Rising Trot Made Simple: How to Find Your Rhythm

Rising trot is the moment riding stops being something that happens to you and becomes something you do with the horse. You rise out of the saddle on one beat of the trot and sit softly on the next, so instead of absorbing every bounce you move in rhythm with your horse. It is a timing skill far more than a strength skill, and once the rhythm clicks it becomes the trot you use for warming up, hacking, schooling young horses and covering ground for the rest of your riding life.

This guide covers how rising trot works, what the research says about its effect on your horse's back, the British Dressage and FEI rules on rising in a test, a step-by-step method, trot diagonals and why they matter, the faults that hold riders back and the exercises that fix them. If you want the wider picture of the gait first, start with our beginner's guide to horse trotting.

What Is Rising Trot?

The trot is a two-beat gait. The horse moves its legs in diagonal pairs, left fore with right hind and then right fore with left hind, with a brief moment of suspension between each pair. Every time a diagonal pair pushes off, the horse's back throws you upwards. Sit through all of that and you feel two bumps in every stride.

In rising trot you use that thrust instead of fighting it. You sit while one diagonal pair of legs is on the ground, rise as that pair pushes off, and stand lightly in the stirrups while the other pair carries the weight. You are in the saddle for one beat of every stride and out of it for the other. Rising trot and posting trot are the same technique: "rising" is the British term and "posting" the American one.

The idea beginners most often miss is that the horse supplies the lift. Your job is to allow it, direct it forward and control the way you come back down. Horse and rider coach Sally Ede describes this as matching the thrust of the hind leg: "As the horse's inside hind leg leaves the ground, so does the rider commence her rise." If you try to haul yourself up with your legs, you will always be late.

Rising Trot vs Sitting Trot: What the Research Shows

Riders have long assumed rising trot is easier on the horse's back than sitting trot. That assumption has now been measured, and the answer is "mostly yes, with a catch".

Lower Peak Forces on the Horse's Back

Patricia de Cocq and colleagues at Wageningen University calculated the force between rider and horse from the movement of 13 riders' centre of mass (de Cocq et al., Journal of Biomechanics 2010, PMID 19926088). The average force was the same in both styles and matched the rider's body weight, as it must. But each stride produced two force peaks, and both were significantly lower in rising trot: 2.54 against 2.92 times the rider's body weight for the first peak, and 1.95 against 3.03 for the second. The authors conclude that this "supports the general assumption that rising trot is less demanding for the horse than sitting trot".

A Vienna team put one experienced rider on 10 sound horses on a treadmill, with a pressure mat under a well-fitting dressage saddle (Peham et al., The Veterinary Journal 2010, PMID 19428275). The highest load on the back came in sitting trot (2,112 N), a little less in rising trot (2,056 N) and the least in a two-point seat (1,688 N). The rider was also steadier front to back in rising trot than in sitting trot.

The Catch: The Back Still Extends

An earlier study by the same Wageningen group filmed 12 horses trotting without a rider and then ridden by one rider in rising trot and in sitting trot (de Cocq et al., Equine Veterinary Journal 2009, PMID 19642400). In rising trot the back flexed no further than it did with no rider at all, but it reached the same maximum extension as in sitting trot, bent more from side to side, and the horses carried their heads lower. The authors' conclusion is blunt: "As the same maximal extension of the back is reached during rising and sitting trot, there is no reason to believe that rising trot was less challenging for the back."

The two halves of a rising stride are not equal either. With three horses and one rider, Martin et al. (Journal of Biomechanics 2016, PMID 26947029) found saddle pressure rose by 3.1 kPa while the rider sat compared with while the rider stood, and movement of the back under the saddle was reduced during the sitting phase.

Standing up does not make the load disappear; it moves into the stirrups. Van Beek et al. (The Veterinary Journal 2012, PMID 22100209) fitted force sensors to the stirrups for five horses and 23 riders. The higher stirrup peak was 1.17 times the rider's body weight in rising trot, during the standing phase, against 0.45 in sitting trot.

