01/04/2022
Answer time!
What’s wrong with this rider and how would you fix it….
This is just a sketch, so obviously my intent is a factor here.
Some mentioned uneven stirrups- great point! But when people ride with uneven stirrups it’s USUALLY because they keep losing one, it FEELS long, so they shorten it. (DON’T DO THAT!!)
This rider‘s right hip is higher than the left hip. This causes the right leg to scrunch up. This is SO COMMON!!!
And I know, I know, rider is technically in the middle of the saddle, however, The best way to correct this problem is to scooch over to the right, high centering the left seat bone in the middle of the saddle, and then dropping the right seat bone down into the hole. When I tell people to do this, they initially feel like they are falling off to the right. Sorry, but get over it. Lol and if you were doing this on your own, just know that I usually tell students six or seven times to, “do it more,… exaggerate more, even more,… yup, further to the right, keep going,…” but when you are used to riding with one hip higher than the other one, it takes a lot to undo that muscle memory!!! The goal is not to get your seat bones even during this ride. The goal is to fix your body so that you have complete mastery over your seat bones, and that requires some serious exaggeration.
It’s just like when we supple really green horses by bending, and leg yielding, and counter bending, and bending some more. By the time those horses are approaching second level we are then working on straightness. But you can’t have true straightness until you have suppleness. It is the same for the Rider.
Once I get writers to really actually put the left seat bone in the middle of the saddle and drop the right seat bone down into the hole this position creates, suddenly they feel strong in the right leg, their right heel finally drops down, they can finally bend the horse to the right, and they can, usually for the first time in their lives, actually leg yield a horse successfully to the left.
We do all of this over positioning while traveling to the right. When going to the left, often their default position is just fine. But some riders need to scooch over to the left while going left, just not as dramatically (assuming the problem is their right seat bone is chronically high like in the sketch)
Dressage is not the art of sitting perfectly straight on a perfectly straight horse- it’s sitting however you need to in order to train the horse’s body, and your own! EVENTUALLY things get pretty even, but when we just try to get even, we typically skip the supple part. We skip the awareness part. We skip the part where we are actually effective!!!
And if your right stirrup feels long, for Pete’s sake, don’t just shorten it. That will just compound your crookedness.
A truly great way to double check this on your own is to drop the outside stirrup and post with only the inside one. The rider in the sketch would find this easy to the left and very difficult to the right. 
