Ep. 17 - Deconstructing the halt to walk transition

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast number 17. I want to start by telling you a story. So when I first came across Bear down, my description at the time, and we're going back a very long time, was as if you're pushing a baby buggy. I thought this was really pretty good because your hands will be out in front of you more with your thumbs on top than your fingers horizontal. And it required a bit of oomph to push. So as if you're pushing a baby buggy became one of the early images for bear Down. Another one which has a bit more oomph to it is as if you're sweeping the yard, especially if you use a good old fashioned British broom that you push away from you and not a corn broom that you might move from side to side, which is much more lightweight and doesn't require half so much bear down. In fact, it makes me feel a bit like the aged women who were the bastilians of the British horse society when I was young. Like, can't you sweep properly, girl? So good proper sweeping requires an awful lot of bear down. And then it wasn't so many years ago that one of my colleagues basically was teaching a lesson with a guy and he got his bear down really well organized and at one point said to her, you know, this is just like push starting a car up a hill. And when she told me that, I thought, well, yes, really, he's right. That's a great description. It's like push starting a car up a hill. And how wimpy was I in my early days of as if you're pushing a baby buggy. But it was a beginning point. It worked pretty well for me and I had no idea at the time that my level of strength would improve, that what was possible with Bear down would develop from a baby buggy to a car up a hill. Strength builds like this over time as one develops more skill and more stamina and resilience within those skills as well as more noticing. And this is how it is for everybody. So let's come back having said that to the idea of the seeking reflexes. Now they're not something that we quote, teach our horse. It's much more that it's natural for a another horse to drop his back when you sit on it, which is understandable, but the reverse of lightening yourself being hung in a harness. Imagine the horse was hung from your underneath and someone picking up the harness would pick him up too, making the push forward. That's bigger than his push back, his response to that kind of just happens. Just like you pull on the reins and his ears likely come back towards your chin. Just happens. So what we're learning here really is to be on top of the horse and to say it in the language, which is just natural to horses. We as riders are learning to speak the language horse, rather than demanding that our horses get to speak the language rider or human. So let's dig a little bit deeper into how this interaction works. And to do this, what I'd like you to do is just imagine a rider and horse in halt, and the rider wants to walk on. Now, at this point in time, walking on is an acceleration from halt to walk, is the horse pulling the rug out from under the rider's feet. And if the rider's not careful, she'll tend to topple back. Now, let's imagine that the rider has inside her a carousel pole. So this is not as it would be if you sat on a carousel horse where pole is in front of you. The pole is inside you. It's going from the top of your head down inside you to your underneath, down through the saddle, down through the horse to a bit below his tummy, but not right to the ground. So, first of all, you have to be plugged in or there's going to be a disconnect where your part of the carousel pole meets the horse's part of the carousel pole. And that's another way to think about plugging in. This is something that goes wrong for people an awful lot in canter, and it can be a great image. And to get you more plugged in in canter, rather than, as it were, your bit of the carousel pole scooping backwards and forwards over the horse's carousel pole, they have to be connected. So if the horse goes to walk on, and in the process of doing this, he drops his tummy, elongates his underneath, shortens his top line so his ears come back towards your chin and his back hollows, and he walks on like that. So basically, he shortened the top line of muscle and connective tissue, and he's elongated the bottom line so he walks on and hollows at the same time. What happens to the bottom of the carousel pole if she does that? Now, it's really worth thinking this through for a minute. The rider's the top of the carousel pole. The bottom of the carousel pole is below the horse's tummy. The horse has hollowed and elongated his underneath in that first step. What happens to the bottom of the carousel pole? It is going to drop down as the horse's tummy drops down, and it's going to go forward as that line of tissue is pulled forward relative to the top of the horse. So you could say that he accelerates the underneath of him to get ahead of the top of him. If we split him into a top half and a bottom half, normally about the level of the rider's knee, but that depends on the size of the rider and the size of the horse. But let's say his top half and his bottom half are kind of joined together somewhere in the middle of him on a line about where the rider's knee is, and the underneath of him has been pulled ahead of the top of him. So the bottom of the carousel pole has dropped down and gone forward. You, as the rider, have the top of the carousel pole coming up through your torso into your neck and your head. What's going to happen to you? I hope it's