Ep. 18 On the story of being told to do ‘nothing-something!’, and how to think about the relationship between simplicity and accuracy

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast 18. On our last podcast, we compared the average rider on the average horse riding a halt to walk transition with an elite rider out there in the Grand Prix test riding the transition from piare to passage. And this reminds me of a story which is a true story, which I was told by a client in America. She had a Grand Prix horse and she'd been on a clinic with a very, very big name, a multiple medal winner, and she was having trouble with piare passage. Not so much actually, the transition from piare passage, but more getting into piaff from passage and maintaining the piaff. And he said to her, okay, well, let's ride the piaffe passage tour from the Grand Prix test. And this is a. When you get to the first piaffe, do nothing. So she began here and she got to the first piaf and she did nothing. And he said to why has your horse stopped? And she said, because I'm doing nothing. And he said, do nothing, something. Now, I have an idea of what he meant, but as soon as I heard this story, my brain, well, that gives us four distinctions, doesn't it? We've got nothing, nothing. We've got something something. We've got nothing, something and something nothing. And if that is the entirety of the map that he has in language, his lack of distinctions are going to lead even a Grand Prix rider into a dead end. So he didn't have any how to information to give her. And I do understand what he meant because most people, when they're in piaf and they can't keep the horse going and isn't really working, start to kind of wiggle and jiggle around and move themselves to try and make the horse move, just as a more novice rider might do when the horse doesn't walk on. Again, that's the same principle, isn't it, of a problem that a novice rider experiences because being experienced by an elite rider in an elite situation. But it's down to the same thing. Hearing this story too, I realize how my map with the idea of the carousel pole of staying plugged in, of bear down, how everything might have to stay the same from the knee up, as she was able to kick from the knee down and say, come on, horse, and how she had to keep herself on that correct balance point, all of that might have been good information, but nothing, something that was a bit iffy. Let's think along these lines of plotting a graph. So I hope I'm not frightening you with the idea of a graph. We're going to plot accuracy against simplicity. Now, we're going to put simplicity on the vertical axis and accuracy on the horizontal axis. So if you think of kids in their early lessons, we need something that's going to be really simple and then by definition, it's not going to be terribly accurate. So our first point on our graph would be high up on that vertical axis, high on simplicity and near to zero on the horizontal axis, because it's really very low on accuracy. And if you think of the opposite end of the scale, when things are really accurate, they tend to not be that simple. So you might think back to your college days when maybe you had to read scientific papers, and that, by definition, is not easy. So that's an example of the other end of the graph, where if we had high accuracy, so we went a long way along the horizontal axis, we'd be very near the bottom of the vertical axis because simplicity would be very low, whilst accuracy would be very high. Now, if you think about those two points, the graph that joins them would be a bit like the bottom left quadrant of a circle, except it wouldn't quite be circular, it would go down more parallel to the vertical axis and then curve, so never quite getting to zero, then curve and go along, becoming increasingly close to the horizontal axis, but never quite touch it. So when we become significantly less simple, we become a bit more accurate and significantly less simple and a little bit more accurate, and then a bit less simple and a bit more accurate until we're getting significantly less simple and a lot more accurate and significantly less simple and even more accurate. And this is really what happens in the peeling of the layers near the onion. So we peel these layers as the rider, as it were, gains that increasingly strong microscope lens and perceives, in this case, feels rather than sees a landscape that wasn't even imaginable before. But if we just try and make something really simple, there's the problem that it's likely to become a pack of lies. And sometimes I think that the attempt to make riding skills really simple, grow tall, stretch your legs down, push your heels down, relax, turns those skills into essentially a pack of lies. It's so inaccurate, it's not a viable map. And then you have all these people who are dedicated and really want to learn and bust their butts on time, energy and money put into their riding. And what happens is they really don't get anywhere because they're being fed this pack of lies and it makes really interested, intelligent people look like idiots. So, paradoxically, the attempt to make Riding idiot proof makes normal people look like idiots because it's been simplified into a pack of lies and a map that really does not help to describe the territory. We need all these different explanations for different layers of the onion. And when this works well over time, what happens