Grip with your knees or weight in your stirrups…which is it?
By Tom Goodspeed
Well, being the “cant get enough kind of people” that most of us in polo are, we want them both. But can you do both at the same time. I can push weight into my heels, but then when I try to grip with my knees, the weight tends to come out of my heels. So both are important, but how do we do one without losing focus on the other. I offer this tip as a possible solution.
Once you have your heels down, turn the entire soles of your foot to the outside. I am not saying turn your toes out, I am saying flip your entire soul of your foot out to the side. If you were standing on the ground, you would roll up onto the inside edges of your shoe. This helps put the center part of our leg(lower thigh to upper calf) onto the saddle. Now the other more traditional way of saying this is squeeze with our knees, but there is a real concern when you tell someone to squeeze with their knees as opposed to turning the soles of your feet out. You can try this one yourself. Stand in your stirrups and then lower your weight into your heels. Then turn your soles out. You should feel that there is a great deal of weight in your lower leg as well as the lateral knee grip that you get naturally by turning your soles of your foot out to the side. Now sit in the saddle, put weight into your heels and then squeeze with your knees and tell me what happens. I know the answer already, but I want you to feel it for yourself. Your focus goes to your knees and weight comes out of your lower leg. That is not a good thing. You want weight into your heels and good grip with your leg. You want them both. We want it all!!
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| Heel weighted and then sole of foot turned out or pronated. |
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| Sole turned out, heels down and knee in. |
So lets review:
1) Step one is driving weight into your heel with the proper angle in your lower leg. (don’t push weight into your heel and straighten your leg…keep the proper angle).
2) Then step two is locking the bindings so to speak. You roll your soles of your boots to the side and that causes your central leg to grip the saddle while you still have weight in your heels, which gives you a stronger lower leg.
I hope you do have it all or at least realize how fortunate you are to be playing this game of polo. And so that you can enjoy this game for decades, I wish you a great lower leg!!
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