Ep. 2 What does waterskiing have to do with riding?

Hello and welcome everybody. It's Mary Wanlis again here in our series of podcasts that are going to begin to illuminate for you rider biomechanics and the rider horse interaction and how it works. We've taken my story so far to the point of me giving up riding in despair. I was 27 at that time, taking myself off to live in London selling fire extinguishers, until the point that I was bored enough and broke enough that I got back on a horse again, riding and teaching. My give up probably actually lasted six months and then my career, my second career as a horse world professional began. And this set the tone for the next 40 years of my life through until today. So I was riding this horse for somebody that jogged a lot, and most of the time it pulled on the reins, I pulled on the reins and it just kept jogging. Then every now and again, I could stop it jogging and I didn't know what I'd done, but I knew that what I'd done was highly significant. It would then start jogging again. I would pull, it would pull, and however many minutes later I'd managed to stop it, but I didn't know what I'd done. Meanwhile, my physicist brain was always at the back of this going, there have to be laws of cause and effect. If I can do this on one horse and not another horse, there has to be a reason. If someone else can do it and I can't, there has to be a reason. If I can do it on Monday and not Tuesday, there has to be a reason. There have to be laws of cause and effect. There has to be a science that underlies this art. And I am going to figure this out if it's the last thing I do. So I kept just having this experience, really trying to work out what did I get when I got it, what did I lose when I lose it. How could I make this reproducible for myself? How could I get where I could explain it to somebody else? Because I knew at this point that I was onto something. So my understanding of this now, and actually this understanding evolved fairly quickly during this process, was if I was stood on a little rug and that rug's on a polished floor and somebody pulls that rug out from under my feet in a forward direction, I would topple backwards on the rug, and if the rug was on a polished floor, the rug would shoot out from underneath me more. So here I was on my horse, my horse jogged out from underneath me, like pulling the rug out from under my feet, accelerating out from under me, I, on top of the rug equals horse toppled back. The more I toppled back, the more the rug went out from underneath me and the more tempted I was to pull, but the more the horse just kept jogging out from under me. I called this the water ski motorboat effect. And in fact, my teacher Dan used to talk rather about this in that he'd scream at me, you're water skiing. He would get on my horse, ride my horse so much more powerfully than I could ride my horse, put me back on that horse, and I couldn't even begin to match the forces that his riding had generated. And all he could do was, was yell at me, you're water skiing. He had no fix that he could offer me, and I couldn't figure it out for myself. But here on this jogging horse, I realized that one of the two important factors that got me to where it stopped jogging, I stopped pulling, it stopped pulling was instead of water skiing, I caught up to the correct balance point, which meant that my center of gravity was, was directly over the horse's center of gravity. There was another thing I did, too. I realised that in my pulling, I would tend to lean back and I would tend to suck in my stomach. Maybe do that now. Just suck your stomach in. You can feel that's not terribly good for your breathing and not something you could maintain for very long. But when you're on a horse and you're a little bit nervy and things are going wrong, a lot of people have a and their stomach sucks in and they get stuck there. When I got out of that pulling match and I caught up to the balance point, I started to use my abdominal muscles in a very different way. And instead of sucking my stomach in, what began to happen, I realized eventually was that I was pulling my stomach in to make a wall and then pushing my guts against that wall. Now, I can give you an experience here now. And this, however, you can only do if you're not driving your car. If you're driving your car listening to this podcast, you either have to remember this to do it later, but you won't be able to do it while you're driving. Certainly once we get into the basics of using two hands. But for the moment, put one hand on your stomach and clear your throat. So when you clear your throat and you go. Or you could cough, you will feel your abdominal muscles push out against your hand. Now, I started teaching this to people and people started saying to me, oh, this is what you do when you have a baby. This is Bearing down. So I called it bearing down. Now, I had discovered core strength and how people use their core. The concept of core strength, the words core strength, nobody had come up to it, come up with at this point in time. This was kind of 1979, 1980, but I had discovered how riders use their core. And in those days, riding teachers never, ever said anything about your core. I used to hear, use your back. Now, part of the whole raison d' etre of my work and one of its big tenets is how we use language in riding arenas, because on the whole, language has been used very, very poorly within our traditions of instructing. So if you said, use your back to 100 different people, you could get 100 different responses of different things being done physically within