is the impossible becomes possible, the possible becomes easy, and the easy becomes elegant. This is one of my favorite quotes, and it's from Moshe Feldenkrais, the founder of the Feldenkrais method, which is a system of bodywork that can be immensely helpful for riders. Let me say it again. The impossible becomes possible, the possible becomes easy, and the easy becomes elegant. I find that a really moving statement. And the idea within the culture that people should be able to just go from A to X is ridiculous. You have to go through these stages, not just through the Alphabet, from impossible to possible to easy to elegant. Another of my favourite quotes along the same lines is by a book called the Centered skier by Denise McGluggage. Now, this was published in the 80s and I really hope it's still in print, but I confess I haven't checked. And she talks about breaking up clods of habitual movement like a gardener breaks up earth with a hoe. That's very much what the Feldenkrais work does for people. And we all have clods of habitual movement in our rather disorganized body. Our horses too have clods of habitual movement. Even if they're not what we might call clodhoppers, they would still have that. And horse and rider together develop much more refined perception and coordination. I've been fortunate enough to spend time in the yards or barns, as you say in America, of a number of elite dressage riders. And I think it's really true that when you go into those barns, there is a kind of calm and a self possessedness amongst the horses there that goes beyond the fact that these folks have the best and most dedicated grooms into the horse's sense of presence in themselves and sense of calmness and sense of knowing which way's up. And of course you'll go into other yards where that's really not the case. All the horses are climbing the walls. And I know bodyworkers who say the same kind of things, that they'll go to some yards where there's this calm within the horses and the horses respond really well to treatment and actually don't have that many problems. And other yards where they go in and they do the same kind of treatment and then it gets undone, so they have to Come in and do it again and come in and do it again. And those horses are much more likely to be climbing the walls thinking about different layers of the onion and different descriptions that become increasingly less simple and more accurate. Let's talk about thighs. And I want to tell you a story which I made up, so please be very clear. I made up this story. I think it has more than a grain of truth in it, but it is a figment of my imagination. Now, I grew up riding in a riding school in the 1960s and we were taught to grip with our knees. And quite often we had pieces of paper between our knees and the saddle. And if you came from more wealthy stock, I think you had 10 shilling notes between your knees and the saddle. And at some point in time the teaching changed and became relax your thigh, take your knee off the saddle. Now, I can't really date this, but I think it was somewhere in the early 70s. Here's my fantasy about how it happened. Let's say first of all, in the 60s, the army, the Pony Club and the BHS were all, that's the British Horse Society were all aligned in this teaching of grip with your knees. And my fantasy is that somebody in the British Horse Society who was maybe very high up on the Training and Education Committee had a really good ride one day and in that really good ride they thought, oh my goodness, I'm not gripping with my knees. This is going so well. Grip with your knees is wrong. You have to relax your thighs and take your knees off the saddle. And in my fantasy, this person went back to the committee and told the other fellows of the British Royal Society, who told the instructors, who told the intermediate instructors, who told the assistant instructors, who told Joe Public and oh my goodness, how effective was that? Because it's 50 years later and everybody's still saying, relax your thighs, take your knees off the saddle. At this point in the time the the British Horse Society changed their tack, the army was still gripping with their knees and the Pony Club didn't know what to do. Here's my take on this. Each school of thought, the grip with your knees school of thought and the relax your thighs, take your knees off the saddle school of thought has one half of the truth expressed very poorly in language. So let's unpack this a little bit. So grip with your knees. In the USA you would say pinch with your knees and that really implies that your knees should be the strongest contact. And for a lot of people, that is what comes naturally. We talk about the thigh being snug We've talked about it in previous podcasts as like your dancing partner, hold and your thighs divide very easily into thirds. So the way the muscles of your inside thigh attach into your thigh bone gives you a top third, a middle third and a bottom third roughly the same length. And the top third would end about where the stirrup bar is. Each of those thirds can be on equally or the top third can be on more. But grip with your knees implies that the bottom third would be on more. That certainly doesn't work well. Your knees as a pressure point can make you almost like an old fashioned clothes peg so that you would ping backwards and they could potentially become a pressure point that's a bit inhibiting to your horse's movement. So