The Invention of the Forward Seat — Or Why Showjumpers Do The Thing
So, if you watch people jump horses, you will see that they fold forward over the horse’s neck (side note, the leg position in that photo isn’t very good).
Why do we do this?
It’s Relatively Recent
It used to be that riders were taught to sit back when jumping so as to take strain off of the horse’s front legs, and they would keep the reins tight.
This didn’t work very well for several reasons:
- It was impossible not to pull the horse in the mouth over every fence. Sooner or later this would make the horse decide to stop jumping altogether.
- Your center of gravity was too far back, interfering with the way the horse’s back arches over the jump.
Basically, these riders were making the horse’s job unnecessarily hard and potentially painful.
Then came Federico Caprilli, who was an Italian cavalry officer living in the second half of the nineteenth century. He looked at the way people did things, and went “This isn’t working.”
He looked at how horses jump without the interference of rider or tack and designed the forward seat. On the flat, when riding in the forward seat, you are positioned a little more forward than a…