What It Means for Your Riding

Rising trot lowers the peak forces on your horse's back and gives you a steadier seat, which is why it suits warming up, young or unfit horses and long spells of trot. It is not a free pass. A rider who lands heavily, gets left behind the movement or rises unevenly hands much of that advantage back, and the back still works hard in both styles. How well you rise matters as much as the decision to rise.

It is easier on you too. Mason and Greig (Journal of Sport Rehabilitation 2020, PMID 31899890) fitted accelerometers at the neck and lower back of 21 dressage riders. Loading rose in the order walk, rising trot, canter, sitting trot, so sitting trot loaded riders' spines the most of the four. When you are ready to sit, our sitting trot guide picks up where this one leaves off.

When to Use Rising Trot

Rising trot is not just a beginner's stage you grow out of. Good riders use it every day. It is the natural choice for:

• Warming up and cooling down, before you ask your horse to carry you in sitting trot and after hard work.
• Hacking and long stretches of trot, where the reduced load adds up over time. Our hacking guide covers riding out safely.
• Young, green, unfit or returning horses whose topline is still developing.
• Horses with a big, bouncy trot. Some horses have a soft gait that is easy to sit to. Others throw you so high that sitting becomes a fight, and rising is kinder for both of you.
• Riders still building their seat. A clean rising trot is better than a bouncing sitting one every time.

Rising Trot in Dressage Tests: British Dressage and FEI Rules

You do not have to sit the trot in most British Dressage tests. British Dressage's competing FAQ sets out the rule by level:

Level	Trot work
Elementary and below (including Intro, Prelim and Novice)	Sitting or rising, throughout the test
Medium	Sitting, except medium and extended trot movements, which may be ridden rising
Advanced Medium and above	Sitting only
National Young Horse classes (4, 5 and 6 year olds)	Sitting or rising
FEI tests, including FEI Young Horse tests	Sitting, except where the test states otherwise

Horse & Hound's guide to affiliated dressage (February 2025) gives the same breakdown. If you are moving up to Medium, our guide to the extended trot covers the movements you may still ride rising.

Under FEI rules, rising where the test asks for sitting is a mistake you pay for. Article 424 of the FEI Dressage Rules 2026 lists "trots rising instead of sitting" as an error of execution, penalised as an error of course: two percentage points per judge for the first error and elimination for the second. In Young Horse, Children, Pony and Junior tests the first deduction is 0.5% and elimination comes at the third error. For how marks are built up, see our guide to dressage scoring, or start with what dressage is.

Riding in South Africa? National tests are run under your own federation's rules, so check the current rule book for the level you are entering rather than assuming the British rules apply.

How to Do Rising Trot, Step by Step

Learn it on a calm, well-schooled horse in a lesson, ideally the kind of push button horse that lets you concentrate entirely on yourself. Our complete guide to riding for beginners covers everything that comes before this point.

Step 1: Set Your Position in Walk

Rising trot is done from the stirrups, so their length matters. Too long and you will be reaching for them; too short and you will be thrown too high. Sit in a balanced position with your ear, shoulder, hip and heel roughly in line (our riding position guide explains how), your feet underneath you and your weight dropping into the stirrup.

Step 2: Practise Standing in the Stirrups

At halt, stand up in the stirrups with your hips forward over your knees and hold the position briefly. If you tip forward, your lower leg has slid back. If you fall back into the saddle, it has drifted forward. Then try the same thing in walk. This is the position you pass through at the top of every rise, so it is worth finding it slowly.

Do not use the reins to pull yourself up or steady yourself. If you need something to hold, use a neck strap or a grab strap on the front of the saddle, sometimes called a bucking strap, so your balance never comes from the horse's mouth.

Step 3: Ask for an Active Trot

Pick up your reins a little before you ask (our guide to holding the reins shows how) and ask for a forward, active trot. A sluggish, uneven trot is harder to rise to because there is less thrust to lift you. Start with short spells of trot and come back to walk to reset your feet and position.

