Ep. 16 So how exactly does the rider/horse interaction work?

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast number 16. We've just been talking about the idea of riding on interface. The realisation that when you do A, the horse does B, when you do C, the horse does D, the way that riders need to reinvent the wheel as they discover for themselves how the rider horse interaction works. So I think we should be looking in this podcast to put more detail into how that interaction really does work. And to do this, I like to split our thinking into the planes of back, front, up, down and side side. This is a totally artificial split, but it really helps us keep clarity in our thinking. So let's suppose that a another green horse. And these reactions are most likely in a less expensive, less talented horse, but could still happen in a more expensive, more talented horse. You put a human as weight in the middle of his back, his first response is likely to be to drop his back away from that weight. So he hollows his back into his tummy, drops down. As he hollows his back, he's going to also, as it were, hollow his neck. We're the same. And within that, his head is likely to go up in a way that bring his ears more back towards your chin. Arabs have a particularly nose horizontal way of doing this that one of my clients calls praying to the Arab gods. Some horses do it with their nose more vertical, although often that's been created by poor riding. But either way, his neck is likely to shorten as his ears come back towards your chin. At the same time as his back hollows, his inner contents kind of really drop down into his belly in a way that could make you, as rider, feel like you're sitting on the pointy end of an egg. And his belly would then be the wide end of the egg. So he's taken away his sides from under your thighs as well as his back from under your butt and and his nose and mouth away from the end of the reins he's retracted into himself. Rather than this, we as rider want to stimulate what I call the seeking reflexes. In these, he begins to lift his back in a way that seeks contact with your underneath, Expand under your thighs widthways in a way that would make it feel more like you were sitting on the rounded end of the egg. With his tummy like the pointy end of the egg, and he begins to reach his head and neck into the rein, potentially creating the carriage and the posture that makes any horse look beautiful. And I really mean that. When a horse has a long back, a short neck, a funny looking this, that or the other, a big head. All of those features disappear when he finds the seeking reflexes. And this is what we're really talking about when we use the term on the bit, although that term is used so badly and means so many different things to so many different people. And for many people, it just means the nose is vertical and kind of scrunched backwards towards the rider in a way that makes the horse look like he's got a very big head on a rather short scrunched neck. So on the bit covers a multitude of sins and is interpretable in many different ways. But the seeking reflexes, that notion makes it clearer what we're really talking about. And any backyard pony will begin to look beautiful once this happens. So we as riders need to know how we can get the seeking reflexes to become the horse's baseline and how we can invite him into this posture. Now, you already know some of this, so you already know that if your weight is concentrated on your backside, you're going to have a bigger pushing down of the back effect, and that spreading weight down through your thigh in the way that I call kneeling, in a way that makes your weight much more spread over a bigger surface, especially if you're somebody with bony seat bones. So the weight in your butt is really the weight on two stiletto heels. Spreading that weight forward over his ribcage makes a huge difference. And your thighs at this point are acting like a lever. The weight at your knee gets to counterbalance the weight of your upper body, and you get to be what I call hung in a harness, supporting your own body weight. It's like you're kneeling to get your weight out of the hollow of the horse's back, and you are doing a lot harder work to make it easier for him. When you get that kneel, there can be a point where it's almost like the right amount of weight goes down through your thigh, out of your butt, transferred forward, and the horse just begins to reach into the rein. I see this happen day after day on horse after horse, when the rider finds the correct balance point. So here we're talking about the up, down plane. We could say the question is, is the horse hollowing his back away from under the rider, or is the back coming up to meet the rider? And in doing that, it will feel more firm, more there, less nebulous, less like there's really not very much sitting to sit on and not much support underneath you. We're looking at the up, down plane. And along with that, the rider has to have her foot on light and her torso box shape. Because as soon as you do push down the stirrups, grow up tall, stick your chest out, get caught in the landau response that we've talked about before, the whole thing doesn't work. We've also talked before about the front back plane. So this is where bearing down comes in. The notion of you pull your tummy in to make a wall, you push your guts against the wall. You're activating your core as you do this. This is how riders activate their core and develop core strength. And this will be what you do naturally if you make the sound or you cough. The most powerful place where your bear down has the most influence is your bikini line. So at that level, when you pull your tummy in to make a wall and push your guts against the wall, you want to imagine you're making a forward force. Maybe imagine that a little power hose leaves your body