each person's body. And it's true over the years that I've had so many different feelings where I've gone, okay, so this could be what use your back means. And a few months later, I might come up with something else and go, yeah, okay. The words use your back might have been meant to describe this, but if you say those words to people, you would end up with what is known as multifinality. In other words, many end points. And saying those words is no guarantee at all that what the instructor really wants to have happen will happen. Nowadays, you don't so often hear, use your back. You hear, use your core. But the same is true when told to use their core. Most people don't have the first clue what to do. And that concept needs taking apart to become something that is reproducible between different riders. So we don't have slippage between the words that are said and, and what each person does in response to that word. And we can end up with what we could call equifinality, which is the same end point throughout many, many riders. We then have a skill which is learnable and reproducible. So use your core is a sort of buzzword type phrase these days, but it's not explained well enough for most people to get it. And at this point in time, this is where I want you to have two hands free and you're going to sit yourself up to where you're vertical. We want your torso to be vertical and like a box. So that would mean that the length of your front from your collarbone to your pubic bone matches the length of your back from the nape of your neck to your tailbone. And you're going to put one hand just under your sternum, and on your back, put your thumb and your first finger each side of your spine at the same level of your front hand. So just under your sternum. You have one hand on your back, one hand on your front. You're going to put on a fair amount of pressure and you're going to go. And I want you to feel the muscles push out against your hand. The pressure may need to be stronger than you think it does. And you. Until you feel strong muscles pushing against the resistance of your hands. Then put your hands on your sides. I normally put the back of my fingers between my ribs and my hips. Put a fair amount of pressure on your sides and again, go. Or cough. And you should feel your sides press out against your hands. Notice whether you think you're stronger in your sides, stronger in your back, stronger in your front. It's going to be different for different people. Then put your fingers of one hand on your bikini line. And again, go. And again. You should feel your innards push against the resistance of your hands. So this is what I called bearing down. So many women said to me, oh, this is bearing down. This is what you do when you have a baby. And that name stuck. We also, amongst our international crew of coaches, often use the words bear forward, bear out, bear against. None of the words are brilliant and all of them have a shortcoming. And we actually have coaches working in English, French, German, Polish, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian. I think I have all the languages there. And none of these languages. Oh, Dutch. None of these languages have really good terms for. You pull your stomach in to make a wall and you push your guts against the wall. Now what you're really doing when you do that is you're increasing the pressure in your insides. Think about how going get something in your insides out. You're clearing your lungs or you're clearing your throat through that increase in your internal pressure. So most riders are really stunned to first learn about this, because this is not relaxing and elite riders don't know they're doing this, but they are bearing down the whole time. Bearing down and breathing, maintaining this high internal pressure. Because the bottom is that we as riders get to stabilize our body on top of a moving medium. It's rather like a surfer riding his surfboard on a wave. He's stabilizing his body on top of a moving medium. So are skateboarders and snowboarders and skiers and all of those requirements that really high internal pressure to help you withstand the forces which are acting on your body. Interestingly, racing car drivers are apparently some of the fittest of athletes because they're Going at such speeds around bends, having to deal with forces of however many G and not being deformed by those forces, so they are still in charge of the car and they are still steering and making turns happen. So the notion of relaxing, which is what most people are trying to do, can get you into trouble. Now, for relax, I would substitute breathe. Be calm, be focused, be quiet inside your head, be noticing. But relax doesn't mean be a rag doll. And certainly when I was told to relax when I was a student back in the time of trying to pass my British Horse Society exam, I would half of me think I should just go, ah. And just expect everything to happen because I was supposed to be relaxed. Well, it doesn't work like that. The rider has to be really able to stabilize her body on this moving medium to organize her center of gravity and to do it so well that she can organize the horse underneath her. And if she's really relaxed, she's a bit of what we might call a water weed. So water weed would be taken and placed wherever the current of the river would put it. And that level of go with the flow doesn't give you enough organization to be able to lead the dance. If you think of riding like a couple's dance form, the rider would be like the woman. Sorry, the rider would be like the man who leads the dance. The horse would be