Step 4: Feel the Rhythm Before You Rise

Sit for a few strides and count the beats out loud, "one, two" or "up, down". Counting keeps you breathing, and holding your breath is one of the quickest ways to stiffen up. Empowered Equitation, the blog of a freelance instructor in South Bedfordshire, makes the same point: allow yourself to sit for a few strides before you start rising, rather than shooting straight up out of the saddle.

Step 5: Let the Horse Push You Up and Forward

On "up", let the thrust lift your seat just clear of the saddle and let your hips travel forward towards your hands. As Empowered Equitation puts it, "it should feel like your hips are travelling up and forward (on a bit of a diagonal) towards your hands every time you rise." Rise only straight up and the horse moves on underneath you, so you get left behind and land towards the back of the saddle.

Think of your knee as a hinge. Sally Ede's image is of the knee as the centre of a circle, with the thigh rotating over it so that your hip describes an arc rather than a vertical line.

Step 6: Come Down Softly

The descent matters as much as the rise. Lower yourself back into the saddle with control, rather than, in Empowered Equitation's words, "landing in the saddle like a sack of potatoes". Sally Ede's test is that your descent should never be quicker than your ascent: "A good rising trot has the look of a metronome, or a consistent windscreen wiper."

Step 7: Keep Your Hands Still by Letting Your Elbows Move

Your body goes up and down; your hands should not. Empowered Equitation's third sign of a correct rise is elastic elbows: let your elbows open a little as you rise and close as you sit, so your hands stay quiet and close to the withers. Rigid elbows drag the bit upwards with every rise, which is uncomfortable for the horse and can make it reluctant to go forward.

Step 8: Build It Up Gradually

Short spells of rising trot with walk breaks will teach you more than long, tiring ones. Leave diagonals until the basic rhythm happens without you thinking about it, then add them in.

Rising Trot Diagonals Explained

Because you sit on one diagonal pair of legs and rise on the other, there are always two "diagonals" you could be on. In the arena and on circles, one of them is called the correct diagonal.

What Is the Correct Diagonal?

On the correct diagonal you sit while the horse's outside foreleg and inside hind leg are on the ground, and rise as they swing forward. Your Horse, quoting UKCC Level 4 coach and Fellow of the BHS Sam York, defines it as "sitting in the saddle when the outside front and inside hind legs move back and rising when they move forward". Ranvet's explainer on diagonals says the same: rise as the horse's outside shoulder moves forward. The outside is the side nearest the arena fence, or the outside of the bend when you are not in an arena.

Riding on the correct trot diagonal, including "correcting and changing diagonal when needed and when changing rein", is learning outcome 3.10 of the BHS Stage 1 syllabus, so it is one of the first things a British Horse Society assessor will watch for.

How to Check Your Diagonal

• Look at the outside shoulder, with your eyes only. If you rise as the shoulder moves forward, you are on the correct diagonal. Sam York's advice in Your Horse is to "look with your eyes only, don't tip your head", because tipping your head shifts your weight.
• Use the rhyme. Your Horse offers "Rise and fall with the leg towards the wall" as a reminder that it is the outside legs you are watching.
• Try a smaller circle. Sam York suggests a 10 m or 15 m circle, where more weight goes onto the inside leg and the sequence can be easier to feel.
• Learn to feel it. Empowered Equitation's method starts in walk, feeling how each seat bone is moved, then moves to short spells of sitting trot, focusing on the outside hip. The little push up from the outside hip is in time with your rise.

How to Change Diagonal

Sit for two beats instead of one, then carry on rising. In the arena you change as you change the rein, usually as you cross the centre line. Out hacking, there is no correct diagonal, so change regularly to share the work between both sides. Sam York's aim is to "perfect the art of changing the diagonal without the horse noticing", sitting lightly for the double beat rather than thumping down.

