Ep. 14 On how you might have to give up what you think is control in order to find real control.

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast number 14. In our last one, I introduced the idea of popping up or not. The opposite extreme being what I often call stiletto heel seat bones which poke down through your flesh when your underneath is really let go. It's important to realise this is not the same as being more skinny or being a bigger person. There's no relationship at all. So. So sometimes really big people have really clear seat bones and sometimes really tiny people have very popped up seat bones. It's more about habit, pattern and the quality of the muscles. Are the muscles soft enough that the seat bones can get down through the muscles, but not so soft or barely there that the seat bones are just clunk? It has nothing to do with size. We're searching for that just right where your sitting surface is, the seat bone plus a pad to the outside of the seat bone and a little bit round the back of it. Sometimes I think of it almost like if the seat bone disappears and you pop up, it disappears in a little dimple, almost like the hole in a ring donut, where the most there bit of the donut is to the outside and towards around the back of the seat bone. So popped up, disappears the seat bone into a dimple, dropped down, totally puts it way down through the hole in the donut to be the really profound bit of heavy contact. The search for just right will take some doing. Remember, 10,000 repetitions, you get it, lose it, get it, lose it, get it, lose it. But you could do a lot of those repetitions driving your car. They're not just on horse. I really hope though that you had a little bit of time on your horse to be able to figure out what is your baseline. If you were just sitting without thinking, would you be popped up? If so, you probably do have too much weight in your feet as well. Would you tend to be a really let go stiletto heels person? Can you find the better way for you to find just right? Is it by first of all popping up and then letting go or starting from let go and then firming up a little bit? Remember too, as we've said so many times, that the brain learns by contrast and it may help you to regularly give yourself the contrast of pop up a lot, let go a lot, find just right. Otherwise you would have been as I suspect you were before the last podcast, the goldfish, who never discovered the water of what it is you're underneath, habitually did. The notion of finding just right is important, as is the notion of are you in Control of the speed of your seat bone movement, or is the horse moving your seat bones for you with his legs going at his speed, in which case he's leading the dance and you're dancing to his tune. The notion that control is control of the speed of the legs is really, really important. And it may require you to surrender what you thought was control, that is pulling on the reins, to find what is really control. For many people, that's a bit of an existential crisis. They ride with the handbrake on normally out of nervousness. And when they take off the handbrake or just the thought of taking off the handbrake is really powerfully scary. But I want you to think about this another way. Let's suppose I was standing on a little rug and somebody pulls the rug out in the forward direction from under my feet. What would happen to me? I would topple backwards and if the rug was on a polished floor, the rug would speed out from underneath me more. So here we have what I call the waterski motorboat principle. The more the rider leans back, the more the horse goes out from underneath her, like the rug on the porridge floor, or. Or like the motorboat towing the water skier. So if you want to slow down or stop and your tactic is to lean back and pull on the reins, you think you're, whoa, whoa, whoa. I think that by the laws of physics, you're saying, go, go, go. This is a really important realisation. I hope you've taken this in. What we instinctively do to stop by the laws of physics encourages the horse to accelerate out from underneath you, like that rug. You become the water skier towed along by the motorboat. This leads us to realise what has to happen in a good halt transition and also what's likely to go wrong. So let's start with go wrong. Most people's instincts when they want to stop, are to push harder in their stirrups to lean back. They might or might not pop up, they might or might not lift their chest and hollow their back, but they probably will. And at the same time, they pull. So they went pushing your feet, lean back, grow tall, pull, and the horse will probably motorboat out from underneath them. Some of my horses here at Overdale Equestrian Centre in the Cotswolds in the UK have this down to a fine art. If somebody goes to ride a horse halt by water skiing, it's almost like they roll their eyes and they right, dear, you need the halt lesson. And they probably get the halt lesson from hell. Because if they lean back A little bit. The horse just goes, sorry, motorboat into the reins, doesn't stop. Now, the motorboat could be acted out in slow motion. And if you have the experience of you pull, the horse pulls and he doesn't stop, really suspect that you're doing a water ski type attempt at a down transition or a halt. So lean back, push in the stirrups, grow tall, pull on the reins will get you exactly the opposite experience to what you wanted. And what's happening here is that your body is instinctively doing the what's known as the landau response. Now, the landau response is seen in babies between five and seven months, and it starts to happen when the muscles of their back and neck are starting to develop. So in the womb, we've been fetal, our front was very short. Those muscles come out into the world functional. But