Ep. 28 - On toolkits, tantrums and leg aids

Hello, I'm Mary Wandlis welcoming you to podcast 28, where I want to begin with a final review of the three toolkits. The fact that they're so unacknowledged that we have these three maps or three different ways of looking at riding and training is largely because there are so many trainers who are conscious of their competence in one toolkit, but unconscious of their competence in probably the other two, but certainly one of them. That means they don't acknowledge, see or teach that toolkit, and they only believe in the toolkit where they have conscious competence. So it's easiest to be conscious of your competence in the second toolkit, which is the school movements. So it's easy to understand how leg yield leads into shoulder in leads into half pass, and how you're positioning the horse's body and affecting him in various ways. And if you're already a good rider, as in you have good first toolkit biomechanics skills in place, you don't realise that there's more to it than just using these movements as gymnastics for your horse. The next easiest toolkit to be conscious of your competence in is, is the Zero Toolkit. And in other cultures, actually in America, with its cowboy culture of natural horsemanship, that might be actually the easiest of the three to be conscious of your competence. And it's easier to learn where to stand, how to position yourself, how to organise your horse, and way easier to be in charge of your body when you're on your feet than it is when you're in the saddle rider biomechanics, the first toolkit, my area of expertise is the hardest of all of them to be competent and conscious of your competence. Maybe you stumbled across good patterns through the discoveries of time and talent, and you don't even know you have those and other people don't. Or if you've consciously learned about that toolkit, you'll know you've done it. Prejudice between these different toolkits and their exponents will always exist. So Andrew MacLean, the founder of the Zero Toolkit as equine learning Theory, is a friend we meet at conferences every now and again, and I really enjoy his company. But I also know he said he'd rather die than have a riding biomechanics lesson. But I actually don't think he knows what that biomechanics would look like, sound like and feel like. But at the same time, he acknowledges that pupils who've grown up within my system are really fun and easy for him to teach. So he knows they've got something others haven't. If I go back to my youth, despite my reference to Empire of the sun, and you salute the general, drink the sake, run to your airplane for the kamikaze ride where you hope you can stay on. I just wanted to be on my horse. I didn't have time for faffing around on the ground. And now, of course, I see that differently. And I can acknowledge that age is part of that. And of course, as a proponent of the first toolkit, it really bugs me that the horse world won't admit that you cannot not influence, just via your sitting, the position of your center of gravity, you, your asymmetry, how wobbly or shovey you are, how much you support your body weight or don't. There's a small amount of lip service, but really and truly, that's it. Although I'll be the first to tell you that rider biomechanics is not the easiest puzzle to solve. And I also have to admit on the individual level, that a lot of riders will just live their life going, yeah, I can't be bothered to faff about with that. I just want to ride shoulder in almost a little bit. Like me going, I don't want to faff about with groundwork. I just want to be on my horse. Within the second toolkit, a lot of trainers do that. Well, even not acknowledging the first and the zero toolkit, though, I'm not convinced that people hold the improvement they get if they don't own how they got there. And it will always be true that more maps of the territory of more ways of looking at the same situation enrich your experience and give you many more perspectives and tools in your toolkit. Within this model, I like to expand the Xero toolkit to include what I call the supporting arts, saddlery, farrier and bodywork. For your horse, these are really asking, is your horse comfortable with his saddle? Is he comfortable with his feet? Does he have a body that's capable of doing what you want it to do? And when you consider that, maybe first of all, consider what percentage of the people you know are the walking wounded. They don't limp, but they might have headaches or back pain or other things going on in their body that limit their energy and make them not as robust and thriving as they could. Similarly, we can ask what percentage of horses are the walking wounded? They don't overtly limp, but they too could have headaches or back pain. When somebody first presented me with the idea that horses could get headaches, that was maybe 30 years ago. It blew my mind. But they have the same neuropeptides, the same brain chemistry, the same muscular fascial system as we do. It can happen. I think a huge number of horses are essentially the walking wounded. And of course, if you're training your horse and you've hit a patch where things are not going well, it can be very hard to decide if