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Holding the feet in the stirrups varies depending on the style of riding and the height of the rider. Adjust the stirrups appropriately with help from a riding instructor in this series on horseback riding.
Hi, my name is Lisa, and I'm an instructor at Enterprise Farms, and today I'm going to talk a little bit about how to properly hold your foot in the stirrup iron. So, the first thing we should talk about is stirrup length. For our standard flatwork, I usually keep the iron so that it hits at the ankle bone. For dressage, which is, it's another flatwork discipline, but they like to do longer leg position, and so you would have your stirrup irons longer down to the base of your foot, or it depends on how extreme of the position you're going to be doing. For other positions, like hunter jumping, and disciplines where you do like stadium jumping where you have a more compact seating position, you want to have your stirrup irons higher so they would actually be even above your ankle bone. You want to think of, like, jockeys because they're going quickly, things like that. So, depending on your discipline judges your stirrup length. As far as holding your foot in the iron, you want to keep your, the iron right on the balls of your heels or balls of your feet, excuse me and right where the crease in your boot would be usually is a good way to tell. And the reason why we, you don't want to ever be locked into a stirrup iron because it's really just for support and to, while you're riding but you always want to be able to get away if you get into trouble and like just kick the heels out and go. As you can see here, I have this, this is called a breakaway iron and the reason why we use that, it's a safety equipment that we use for novice riders who don't have the most stable seat yet and it's because it's designed to break away in case of an emergency because we want our equipment to break before we want our riders to break. But, you will see with more advanced riders using a solid iron. Other than that, that's basically everything you would want to think about with heel position and keeping a nice solid leg position is going to keep us locked into the saddle, really strong foundation, the legs are our foundation of equitation and that's what's going to make for the happiest, most secure and safest ride.
