After attending an English Icon instructor on a gruelling weeks course where you had to bear down (tightening your stomach) and keep breathing low pushing your seat bones deep keeping your knees in contact as if welded to the saddle all this just in walk...I won't go on....I decided Western must be easier! just like English I have discovered there are different styles and different instructors. The cowboy style is legs off; hands shoot upward and legs stretched out for whoa; then others tell you just lean back with slight upward hands and so on.....actually, I found a fanastic instructor after several and found English overlaps but you dont have to be so heavy as English nor so cowboy either; there is I think a more classical western style that is now suiting me....keep it up and change instructor till you find one that is more visual and helpful too.....just sit still and FEEL...think and see your horse will tune in and see what you do too....its wonderful when that happens, its light and refined...I am still learning and will always be learning...best of luck and try someone else....you are a good student because you are asking and questioning what you are doing rather than being a robot and idiot you are a good rider already because of that....