Ep. 13 On noticing more about your seat bones and the underneath of the torso-box.

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis, introducing you to podcast number 13. In our last podcast, we talked a bit about words and how having more words to describe experience allows us to recognise different facets of ourselves, our life and our planet more easily. And I think it's time now to introduce some more words and another version of weird. So you are making more distinctions about your riding. This is going to work best if you listen to this podcast, sitting on a hard chair, because there are some exercises I want you to do that will make clear what I'm really talking about. So if you need to pause this now and get yourself some kind of upright dining room chair, definitely you don't want to do these exercises on a soggy sofa. So now that you're sat in your chair, can you get yourself sat so the length of your front matches the length of your back? And of course, the ultimate check on this would be to sit yourself sideways onto a big mirror. Because it may be that being a box is not quite where you think it is. You may live your life with a longer front and a shorter back, or live your life with a longer back and a shorter front, and that's going to distort your sense of what it really feels like to be a box. So double checking yourself sideways on to a large mirror would be a fabulous thing to do. You then want to have your thighs and your calves at right angles. That means your feet just rest slightly on the floor and I want you to push down in one foot. When you push down in that foot, what happens to the seat bone on the same side? It's absolutely normal for that seat bone to lift and your body to maybe lean a little bit in the opposite direction. Your knee and your hip are known as reciprocal joints. When one of them opens or straightens a little bit, the other one tends to as well. And your push down here has opened both of those joints a little bit as your seat bone lifted. And this is Newton's third law of every action you're pushed down has an equal and opposite reaction, the push up, which straightens your joints a little. Do it on the other foot. You'll experience the mirror image, but the chances are it feels a bit less familiar. Like this is not such a known pattern to your body. So this may already tell you which seat bone you tend to lift when you're riding. This could have you double check when you occasion your horse next time. Do you have 50, 50 weight in each seat bone? But for now, what I want you to realise is that pushing down in your foot tends to lift your seat bone. And this is the reason why we want your foot to just rest and not press in the stirrup. If you press down, you're going to generate this equal and opposite push up and that's going to do you no good whatsoever. So just rest, don't press is a fundamental rule. And in doing that in their riding, most people have to take take weight out of their feet really deliberately and reorganise that weight so it's taken in their thigh. In their kneeling type way of sitting, where their dancing partner hold on their horse goes all the way from their backside through to their knee, not as a vice grip, but like a dancing partner hold, that's not too wibbly, wobbly doesn't come and go, come and go, come and go, but is just there and secure. Now, when you're actually riding, this may act out in a slightly different way. And we're going to do another exercise here. So I want you to sit on your hands. If you go palm down, your hands will last a little bit longer. And if at some point through this, you feel your fingers are getting mashed and you need to pause the podcast and have a break, then you do that. So, first of all, as you're sitting on your hand, I expect you can feel your seat bones, one in each butt. They're normally really clear and notice what direction they point in. Would they point straight down to the ground? Would they point forward? Would they point back? So let's have you deliberately round your back, feel your seat bone point forward. It would be if you were riding towards your horse's front feet. And feel how your back has got longer, your front has got shorter, you've rounded yourself into a slouched way of sitting where if you were riding, your weight will be coming back on your pockets. Go again to neutral. When your seat bone points down, you'll be a really good box. Point your seat bone back, and that involves hollowing your back. Your front is now longer than your back. So when your seat bones are down, that's a double check on being a good box and being vertical. And you can always sit on one hand and have your reins in one hand as long as your horse is safe and quiet and still, or just walking. And that's a way to check yourself out. There's another variable here, and you can do this with your fingers under your butt or you can take your fingers away. It will work equally well either way. I want you to tense the muscles between your seat bones and your fingers and then let them go. And then tense again and let go and tense again and let go. If you've been doing that with your hand under your backside, take your hand away and without your hand, tense and let go and tense and let go. If you've done all this lot without your hands under your seat bones, put your fingers back under there so you can feel this happen. Now we call this popping up. So now we're getting to talk about the underneath of the box and this is very personal, I realise. So we are getting to talk about your pelvic floor as well as your glute muscles and your hamstrings that are the bigger base of what you're sitting on. And it's also very different between people. So quite a lot of riders pop up the whole time. That