Why the Correct Diagonal Matters: The Evidence

This is not just tradition. At Uppsala, Roepstorff et al. (Equine Veterinary Journal 2009, PMID 19469238) rode seven elite horses on a force-measuring treadmill on each diagonal. Force loading was generally higher in the legs of the diagonal the rider sat on, and the back, pelvis and limb movement all changed with it. The authors write that "the generally advocated technique of alternating limbs when riding in rising trot is supported", while noting the force differences were "minor in absolute terms and therefore unlikely to have direct impact on the occurrence of locomotor injuries".

The strongest case for the correct diagonal comes from Persson-Sjodin et al. (PLoS One 2018), a Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences study with the Royal Veterinary College's Thilo Pfau. One rider rode 26 Swedish Warmbloods in rising trot, sitting trot and a two-point seat, on straight lines and circles. Only rising trot changed how symmetrically the horses moved. On a circle, rising on the correct diagonal cancelled out part of the asymmetry the circle itself creates, so the horses moved significantly more evenly than they did on the lunge in the same direction. Rising on the incorrect diagonal on a circle produced the most asymmetry of all. In the authors' words, this "offers an explanation to the equestrian principle of rising on the 'correct diagonal'".

Not every study lines up neatly. An RVC study of 23 horses (Robartes, Fairhurst and Pfau, The Veterinary Journal 2013) found horses were at their most asymmetric in rising trot on a circle, with values comparable to mild lameness, and Persson-Sjodin's team note their correct-diagonal result differs from it. The practical message from both is the same: rising trot on a circle changes how your horse moves, and the diagonal you choose is part of that. As Empowered Equitation's summary of the research puts it, on straight lines there is no correct diagonal, so alternate; on circles, use the correct one.

When Your Horse Feels Different on Each Diagonal

Sam York notes that "some horses who are stiff, crooked or have muscle imbalances tend to throw you off onto the wrong diagonal, and often riders have a favourite diagonal too." A diagonal you rarely use will feel awkward at first, and the answer is to practise it until it does not.

There is a second possibility you should not ignore. Persson-Sjodin's study found that rising trot mimics a push-off lameness in the hind leg of the diagonal you sit on, and can make a small existing asymmetry look worse or better depending on the diagonal and the direction of the circle. So if a horse that used to feel even suddenly feels wrong on one diagonal, keeps throwing you onto the other, or feels short in its stride, do not just school through it. An uneven feel can come from hindlimb lameness or a sore back, and that is a job for your vet. Our guide to lameness in horses explains what a lameness work-up involves.

Common Rising Trot Faults and How to Fix Them

Most rising trot problems come from tension and timing rather than a lack of strength. These are the ones that hold riders back:

• Rising too high. If there is clear daylight under your seat at the top of every rise, you are working far harder than you need to and are more likely to get left behind. Let the horse lift you a little and no more.
• Going straight up. Rising vertically leaves you behind the movement. Think of your hips travelling forward towards your hands.
• Lower leg too far forward. Empowered Equitation calls this one of the biggest mistakes: the feet escape forward and the rider ends up "falling back into the saddle too heavily and out of balance". Keep your feet underneath you, just behind the girth.
• Lower leg swinging back. The opposite fault tips you onto the horse's neck and shoulders. Go back to standing in the stirrups at halt until you can balance over your feet.
• Gripping with the knee. A pinching knee becomes a pivot that pushes the lower leg back and tips the upper body forward. Keep the knee soft and let your weight drop into your heels.
• Forcing the heels down. Empowered Equitation warns that forcing the heels down "usually causes your lower leg to shoot forward" and stops the ankle absorbing movement. It recommends focusing on "the lower leg underneath you, weight on the stirrup bar and heel level with the stirrup or marginally lower."
• Bouncing hands. If your hands rise and fall with your body, they jab the horse in the mouth with every stride. Let the elbows do the moving.
• Landing heavily. A thump at the bottom of every stride undoes much of the benefit of rising. Control the descent.
• Looking down to check the diagonal. Tipping your head to look shifts your weight. Glance with your eyes only.
• Holding your breath. Count out loud, or sing, until breathing in rhythm becomes automatic.
• Always picking up the same diagonal. Your Horse suggests practising walk to trot transitions and noticing whether you always start on the same diagonal. If you do, change it deliberately.

