“I WAS lucky enough to ride for Jack Le Goff, Walter Christensen and Bert De Nemethy, three real masters when it comes to coaching, and I suppose my style comes from distilling what I learned from them,” says Denny Emerson, US team gold medallist.

The 1972 United States Eventing Association (USEA) Rider of the Year and former president of the same association is en route to Dublin to judge the young event horse class and host several masterclass demonstrations at the 2016 Dublin Horse Show.

“Perhaps the best way to describe it is like a table with four legs,” he continues. “To become a good rider, you need all four legs of the table. The first leg of the table is to develop a good independent seat. You just become part of the motion, there shouldn’t be any bouncing. And if that doesn’t come naturally to you, then you just have to learn how to do it.”

“Jack Le Goff used to have a joke about it. He would say there are three things you need to be a great rider. Number one is a good seat. Number two is a good seat. And number three is a good seat.

“Good riders don’t bounce! When you look at lots of dressage tests today you see a lot of flailing around. Those riders are not part of the motion and that is not comfortable. Now look at Michael Jung and Charlotte Du Jardin. Watch them sit the trot. They are the best in the world and they are the competition – that is what you need to do to be a great rider,” insists the author of How Good Riders Get Good and regular contributor to US-based The Chronicle of the Horse.

“How do you get a good seat – you put in the hard work!” Emerson says. “You take away your stirrups. You suffer. You develop the core musculature that you need to have an independent seat.

“Independent of what? Independent of your stirrups, independent of a saddle. If you have to, you go back to what the old cavalry guys had to do – four or five hours every day for weeks and months without stirrups. You do whatever it takes if you want to be a great rider.”

He continues: “The second leg of the table, whether you are aiming at jumping or dressage, is an adjustable canter. You need enough impulsion to go forward and enough balance to shorten. Getting the balance between those two is the tricky part.

“We can get impulsion all day long but the horse lengthens and goes downhill. We can shorten all day but then we lose the impulsion. It is an art form to get your horse in the position right at the tipping point where he has enough impulsion to go and enough balance to wait.”

At Dublin, Emerson intends to work with his demonstration riders on exercises with poles on the ground to develop the adjustable canter he wants.

Leg number three on the table is the ability to see a distance, he says.

“All good riders can see before they get anywhere near a jump where their horse will take off. Someone like [five-time Olympian] Anne Kursinski can see a distance from here to Dublin but most riders can see a distance from at least three strides away and more with enough practice,” says Emerson. “Of course you also need that adjustable canter we talked about so that you can make changes as your approach the jump.”

The fourth and final leg of the table, according to the Tamarack Hill Farm boss, is the rider’s jumping position.

“You’ve seen those awful pictures of bad jumping positions – where the rider has hurled himself up the horse’s neck, pinching at the knee, the lower leg swung back to almost touch the horse’s hip,” he explains. “I call it the ‘preying mantis’ position and it’s awful.

“Ok, the fourth leg is probably not quite as important as the other three and we don’t all need to be like Beezie Madden but if you can get legs one, two and three, number four would finish it. I would like to have it all.”

“They are four very basic skills but they are hard to get,” he says. “We are all guilty of being in too much of a hurry to scurry through to get to the fun part of competing.”

When asked about the most common faults he sees in riders, Emerson again reinforces the need for riders to develop an independent seat.

“You need to work on becoming one with the horse, as if your spinal column is part of the spinal column of the horse,” he insists.

He continues: “And we need to get away from this habit of fixing the front end of the horse with bits, draw reins and all those leverage things. I see it all the time – the horse’s head cranked in and set in position.

“We need to stop riding from front to back and start riding from back to front. The horse should be light in front as a result of stepping under and lifting his back. In a way we are lucky now that there is more access to educational tools than when I was young. Back then we would just haul in the horse’s head so that had his head was in the right position, even if he had his mouth open!

“Now we’ve got Google and all these videos and tools to learn about the dressage training scales and we can see what’s the right picture and what’s the wrong picture.”

Denny Emerson’s masterclasses will take place in Simmonscourt on Thursday, July 21st at 1.40pm and in Ring 2 on Friday, July 22nd at 2.20pm.