I mean there are professional jockeys and show riders who must be doing *something* at a very high level, but I honestly don’t understand what. Like if I’m riding a horse that’s jumping over a fence, isn’t that all the horse? And I just need to not fall off?
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You’d be surprised at how difficult it is to hold onto a moving horse. For starters, the reins do nothing for keeping you on – that’s for guiding the horse. It’s all in the legs, and they get real tired, real quick. You *can* just sit there like a sack of potatoes, but your butt’s gonna hurt a lot more. So you need to use your stirrups to move *with* the horse up and down. There is the pommel of the saddle you can use to steady yourself if needed, but you can’t rely on it and you unless you’re being led, you need to let go of the pommel. And all of this assumes, of course, that you’re using a saddle and that the saddle is on correctly. Bareback is even harder because you don’t have stirrups – you may have reins or not, depending on the whole situation. If you don’t have reins, you don’t have a lot of choice in whether the horse decides to listen to you tugging their mane or kicking their side. But a skilled horse can absolutely control their horse without saddle or bridle, using their knees to indicate turns.
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