through a small little exit hole in the middle of your bikini line, and that power hose aims to the little indentation just in front of the wither where a conventionally cut rug would sit. So you're making a push forward from your bear down, and it literally is a forward force. When the horse contracts his neck backwards and. And he does what I call pushing back to you, it's as if somebody put their hand on his muzzle. His muzzle compresses back into the poll, the pole compresses back into the neck, the neck compresses back into the wither, the wither compresses back into the back, the back makes a hollow, and the rider falls down the hole unless she's got some really good kneeling to help her. So on the front back plane, we can literally ask, is, is your push forward bigger or is the horse's push back bigger? And usually when you're riding and your good change happens in your horse, you will be aware of either the push forward instigating that change, or the way of kneeling instigating that change. So the next variable, which is on the plane of side, side, or really, I'm going to redefine this as a narrow wide, is a little harder to explain. And it's really the variable that we talk about as narrowness and also suction. But if you can do this little exercise along with me with your hands, I think you'll begin to understand. So put one hand out in front of you so your hand makes a roof shape with your knuckles as the ridgeline of the roof. That means your wrist is lower than your knuckles and your fingertips are lower than your knuckles and ideally your fingers are straight. And we're going to pretend that this is the horse's back. Your knuckles are like the spinal processes of his vertebra. Then put the other hand on top. This is you. And the other hand needs to rest on the bottom hand. So all of your skin is in contact with as much as possible of each hand. Now, if you press the top hand down on the bottom hand, that that would be like sitting really heavy, not supporting your body weight, having your weight just down in the hollow of the horse's back. Rest the top hand on the bottom hand. This is one stage better. You're now supporting your body weight. Can you use the skin of the top hand to pick up the skin on the bottom hand? Now, hands know how to do this, and hopefully it's pretty obvious to you. And as you're doing this exercise. And you can do the same thing with the underside of your butt and your inside thighs, only they don't naturally know how to do it. So it takes a little bit more figuring out. So maybe you can understand that this is a way of getting lighter and narrower and it becomes what we call suction. So let's do a few different things. Think of your fingers and your wrist going away from each other. So that's almost like trying to spread out down and out and down and out and down on each side of the bottom hand. And a lot of people would do that as they thought, stretch your legs down and it's not going to work. Now make that as if you could pick up the skin on your bottom hand again. Now change the top hand so only just under your knuckles is in contact. And your fingers and the palm of your hand are not contacting the bottom hand where you couldn't pick up the skin on the bottom hand. From here, you'd have to have contact. This person doesn't have their thighs on the saddle at all. Now put your fingers against your hand, but not your palm. This is like somebody with one thigh and one side of their body functional, but the other side of their body not in place, Thigh not against the saddle, not functional. Or you could try curling your fingers and just putting your fingertips against your bottom hand. And this would be like somebody kind of gripping with their knees but not having contact with anywhere else. And you kind of sort of could do suction, but it's not as good. And now come back to that way of having full contact of the one hand against the other and using the skin on the top hand to pick up the skin on the bottom hand. Now, this analogy has helped a lot of people to figure out suction and it does require that you find just right with your underneath. If you're popped up, you can't do it. If your seat bones are stiletto heels, you can't do it. If you're pushing down into your feet, you can't do it. But once you find how to make it work, you, it's hugely significant. I'll never forget actually being in the cafe area of the big riding centre and big competition centre that I used to be based at before I had my own place and the cafe area had some windows looking into the arena and Dane Rawlings, who's an international rider, was teaching a clinic there and he just got on somebody's horse just in front of this window and you could see about from his knee to maybe his waist through the window. And before the horse moved off, he applied suction in a way that I watched him and the horse go up. So more of the horse's body was framed in the window and less of Dane's torso was framed in the window and he hadn't even moved. Now, I normally have to have some motion in the horse walking or maybe going faster than that, but walking is fine to begin to get that to work. And it was a mind blowing moment for me just observing how this happened in that narrow, narrowness way of picking up the horse underneath you. There's a lot of magic, but there's magic too in your push forward, bigger than his push back, and the idea of kneeling so your weight does not get focused down the hollow of his back. If you push in your feet, it's as if that push down in the stirrups sends you up in a way that separates you from the horse. You remember our exercise about how your seat bone lifted when you pushed in your foot. Or you might be someone who pops up and tenses the muscles under your butt when you push in your foot. But either way, you've separated yourself from the horse so you can't glob onto him if you in the way