Exercises to Improve Your Rising Trot

A few simple exercises build the balance, leg strength and control that a good rising trot depends on. Empowered Equitation's three exercises for rising trot are a good place to start.

Alternate Rising Trot and Light Seat

Change between rising trot and a light seat, which Empowered Equitation suggests doing for "maybe 6-8 strides for each". You can only stay up in a light seat if your feet are underneath you, so this quickly shows whether your lower leg is in the right place.

Stand, Then Hover

In trot, vary your position between standing up in the stirrups and lowering yourself until you are hovering just above the saddle. It builds leg strength and teaches control through the whole range of the rise, especially the way down.

Ride One-Handed

Take both reins in one hand and keep rising. If you have been balancing on the reins, you will find out fast. For an easier version hold a neck strap with the free hand; for a harder one, Empowered Equitation suggests swapping the reins from one hand to the other every 4 strides.

Use Your Rise to Set the Tempo

Once the rhythm is secure, your rise becomes an aid. Rising a fraction more slowly can help steady a horse that is rushing, and combining it with a half halt teaches you to influence the tempo from your seat rather than your hands. Keep the changes small and stay with the movement.

Trot Over Poles

Riding a balanced position over trotting poles in rising trot, from a single pole to three in a line, is part of the BHS Stage 1 syllabus (learning outcome 3.6). Poles reward a steady rhythm and an independent seat. Our pole exercises for beginners explain how to lay out a trotting pole line safely.

Ride a Serpentine to Practise Changing Diagonal

Your Horse suggests a three-loop serpentine, changing your diagonal each time you cross the centre line and making sure you are on the correct one before the next turn. It is the quickest way to make diagonal changes automatic.

Book a Lunge Lesson

If the rhythm still is not clicking, ask for a lunge lesson. With your instructor controlling the horse on a line and a lunge cavesson, you can forget about steering and concentrate on timing. Dressage rider and trainer Eileen O'Connor, in HORSE magazine advice republished by Horse & Hound, recommends lunge lessons for riders of all levels and suggests working "in rising trot without stirrups. This uses the inner thigh, knee and calf, and is great for developing a good leg position." Work without stirrups is demanding, so do it in short spells and under instruction.

Practising Rising Trot Without a Horse

Nothing off the horse can teach you to feel a horse's rhythm, but you can build the strength and balance that make rising easier. These are our own suggestions rather than a published programme:

• Slow hip hinges. Stand with your knees softly bent, then push your hips forward and up as if rising, and lower yourself back slowly. The slow lowering trains the controlled descent.
• Balance on the balls of your feet. Stand on a low step with your heels just over the edge and your weight centred, to get used to balancing over your feet.
• Core and leg work. Anything that strengthens your thighs, seat and core helps you rise without gripping.
• Count to music. Clap or tap a steady two-beat rhythm to a song. It sounds simple, but rising trot is a rhythm skill first.

If you ride once a week, a few minutes of this between lessons helps your body remember the movement. Our riding tips for beginners cover more ways to make each lesson count.

Rising Trot in Western Riding and on Gaited Horses

Rising trot belongs to English riding. Western riders sit the slower, flatter jog rather than rising to it, and Western horses are trained to produce a jog that is comfortable to sit.

Gaited breeds offer another way round the bounce. The Tennessee Walking Horse's running walk, the Paso Fino's four-beat lateral gait and the Icelandic horse's tölt are all smooth four-beat gaits with no trot-style bounce, so there is nothing to rise to. Icelandic horses do trot as well, and when they do, the same rising technique applies.

For everyone else, rising trot remains the foundation of everything that follows, from sitting trot and the first canter leads to riding a test in a dressage arena. Take your time over it, let the horse do the lifting, and it will repay you for the rest of your riding life.

Frequently Asked Questions