like the woman who follows the dance. And to be able to lead the dance requires massive body control and stability. Just what I didn't have that day when I went and cried behind the muck heap, when my teacher screamed at me, can't you control your body? And the thought that went through my head was, no, of course I can't. If I could, I wouldn't be here. I'd be out being a rider who was paid to ride horses, who was competing and winning. But here I am in your riding school trying to learn this. Please help me control my body. Bearing down for me was a massive breakthrough, and it is for just about every rider I teach it to, although many people really, really struggle to believe it. This makes me think of one woman I used to teach in California who actually was a very good belly dancer. Now you can imagine belly dancing. She could wiggle her body so much, she could run ripples from her tailbone up to her head. She could do amazing thing. She was semi professional as a belly dancer. Could she stabilize her body on a horse? Not very well. And I taught her about bearing down. And I kind of knew she didn't really buy It. And then I can remember a clinic I did there. And I walked up to the arena. She was my first lesson after lunch and I looked at her on her horse and I said, okay, this is really different, what did you do? And she looked at me and she said, well, I had to do a long car journey and I decided I was going to bear down from beginning to end. It was about a three hour journey. On the way there. I managed the first 10 minutes and then I'd had it. I couldn't breathe, I was disorganized. I just hated it. And then on the way home, I went, okay, this is it, I need to do this. And so she managed to get herself through this hurdle where her body went, it can't be like this, I can't sustain this, I can't do it, I can't breathe. She managed to get herself through that hurdle and at the end of four hours, she had pretty much got through that hurdle to where she could do it. And as I walked up from 50 yards away towards that riding arena, I could see the difference and bearing down like that. Getting the hang of that is a bit like throwing a six at the beginning of a board game. You know, all these snakes and ladders type or Monopoly type board games where you can't even begin till you've thrown a six. And once you've thrown a six, then the whole game begins to unfold. The irony is, of course, that elite riders are doing this, but don't know they're doing it. This was one of the key things that my teachers weren't telling me back in the days when I was obsessing about, there's something they're not telling me, there has to be something they're not telling me. They weren't being difficult, they weren't deliberately keeping their secrets. They did it so naturally, so easily. They didn't even know it was possible for people to not do it. And because they didn't have that knowledge in consciousness, they only had it as instinctive know how they couldn't put it into words and they couldn't pass it on. And that left most of their students basically impoverished. And if you think about it, there's very often people being working students or young riders in the barn of somebody who's a more elite rider. And very rarely can those elite riders really and truly clone themselves. If they had the ability to put what they're doing in into words, then those skills can be passed on. But any skills which are unconscious and instinctive, part of the know how, if you like, of elite riders, some of you may know the phrase unconscious competence. Part of the unconscious competence, the autopilot patterns that happen within that person's body cannot be passed on. And that inability to put skills into words becomes a limit on the skills that anybody can teach. So you could think of a teacher in any sphere. Advanced concert pianists do not tend to give early piano lessons to young children. Maths maestros don't tend to be very good at teaching basic maths to children. Anything that's instinctive and easy to you, you are not likely to teach well. And actually, in these early days in London, when I was on my way back from having given up teaching again, involved in psychotherapy, becoming very interested in how people tic, how people learn, how people get stuck, what helps to unstick them. I was in Change's bookshop one day, which was well known as a bookshop within that field, and I picked a book off a shelf and I opened it at random at a page, and I read, if you want to learn a skill, do not go to somebody who is really highly skilled in that field, go to somebody who struggled to learn it. And this was me in those early days of coaching in London, when I confess that most of my students were the people who'd run away in tears from every other professional who was working on the London fringes. And they were patiently helping me figure this out, knowing that they were crossing a watershed in their own skills and their own abilities and understanding. So I picked up that book and I bought it. And it was Frogs into Princes and one of the early books on neuro linguistic programming by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. And that book, I knew immediately was for me, and it began to shape my thinking, to be one of the forces that shaped my thinking during the 1980s when this work was being born. So with those thoughts, I get to leave you now and our next podcast will dig a little deeper into this. And meanwhile, have a great time with your horses and enjoy your riding.

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, 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.