fore grip with your knees. Read thighs snug all thirds of your thigh on, and you may know the resistance of putting your knuckles on the side of the pommel, on the flap that covers the stirrup bar, and using a pressure with your fist to help you snug in your opposite thigh. So snugging in the top is often not so easy for people, but it's very powerful. So this rider had a really good ride one day and she went, oh my goodness, no, it's not grip with your knees. It's. It's as if you take your thighs off the saddle, relax your thighs, take your knees away. Now again, she's got one half of the truth expressed very poorly in language. If she'd have said to us, it's as if you push your thighs out against a resistance, that would have been helpful. But she didn't understand how thigh muscles work, so she just called it relaxing. Let's explain this a little bit more deeply. So we start in teaching with the inner thighs and the thigh snug. You may have seen some of the old fashioned thigh masters that you could put between your thighs and just use as a pressure and just push against their resistance. Or you may have worked with a Pilates magic circle. So if you do that with your thighs, you're just pushing a resistance between your thighs and just maintaining a push against it. This is known as an isometric muscle use, and it's different to what you do if you went to the gym and you had a machine between your inside thighs and you went, press in, let it come out. Press in, let it come out. Press in, let it come out. That's a different kind of muscle use that's called isometric. But we're doing just a continual push. Now, for most people who start with their thighs off the saddle. It's a real shock to get their thigh on the saddle. And they have to be able to make this dancing partner hold and to have their thighs help support their body weight. So their sitting is more like being on one of those kneeling stools. You cannot support your body weight on your thigh if your thigh is not on the saddle. So we've made contact with the horse, We've globbed onto him. We've made our dancing partner hold. Instead of relax the thigh, take the knee off the saddle with the outside thigh. You have to start by thinking that your inside thigh on the saddle has suction cups connecting you to the horse. If you're really suctioned onto him and your thighs move outwards, his ribcage would come too. It's like you've drawn his thighs out in a kind of a. That encourages his rib cage to expand. But if, in doing that, you lost contact with him, you'd have to narrow in, get your suction all over again, and then begin again with your draw out. You can't do the draw out unless you've done the narrow in. Some coaches imply that if you leave a space between your thigh and the horse, the horse's body will fill it out. Well, in my experience, that's not true in. And it's better to think that you cannot do suction on anything until you've made contact with it. So here's a kind of paradox. You narrow in, you make this contact, you draw out. It's a bit bizarre that the way the inside thigh muscles are working and the outside thigh muscles are working, almost contradicting each other. And it's one of the many paradoxes that. That I have discovered through the years about how this works. And right now, we're not on an ABC at the ABC levels. You're just learning to get your thigh on the saddle and get your dancing partner hold. At the hij levels, we have something that's less simple but much more accurate. How you narrow in is important. Sometimes I'm saying to people, are there air bubbles between your thighs and the saddle? Could you somehow get rid of the air bubbles? Could you really think of globb in the way you make suction? Another idea would be if your thigh and the horse and the saddle were like attracting magnets. So some people kind of automatically do it as if they had repelling magnets. So this is a learnable skill. It's not an abc. It's built on the ABC of your dancing partner hold. And it shows how layers of the onion build on each other and how one layer, when you update it later on deeper into the onion, might almost appear to have a contradiction with the original layer. And how that half of the truth, relax your thigh, take your knees off the saddle has been expressed very poorly in language. And I really think this is a misleading way of drawing the map of riding. It leaves people with their weight on their butt and their feet. They, not their thigh, unable to get a dancing partner hold, unable to do suction. How I wish I had 1/10 of the influence of that person who somehow changed a whole culture and set in play something that's been going now for 50 years. And if I had a magic wand, this is something I would really change for the horse culture because I think it's damaging and difficult for riders. It's a great example of an example, a distorted X not said well in language, presented as an A. So there you go. Please remember this is just my story. It's a figment of my imagination. I suspect there's a grain of truth in it, but it is a very good way to explain what otherwise you could scratch your head over. And the inherent paradox, while really weird, is how it works. 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@justgiving.com and then to search Overdale to find the Justgiving page for Overdale Equestrian Centre. Where 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. Grateful. Many thanks to you.