means there's tight muscle, a tight layer of muscle between the seat bones and the saddle that make it really hard to feel what your seat bones are doing and to be able to influence in a more organized way. Some people are very, very let go under there and have what I call stiletto heel seat bones. In fact, many, many years ago, somebody tried to sell me a secondhand saddle which had a massive great dent under his heavier seat bone, with the stitching beginning to come apart on the seam line of the saddle that's near your seat bone on that side and barely a mark on the other side. And sensibly, I said, no, thank you, I don't think I need that saddle. So he had one not there side that was maybe really popped up and one really heavy side. And looking at your saddle might give you some answers about your underneath too. But this is not so hard to feel. Now, the Goldilocks principle applies here maybe more than in any other element we've talked about so far. So some people are too popped up, they can't feel their seat bones. Some people are so let go that their seat bones poke down through their flesh and their sitting surface really is to two pressure points, or in the case of this person, I knew one pressure point. You need to find just right. And it's very often not what you do naturally. In fact, if you do this just right naturally, you probably are quite a talented rider. So we need to bring your hands back under your underneath again so we can do some experiments and begin to find where just right is. So if you sit on your hands again and first of all pop up, and I want you to very, very gradually let go until you first start to feel your seat bone, pause there for a moment Then let go the whole way and the chances are you'll experience stiletto heel seat bone from there. Gradually firm up, but stop before you lose your seat bone. Pause there, then firm up the whole way and you'll feel that muscle comes in under your seat bone and makes it disappear. Let go gradually till you just find the seat bone and you're then sitting on the seat bone plus a pad of muscle to the outside of your seat bone. Maybe make your knees somewhere about 6 inches to a foot apart. That will probably make it clearer to you. So you're paused here where you can feel the seat bone and the muscle pad to the outside and also a little bit behind the seat bone. If you now let go completely, your seat bone comes down through the flesh. You have stiletto heel, seat bone and that seat bone is very much the weight bearing area. Firm up slowly to get to where you have the seat bone and the pad. Think of your knees a little apart and maybe imagine pushing your knees out as if against a resistance. Now this isn't the same as widening them apart. You're just imagining them going out against a resistance. This will make the pad a little bit firmer. Pop up again, go the whole way. You've disappeared your seat bones. Gradually let go to where you have the seat bone and the pad. Pause there. And now let go the whole way to stiletto heel seat bone. And then can you firm up that little bit to where you have the seat bone and the pad? Now this is the place that's just right. It gives you a bigger sitting surface, a bigger weight bearing area than if you had stiletto heel seat bone. But you still know where your seat bones are and they are really important landmarks. So see if you could take your hand away and keep sitting on your chair in a way that you have the seat bone and the pad. This is something you can practise sitting on chairs. And actually it works really well if you have a good car seat to practise this driving your car, it can become your norm. It may feel a little bit different on the two sides. Like one side may have to let go a little more or firm up a little more to to find where you get even seat bones, even pads. Some people when they're riding, if they push down in their feet don't so much lift their seat bone, they pop up. So your feet have to be light to find just right. If you're pushing down and it would be really good to test this on your horse, do you respond by lifting your seat bone or by popping up. I think people are different in that. So you're searching for just right. Whether you have a popped up starting point or a to let go starting point. It would be interesting for you to notice as well if you're driving your car and somebody, let's say, cuts across in front of you or a traffic light changes suddenly and you weren't expecting it. And you yikes. Do you pop up in that moment of yikes? For some people, that's how their body expresses that kind of. Other people might lift their shoulders or tense their jaw and another part of their body responds. But there's a fair percentage of the population who their yikes muscle is the same as this pop up muscle. It would be really good if you can figure this out for yourself. Is this you or is it not? And if it's not, what is your yikes muscle? So finding just right while you're riding and learning to maintain that might be quite a quest, but it's a really important quest because it's helping you support your body weight, help to not get too heavy down on your butt and your seat bones. It's giving you clarity about the interface you have with the horse. It's helping you gain control of what's happening under there. It's a big piece in the puzzle. And this notion of being too popped up or too let go with stiletto heel seat bones I think is not talked about in most trainings. And it's a really, really big element of skill. Getting to this point enables us to ask a really important question in your riding. And the question is, who's in control of the speed at which your seat bones move? Is it you or is it your horse? This is a profound question because whoever is in control