The thing about sitting the trot is that as your horse becomes more advanced in his training , his movements become more fluid and (assuming you have a nice athletic horse) his trot becomes very nice to sit. At least in the olden days, dressage riders did not begin to sit at the trot until the horse had developed a very nice trot. I would still rather see a rider with her bottom glued to the saddle and the movement expressed somewhere else in her body than see someone bumping along on the horse's back.
That said, Tosca is one of the few gaited horses Bev has ridden. I think she rode one of Amber Applegate's once to try out a saddle and she had a cute little Peruvian Paso mare in for some trail training. So she was commenting on how smooth Tosca is. Mostly Tosca does some sort of an unidentified (by me) intermediate gait and Bev was sitting nicely, then Tosca switched to a trot, Bev was still sitting and not moving any more than she was in gait. Since I have only ridden the pony at a walk, I have no clue as to what Bev was feeling, but she did say, "I'll be curious to see if she makes you smile like she does me." Nancy