pretty obvious. You're going to flip back with your head and shoulders. At this point in time, the chances are you're water skiing and the horse is towing you along, he may well be in control of the speed of his legs. So if you think that you mustn't let the top of the carousel pole flip back and you can really resist doing this, you've got a chance of keeping the bottom of the carousel pole in place. And this is where, if I was teaching you, I'd really encourage you to do what we call resist my push. So if I were to put my fingers between the first and second of your ribs, just each side of your midline, and get you to, as it were, lean against my fingers and not let me push you back. You'd be exerting a force with your torso in the forward direction. To not let my force win the day and push you back, you have to do just the same thing here, exerting that force as if you were resisting my push. So the top of the carousel pole will stay in place. Now, if the horse really can't bring forward the bottom of the carousel pole, which is what will happen if you do this really well, he's then got some choices. He could just go, oh, okay, I get it. I get to walk on with my top line reaching over my underline, which would mean the transition would have his neck staying elongated, his back staying up. He's underneath staying short. But he might. Whoa. Wait a minute. This is a bit weird. Horses feel weird just like we feel weird. Whoa. This is really funny. This is wrong. This can't be right. And he might. The only way I know to move if my back is up, is backwards. And he might start stepping back. Now, at this point in time, riders often panic, and if they just panic and go, boom, bang, kick, the horse is going to go forward in that underneath elongating bottom of the carousel pole, pull forward, rider flips back way, and you're back at square one. What we want is that the rider can hold her ground and stay really calm and realise she hasn't done anything wrong. That's another thing that happened. Even if the rider doesn't really panic, she often goes, oh, my goodness, he's going backwards. I must be doing it wrong. You want to hang in there, keeping your rightness, and you're kind of trying to stick with it to vibe the horse going, come on, honey, you can do this. I'm on your team. Come on, I know you can do this. You just get to elongate your top side. Come on, be brave. And the reality is that you may have to kind of turn backwards into sideways and sideways into forwards as you convince the horse that this is all within the realm of possibility. You have to be bearing down, you have to be breathing, you have to just quietly hang in there. The reality is that your transition will probably be damage limitation. And you're trying to keep repeating this and gently, keep going. Come on, honey, you can do this. Of course, you want to keep the feeling on the next step and the next step and the next step that the carousel pole stays vertical. You're in charge of the top of it, and you being in charge of the top of it keeps you in charge of the bottom of it. He's kind of there going, but I'm always in charge of the carousel pole and I shift it from the bottom. You can't do this from the top. But we're really kind of going, can you keep your rightness even in the face of his wrongness? And what's happened here is that you entered what trainer Kira Kirkland calls the horse's private space. Now, Keira's a very accomplished rider. She's now retired from top class competitions, but she's ridden in five Olympics, been up in the top half, dozen riders in all of them. And she's a remarkable woman, and I love this phrase. Horses and riders both have their private space, like, yes, I'm up for this. Yes, I'm up for this change. Okay. It feels pretty weird that I'm up for it. Yes. Okay. Whoa. Not that. And your horse will have Hit a more or less big version of whoa, not that and you're just quietly hanging in there is critical here. And this kind of moment brings me to mind one of my favourite little sayings, which does the organized rider organise the disorganized horse, or does the disorganized horse disorganise the organised rider? You're doing your best to be an organised rider, organising your disorganised horse, but realise the knock on effects of this. If we generalise a little bit every time your back is hollow, your front is longer than your back, you're a banana, not a box. And at the same time you lean back a little bit, you're giving your horse permission to elongate his underneath and draw the bottom of the carousel pole forwards. He has to be the horse version of a box, just like you as rider need to be the rider version of a box. His top half and his bottom half have to kind of line up with each other and be the same length. Keeping your box is not just because you should be like a martial artist, because Mary said so, or because it, to my mind, looks good. Although people have to learn that chest down in this way can look incredibly elegant. It's really not that. It's because as soon as you elongate your front, you've given your horse permission to do the same. It's like you're saying to him, this is how we organise our front relative to our back and our back relative to our fronts. Let me show you. And this may be more or less alien to the horse, depending on his make and type. Let's outframe this a little bit more again. And this bears relation to my story at the beginning of this podcast of the distance between pushing a baby buggy and push starting a car up a hill. We've been talking about this like it's another average rider on another