of the speed at which your seat bones move is in control of the speed at which the horse's legs move. And that might be you and it might be the horse. We want it to be you. Now, we have an analogy here for this, which I think is helpful. If you think of riding a bicycle, you pedal the bicycle and you provide the power that pushes the wheels around. We're going to say that that's you taking the bicycle. When you get to a steep downhill, you'll reach a stage where you can't pedal fast enough to keep up. And then the bicycle, as it were, takes you. You might have had a similar experience working in an electric sewing machine. You put your foot on the foot pedal and you're in control of how fast the needle goes up and down and how the stitching turns out until you get carried away and put your foot down so fast that the sewing machine takes you. We can ask just the same thing with your horse. Are you taking your horse doing the equivalent of pedaling the bicycle and being in control of the speed at which his legs go round? Or does the horse take you where he's in control of the speed at which his legs go? That's kind of saying, who dances to whose tune? Who's the instigator, the leader, and who's the follower? Now, most of us think that control is something that happens with the reins. And yes, the reins are a significant part of your stop aid. But you could pull on the reins trying to stop, and all that would happen is that your horse will pull back against you, get more and more claustrophobic and faster, and within that, his legs would be speeding up. Whoever is in control of the speed at which he moves his legs is the partner in the dance who's leading the dance, and we want that to be you. So when you next ride your horse, can you diagnose in walk, are you in control of the speed that your seat bones move at, in which case you are taking the horse and you're, as it were, the prime mover? Or is your horse controlling the speed at which your seat bones move? Because if he is, you're dancing to his tune and control is control of the speed of the horse's legs. And as much as we might like to believe we can slow down the legs by pulling on the reins, it may well not work. The surefire way to slow down the legs is to be able to slow down the speed of your seat bone movement. That means you need to think of your seat bone movements being smaller and slower. And you may even have to think as if you're going to halt, don't halt. And a halt would involve stopping your seat bones. That has intuitive sense to it, doesn't it? So can you get to where you're doing smaller and slower seat bone movements, if indeed you do need to slow your horse's legs and be the one who, as it were, pedals the bicycle and takes him? Now, very often when people first do this, they I feel rigid, I feel stiff. Surely I shouldn't be doing this? Surely I just have to go with the movement. Surely I should be supple. And very often people's version of going with the movement and being supple is way, way, way more movement than they need. Getting the right amount of movement and getting what we call Plugged in makes the rider a lot more quiet and still than most riders are. And all the extraneous movement is a bit like interference on a radio that isn't well tuned. That's an analog radio rather than a digital one. And our instinct is to turn up the volume rather than fine tune the tuning. If we can fine tune the tuning and get rid of all the white noise that makes a disorganization between us and the horse, we make ourselves way more comprehensible to him and way more effective. And if you've watched elite riders riding, be that in the flesh or on YouTube or television, you will have seen how quiet and still they are. There's a quality of almost as if the rider was a carousel pole emerging from a carousel horse. There's no wiggle and jiggle and shove that becomes a separation between the rider and the horse. This is important to start working on. And as soon as you start to become more aware of the wiggles or jiggles, or shoves, the disappearing seat bones, the popped up ness, the too let goness and you start to find just right, you change the cat game and you begin to find the influence that doesn't come through kick and pull, but comes through sitting still, plugging in, leading the dance. The horse then dances to your tune instead of you dancing to him. And to an observer, you're going to appear to do nothing. I've got some more tips for you coming up in our next podcast and I'm looking forward to speaking to you again then. These podcasts are linked to two other Internet sites. One is Dressagetraining tv, which hosts a whole variety of webinars taught by myself, Mary Wanlis and my colleague Ali Wakelin, where we're working live with a variety of horses and riders, showing them the basics of biomechanics and helping them build their skill and train their horses and explaining to the audience. And as we do this, there's also a groundwork certification course on that site based on the work of Dr. Andrew MacLean and Equine Learning Theory. And this too gives you a step by step guide to building your skills. We'd also love you to take a look@justgiving.com and then to search Overdale to find the Justgiving page for Overdale Equestrian Centre, which is my UK home base here in this time of lockdown in 2020, we have 10 school horses eating, of course, and pooping and doing all the things that horses do and no income to support those horses. And whilst they're having a wonderful time for us, this is something of a stress. And if you've enjoyed these webinars or enjoyed these podcasts and benefited from them and you're willing to give any small or large amount to our Just Giving page, we, we would be so grateful. Many thanks to you.