that makes suctions work. So stretching down and also stretching up will get you into trouble. You have to be a box. You have to have the 45 degree thigh with the thigh on the saddle with the foot. Light elite riders can actually make suction work with a bit more weight in their foot, but it's different. They're not pushing into the stirrup like normal average riders do. It's almost as if their bones are making A framework. And they're so aware of their bones that the way their calf bones come into their ankle and into their foot is just more solid and more there. But it isn't a push down, it's different. And I love the quote from Lars Cedarholm, who once said the rider should be a framework around the horse and not a load on top of the horse. And the rider can be a really good framework with those more solid bones, but that is normally something that develops over time. And most riders are attempting to make this framework from either a rather wibbly, wobbly, not high enough pressure, not a well enough stuffed, stuffed toy rider, as it were, and maybe from round backed or hollow backed. And how you organize yourself with within this is critical. Plugging in is also part of this skill. And you've been learning plugging in 101 in terms of thinking of your seat bones and the extraneous movement or the overdone movement in them that you're trying to eradicate. When I plug in, I'm trying to make my whole body be organized all the way from my shoulders and my collarbone down through my torso, my seat bones, so that there really isn't any wobble or disconnect within my torso or a place where the horse and I are not in sync. But plugging in makes a massive difference to your influence in terms of the narrowness, the kneel, the bear down. If you've got too much wibble, wobble, and too much shove and push, it won't work. So another way we can think of this is, is that it's as if the horse was clay and the rider is a potter and the rider is moulding that clay into a form. Except really, what the rider's moulding is the horse's energy. And if we come back to the idea we had in the last webinar of water through hoses from the horse's hind feet up to his hock and up to the point of his buttock, over his croup, under the panels of the saddle, up each side of his crest, to each ear, like two big hoses. And you think of energy flow through those hoses. When the horse comes into a really good carriage, that energy flow is really fluid, clear, easy. But it may be that somewhere there are leaks in the hose and the energy just gets dissipated. This can happen very often in the horse's loins area behind the saddle, or the energy might get deviated. Let's say if your horse jackknifes and falls out through his outside Shoulder where his nose is too in, his withers are too out, and you might pull on the inside rein. As the circle gets bigger and bigger, the energy could get dissipated in other ways too. Or there could be eddies and backflow. If you can get that energy flowing within your horse's system, you are going to almost certainly create the beauty of the seeking reflexes. And as I said before, any horse, no matter his make, shape, type or the quality of his places, will start to look beautiful when he comes into that fluid kind of movement. And it means that you as rider, must not oppose his energy or, or minimise his energy. You might be tempted to go, horse don't have too much energy, be a good boy for mummy, please. Just because you're a little bit scared of getting energy through those hoses and really dealing with power and flow. So you might want to minimize his energy. But if you were a martial artist and your partner, let's say in aikido, came at you with energy, you wouldn't be going, please don't do that, please don't come at me with energy. Neither would you oppose your partner's energy and turn what's supposed to be your martial art into a punch up fight. And yet people do that with their horses. As soon as you put on the handbrake and you really oppose that energy and you pick a fight with your horse, you're trying to essentially, as it were, dam that flow, like damming a river, and it's going to come out somewhere and you're going to get into trouble. When it works really well, it's almost like you join the river, you flow with it. Maybe the horse is taking you a little bit, but you take that and pretend it's your idea and go with the flow until you can create flow on your terms. His legs moving at your speed and energy coming through the circuit without deviation, being deadened, being dissipated, having blockages and having backflow, of course that means that energy has to be flowing through your system too. No handbrake, hand giving forward, bear down pushing. So your push is stronger than your pull as we talked about in some of the early webinars. And you're really not pulling, but your push of your bear down is enabling you to push your hand forward and allow the horse the freedom to reach his his neck out of his wither. So the seeking reflexes, the up, down, the back front, the narrow wide, are all a big part of skill. Elite riders know this, they can do this, but they couldn't tell you in words for them. It's instinctive know how. For most of the people I teach, these are consciously learnt skills that then begin to come part of your know how. I hope this gives you more clarity and we'll talk more about the nitty gritty of what goes wrong in the water ski motorboat scenario and when the horse whizzes off and hollows because that gives us a real even clearer understanding. All the best to you. Have fun. Keep kneeling, keep bearing down, keep your feet light and see if you can figure out how that exercise of the hand on hand pickup translates into doing suction. I'll be back with you 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 small, large amount to our Just Giving page, we would be so grateful. Many thanks to you.