horse inside leg with forward, that would be on the wrong diagonal. So when this leg goes forward, we are going to come up and when it goes back we are going to sit down. So let me move her to a trot here so you can see it in motion. So we are going to move her a little bit more forward. When her outside leg goes forward we are coming up out of the saddle. We are looking where we want to go, we are keeping our posture nice and straight, keeping our hands nice and supple. We are rolling our knee in and using our calf. We don't want to have our legs out here posting off the steer up. So we are using our leg. You see that her outside leg is going forward so that is when I'm coming out of the saddle. Now when you want to change diagonal, you are going to want to sit for 2 beats, go the other way, trot to the opposite direction. So we want to be posting when her outside leg is coming forward. Change direction, sit for 2 beats, come up when her outside leg is going forward. It takes a little bit of practice to get use to the motion of the horse to be able to feel when your horse is, when you are at the right diagonal. It also come with practice. But again you are coming out of the saddle when the horse is going forward. So that is a posting trot."