your horse is throwing tantrums like a two year old, or if the truth of the matter is that he hurts. And personally, I really like to give the horses the benefit of the doubt. And one of my horses, who's a rather delicate flower, I reckon it takes three different bodyworkers to keep him on the road. One of our horses, one of our school horses has come in from the two months they were out at grass and not working in way better shape. I'm almost certain he had a headache that got a chance to dissipate. And he's so much more fun to be around and looks like he's having so much more fun in life. And the most robust horses have a kind of, let me at it approach that's not deterred by some form of discomfort from yesterday. And it has to be like that with any athlete. Any athlete is going to tolerate a fair amount of discomfort during their training and they know it's going to be like that and they're fine with it. Some horses are fine with it and others are the kind who go, oh, my ear itches, I can't possibly trot today. And those delicate flowers are much harder to work with. And their rideability score is likely to be a lot lower. I was talking recently with a body worker about a horse of ours and she was suggesting that this horse couldn't feel his right side as well as he could feel his left side. Now, that was a new idea to me that I just hadn't thought of. But I know so many humans that have that issue. One side of their body is much clearer to them in their field sense than the other. It does what they want it to so much more effectively. Why should horses be different? And they're made of the same kind of stuff as us. It's almost inevitable that they can't be different. So let's think now about leg aids, or at least the go aid, because when we're on the ground, the, the whip tap is the go aid and you whip tap where your leg would be when you're riding. And the fact that you go tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap allows you to stop tapping at just the right moment. If from the ground or riding, you just went whack, you wouldn't teach your horse anything. In fact, you'd just punish him, especially if he couldn't predict why or when it was going to happen. And that would not be good. So if you were leading him in the training position from the ground, you would want to not drag him. If he started to not walk on you, tap, tap, tap again. To get him to walk on the taps, you do need to be light and quick. They're a kind of, come on, come to the party, come on, wake up. And of course, you need the right whip. And on dresshouse training tv, we sell fleck whips, which are the best, and they're very light and they transmit force really well. What doesn't work is the kind of whip that goes. That's too soggy. You need something harder than that and lighter. And when I say harder, I should say stiffer. Stiffer than that and lighter. And to really appreciate that, when you're on the ground, the whip tap is the aid replacing your leg. And when you're riding, the whip tap is a consequence when the horse doesn't listen to your leg. And a consequence is very different to a punishment. And it's really important that you think about it that way. And by using a series of light, quick taps, you can back off at just the right moment. And that's very different to just the one big hit. So when people are riding, I often have to teach them how to hold the whip so that it lies still on their leg about two thirds of the way down their thigh. It's then at the correct angle for them to be able to use it just behind their leg. Lots of people hold their whip with their wrist kind of rolled over, so when they were riding, they could probably see their fingernails and the whip rests across their thigh, right at the top of the thigh. If they then use it, they're going to use it on some part of the horse's body or way back from where their leg is, and it won't have the same association for the horse. Some people really struggle to hold the whip so it just rests on their thigh and it jiggles about all over the place. Well, on a sensitive, delicate horse, that would not be good. And you almost need to press your whip against your thigh a little bit to have it hold there. And that way of it resting 2/3 down your thigh, one third up from your knee, there's a little place there that's almost an indentation. A muscle inserts and putting it there is remarkably hard for some folks. And of course, none of us are going to be able to whip tap quite as well with our non dominant hand as we do with our dominant hand. But you just practise till you get better at it. So the whip tap kind of happens when you've used your leg and you didn't get a response. But you have to be careful that kick tap, tap doesn't become the new normal. You have to whip tap until you get a response. And sometimes on a horse, you have to escalate your whip tap. Realise what you're trying to do is to change your horse's brain chemistry. He needs more get up and go chemicals, fewer rest and digest chemicals. This is an interesting fact. Apparently camels are so phlegmatic and so immersed in the kind of rest and digest brain chemicals that they can happily eat thorns. Getting a camel in to go might be a lot harder than getting a horse to go. And