average, rather hollow, disorganized horse. Let's suppose you're watching the Grand Prix test in the Olympics and you're watching riders ride piaffe passage, and particularly the moment where piaffe, which is the trough on the spot, turns into Passage, which is that very elevated, rather slow trot that covers more ground. Very often in that transition, you'll see the rider flip back with their torso in their shoulders and probably recover two or three steps later. Well, guess what happens in that moment? Just exactly the same thing. The horse went to go from Piafre de passage by elongating his underside, drawing the bottom of the carousel pole forwards, which means the rider as the top of the carousel pole flip back, and then you'll normally see an elite rider get it fixed within maybe the next four beats. The really good rider in that transition, done really well, stays vertical, keeps the carousel pole, kind of says to the horse, okay, we've got to have a big forward bound after this and I'm going to be absolutely with you. And she's kind of, as it were, pushing into the top of the carousel pole like crazy as she goes to make that transition. So she's drawing on exactly the same skill with a strength that has built off over time in the face of massively bigger forces and a huge demand on her balance point. But she learnt that skill just initially, like you've done in halt to walk transitions, but she couldn't verbalise the skill and tell you what it is that she does. It's exactly the same principle, and you'll see this again and again and again, that the baseline principle that riders start learning in walk and halt and rising, trot and then into sitting, trot and canter are seen with elite riders doing the more complicated movements. So skill develops over time along with the way that strength develops. And let me just tell you another story about that briefly. One of my colleagues, a coach in the us, said to me a while ago, you know, I got on somebody's horse in a lesson recently and I adjusted my stirrups and got myself organized and walked on. And the person who is the normal rider there in the lesson looked at me and went, oh, my goodness, how did you do that? And the horse had just walked on in carriage and she was there going, oh, I wasn't aware I did anything. I was just kind of sitting here. And that was the first time she'd had a oh, I'm just sitting here and look what impression this has had on the horse underneath me moment. Rather than knowing that she did the thing, she'd learned to get the horse to come into carriage. So that was a wonderful moment for her. But at least, rather than just looking like a God on the horse up there, she could say to the rider, well, yes, that's true, but it's all built up from how I'm supporting my body weight, how I'm bearing down, how I'm kneeling. And actually, now I can really feel how this makes a really big difference. So she could unpack it for the rider and put it into language. There's also a story I really love of a young woman who was a working student for us. She was a weekend helper, really, who started when she was about 11 and was an all over the place kit kid who looked as though she had no bones. She was this kind of rather depressed blob. Her father had just died and she kept coming on Saturdays and kept having lessons. And when she Left school at 16, she went to a college and did a course in small animal care. I think she was filling in time more than anything else. And after that she left and she got a job locally with a hunting family. So she was then riding horses round the block, getting them fit for hunting. And when she did this with her boss, her boss would say to her, stop doing that posh stuff with you. We don't do this posh stuff here, we just do hunting. And the kid would go, I'm not doing posh stuff, I'm just sitting here. And the woman would be back there the next day going, please, I've told you not to do that posh stuff. Will you stop doing that posh stuff? And what was happening, and it probably took a while and a few long, slow hacks on these horses, was that her way of sitting or was saying in the language, horse, you shorten your tummy, you lift your back, you reach into the rain, you fill out your ribcage. And the horses with no schooling or training as such, were just responding to her framework, responding to her bear down. And eventually I think she decided that she just had to sit like a sack of potatoes because it was the only way that was going to make her boss happy. And I reckon she must be the only young rider who's ever been told off for riding a horse that well. Kind of sad, but true. Here we are realising how skill develops over time, how the principles stay the same and how the evolution of your skills begins from apparently simple things like a halt to walk transition, which really isn't that simple at all. So all the best to you here. I hope you really understand this carousel pole idea. I really wanted it to be really clear to you how profound this is and how the interaction works. Because when you extrapolate from that first step to every other step, you really begin to realize how powerful it is that you keeping the balance between your back and your front being a box encourages the horse to do the same and how you give him permission not to do that as soon as you are not in balance. 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 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 at Just Giving 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 or large amount to our Just Giving page we would be so grateful. Many thanks to you.