Mary Wanless teaches dressage riders how to build a firm core by engaging muscles around the ribs, abdomen, and pelvis. She walks through tactile checks: hands on your sternum, spine, and sides to feel the engagement, then clear your throat to activate the right muscles.
We're looking for a higher pressure system. What you see when you look at elite riders, when you look at the Carl Hester's and the Charlotte Dujardins and the Heather Blitzes and the top riders around the world, what you see is a really high pressure system, as if that rider and that horse had have been blown up with a bicycle pump. So we're looking for firmness. And what I'm going to show you now is how you start to manufacture that firmness. Put a hand on your front, under your sternum, put two fingers on your spine, your thumb on one side, two fingers on the other side. So you've got a hand on your front and a hand on your back. Put on a fair amount of pressure and go. And when you clear your throat, you should feel your muscles push hard against your hands. Put your hands on your sides here and make some pressure with the back of your hand from making a fist. And go. And you should feel your sides push out against your hands. Put your fingers on your bikini line, put some pressure on there. Again, clear your throat, go. And you should feel the muscles push out against your hand. So we've got your spine and in this part of your body between your ribs and your hips, everything else is soft tissue, Everything else is part of those muscles and connective tissue and the various lines and chains you're going to be learning about. The only bony bit is your spine. So that means all the way around, from where my thumbs are, each side of my spine, around my sides, around my front. When I pull my tummy in to make the wall and push my guts against the wall and go. I'm going to feel that pressure in my front. As I get to pelvis level. The pelvis is like three sides of a bony box. We've got bone under the muscle and fat here, we've got bone under the back here, we've got open front. And if I go, all the push gets pretty much channeled into.
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