the muscles of our back are very long, very weak, and not so formed. First of all, we learn to lift our head and we make a little forward curve in the back of the neck. And between five and seven months, the muscles in that chain at the back are becoming strong enough that if you support a baby under its belly with one hand, it will keep itself horizontal and tend to lift its head and arch a little bit. If the baby doesn't do that and it stays somewhat rounded with its head down, that implies it's not developmentally quite in phase with where it should be, and there may be a problem. The landau response, in a way, is the body's go response. In elongating your front and hollowing your back, you're getting ready for movement. The opposite, where you round your back, kind of is a stop response that's going towards the fetal crouch. Now, actually, it's only very nervous novices that might do the fetal crouch when they want to stop. It does, though, happen to people when they're in a mess in front of a jump and they think things might not work well. And their yikes response at that point is likely to be to tip forward and fold a little bit. But established riders rarely do that in a halt. But very, very many of them will do essentially the landau response. Push down in your stirrups. The maybe you pop up, you lean back, you grow tall, your shoulders go back, you stick your chest out, you become a water skier, maybe in slow motion, but the horse just doesn't halt. He motorboats on, you pull, he pulls, he doesn't stop. If you want to ride, a good halt aid, and I'm using walk halt really as the blueprint for any down transition or Any woe type of aid, the first thing you have to do is stay on the balance point, stay vertical, no lean back, no growing tall, no lifting your chest, no pressing in your feet, no making your thigh too vertical. You have to keep the same angles of that martial arts posture. You get to stop your seat bones and bear down double. I recommend people going into a halt, go double, to make sure they're doing that transition on an out breath and whilst bearing down. If you go into a halt or any down transition on an in breath, you're more likely to go bring your plunger up. If you remember the plunger down analogy that we had to the French press cafeteria coffee maker. So on an in breath, you're more likely to go bring your plunger up, lift your chest, grow tall, stop breathing, pull an out breath and a pssh. Help you to stay in place. Your feet stay light, you stay vertical, you're bearing down, you stop your seat bones. You will need your reins as well, and your reins need to be short enough that the horse will feel it when you just press a bit harder with your thumb on your first finger. Getting the walk holds to work is a real step forward for people in their skill and their understanding of the rider horse interaction. And I always find myself thinking that if the horse world as a whole understood the water ski motorboat principle, it would make a massive difference and it would be a wonderful step forward in terms of horse welfare. So let's come back to your seat bones again. Hopefully you're finding what is for you just right. In the process of this and in the process of people learning how to slow the legs on a motorboat type horse who wants to speed out from underneath them and run the show, I'll often find myself saying, make your seat bone movement half of what it was. I might ask people, how much do you think your seat bones move each time they move? Is it 1 inch, 2 inches or 3 inches? And if they respond, well, it's 2 inches, I say, well, can you make it 1 inch? I may have to say, can you halve it again? So it's a much smaller, slower seat bone movement. And as I said last time, it often has. People respond by going, I'm stiff, I'm resisting being moved by the horse. Well, yes, you are being resisted resisting being moved by the horse so you can lead the dance. So you may have to halve your seat bone movement and halve it again. Once somebody's got that organised and they've taken away the static, the white noise between them and the horse I'll ask my next question, I might ask, is the movement of your seat bones predominantly in the front back plane, the up down plane or the side side plane plane? This is a question I hope you'll get to ask yourself when you're riding. Side, side kind of makes you almost like your seat bones are a teeter totter and one side of your body shortens and the other side shortens and one side shortens and the other side shortens. Not so many people do this, and it happens mostly to riders on cobs. So anyone who lives in the UK will understand that Americans might not. These would be shorter, wider, stockier kind of horses that are built more like sumo wrestlers. And they themselves tend to have a big side side and they can make the rider mirror them. So side side is like a teeter totter and it's not ideal. Quite often in early halt transitions, people end up doing a side side in the last few steps of walk. You want to avoid that up down, predominantly up down puts in too much movement and almost has you lift yourself up on one side in each step. What you really want is a front back movement. And if you think of the shape of the seam lines of the saddle as they narrow forward, up and in towards the pommel, you want your seat bones to move a little bit within those seam lines. So each little forward movement is both forward, up and in. And then the next seat bone goes forward, up and in, forward, up and in. It's a little bit like a horse with bad action that plaits, or you would say in the us, braids with its front legs. So your seat bones are moving a little bit within the seam lines of the saddle. That's in theory, but in practice it's good to ask the rider, if you had a pencil point on each seat bone, what would that pencil point draw? Now, very often it's very different with the two seat bones. So one seat bone might be a more reliable line and one a less reliable line. The more reliable line will probably be with a pencil, a deeper, darker line that would imprint a bit on the paper. The less reliable line might be more random and lighter. One seat bone might reliably follow that little movement within the seam line of the saddle and the other one go goodness only knows where. Sometimes it's almost like that seat bone does breaststroke and goes out to. The seat bones need training, and training needs awareness. That's a noticing in each moment. And every time you realize, oops, my left seat bone's disappeared, it's gone awol. It's doing its funny thing. You're trying to bring it back into that little reliable movement. You're then establishing a baseline of communication with your horse that's reliable and has some meaning rather than is way too random. I can remember one person who had had, I think quite a bad injury. And with her, one seat bone was almost like the point of a compass. It barely moved and the other one went backwards and forwards on an arc of a circle like it was the pencil in the compass. There are many possibilities in this and you will uniquely do what you uniquely do. But if you can get your seat bones to just walk along reliably in that way, it will make a huge difference to baseline interaction with your horse. It's worth doing the following exercise. Now, it doesn't totally mirror what you do on the horse, but it's close enough to be useful. If you sit on the floor with your legs out in front of you and you were to imagine walking on the floor or actually do it with your seat bones, you're walking along the floor. You then get the idea that one moves and then the other moves. But you have to have too much up down to make this work. But it's worth doing just to get the sense of how you're moving along one seat bone at a time. Another way I think of this too in plugging in, and it happens even while your seat bones are making these little movements. If you think back to a childhood, if you lived long enough, where little boys, maybe little girls, played with plastic cowboys that had two little prongs sticking out of their backside and would slot into two little holes in their plastic horse, that gives you the idea of plugged in. The horse moves, the rider moves. But actually there's no disconnect. Another way to think of it was supposing you're trying to put a two pin electric plug in a socket in the dark and what's actually happening is you're moving the prongs of the plug backwards and forwards over the holes until glunk, you get the plug into the socket. That is connection. The backwards and forwards over the holes is a fundamental disconnect. Here's another exercise on this to finish up with. Put one hand on the top of your thigh, somewhere between your pelvis and your knee. Just rest your hand on your thigh. Now move your hand backwards and forwards over your thigh. That's a fundamental disconnect. And if your hand represents your backside and your thigh represents the horse and the saddle, there is movement between the two extraneous movement. Now just see with your hand in the same place in your flesh. Can you move your flesh underneath you a little bit towards your knee and a little bit towards your pelvis? There's probably about an inch that your flesh can move with your hand attached to the same place in your britches. Move a little to the right, a little to the left again, you've probably got about an inch worth of movement. Try a circle again. You're fundamentally keeping connection whilst you're moving with the surface underneath you. And actually you are organising the movement in the surface underneath you. Go back to moving your hand over your britches in a way that makes friction. That's a totally different form of. Of contact, or shall I say not contact, but disconnect. This parallel absolutely holds. Skilled riders have a contact with the horse like you have when your hand is moulded onto the tissue underneath you and able to move and organize the tissue underneath you. It's very subtle, but it changes the game. In fact, this kind of contact is the basis of some bodywork forms like myofascial release and other ways of working with fascia, which is the connective tissue under your skin. You want this form of contact with your horse. It changes the game over. Too much friction, too much wibble, too much wobble, too much shove. The connection of plugging in is profound and life changing for you and him. Very often the horse that's going, yeah, yeah, whatever, you're just doing your thing up there suddenly goes, oh, hello, I have a rider on my back. Oh, hello, this rider's talking to me. The horse will tend to become oblivious to all that extraneous movement. He's going to tune it out or it's going to drive him nuts. He's going to want to get out of Dodge, run the game, speed up his legs. I've given you a huge amount of input here. You might want to listen to this several times and take a few little notes, maybe to stick in pocket to notice when you get on your horse. Can you plug in? Can you find that quality of contact? Can you lead the dance? Can you make that little front, back, walking along movement with your seat bones, which never makes a disconnect. Can you begin to figure out a walk, halt where your horse just goes, walk, walk, stop, and nobody pulls on the reins. All the best to you. Have fun with this. I'll be back soon. 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 and train their horses and explaining to the audience 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 Just Giving 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 swap or large amount to our Just Giving page, we would be so grateful. Many thanks to you.