if you do use a leg aid, let's say, to go from halt to walk, realise that you asked your horse to accelerate. And having asked him to accelerate, it's very important that you as rider, do not get left behind. So you asked him to pull the rug out from under your feet. And if you topple backwards, the rug's going to go out from underneath you, more like on a polished floor. And this might just mean that you meant him to walk on. He accelerates, you topple backwards, it became a jog. The fact that he accelerates out from underneath you and keeps accelerating doesn't necessarily mean he went really fast. But if you're going to use a leg aid, it behoves you to get really good at still being on the correct balance point when that acceleration has happened, be it halt to walk or walk to trot, and from trot to canter. You want to think of the aid barely being an acceleration. It's basically more like changing gear in a car rather than putting your foot on the gas. So when you're riding and you use your leg, it needs to be like a slap. Now, what makes a slap a slap is the fact that it always rebounds. You can do a very light slap or you can do a heftier slap, but that slap is always a very quick in and out. It's a touching away. That's different to a nudge or a squeeze, which is more prolonged. Now, this is really important because a lot of people try and get more strength by going for longer. And in a way, the energy you put in is the Energy, you get out. And if you put in, you get out. If you put in a light and quick. Come on. You're more likely to get a. Oh, yeah, okay, wake up, shake up, kind of I'll come to the party deal. You want to be sitting in a way that has rotated your thighs inwards so you could think of having your knees in, your toes in, and your heels away from your horse's side. And we've talked about this before as being rather like doing a snowplow in skiing, only it's as if your skis are set in concrete. Teachers teaching kids in skiing talk about the shape of a pizza wedge with the point of the pizza wedge in front of your skis and. And that baseline of thigh on the saddle in your dancing partner. Hold knees in, toes in heels away from the horse's side is important. So we could say that your thigh and your butt are moulded onto the horse, and in fact, your thighs and your butt are moulding the horse onto you. Your lower leg needs to belong to you. The knee is a kind of separation point, so you can choose to kick or. Or not kick. Now, with a very hyper horse, you may have to go through a stage where you're really keeping your lower leg on as a way of desensitising him. So this will be rather like the whip desensitization of stroking the horse with the whip that you were doing groundwork. So you don't want a horse that goes waa and has an existential crisis every time you put your leg on. So that might mean you do a lot of whip desensitization from the ground. You'd have your lower legs on him. You'd get where can move your lower legs and he doesn't react. And that would take the time it takes. But you really want to get to knees in, toes in, heels away. Your lower leg is belonging to you. Your upper thigh, well, your thigh and your butt are moulded onto the saddle, molding the horse onto you. A friend of mine was at the Atlanta Olympics, and she had a seat watching the dressage the that was directly behind either E or B. Those are the markers halfway along the long side. And in the Grand Prix test at that time, the riders rode a change of rein in walk from E to B. And she took a photograph of Klaus Bulkenall, the German rider who won the gold medal on his horse Goldstein. In her photograph, she could see the entirety of somebody's face between Balconal's lower leg and the side of his Horse on the right and the same on the left. A complete face of somebody on each side. It was the most brilliant photograph. And Balconol was one of the biggest exponents of knees in toes in heels away from the horse's side. So there was that potential to see a whole face on each side. So as soon as you try to find strength in your leg aids, it's going to get you into trouble. You know, your leg aid is a cue. It's a signal to the horse. It's a communication. It doesn't mean to squeeze him and make him move. That's really important. I think people think that sometimes in canter that they have to make the horse with their leg somehow change. The light quick leg is much more effective than the prolonged leg. The value of the leg aid is in the rebound. And when you do that leg aid, it's really important that nothing changes from the knee up, that your dancing partner hold has been maintained. So you might want to just stand up for a minute and put your arms down by your sides. And we're going to pretend your arms are your legs. You've got your upper arm like your thigh, and your lower arm like your lower leg. And your hands can just be palm down close to you. And could you keep your upper arm by your side and use your hand to slap your thigh a few times? Kind of like that. So maybe you can hear my slap. That's your arms mirroring what your legs need to be able to do. You can also do this standing if you stand and maybe hold onto the back of a chair or something, because you're going to stand on one leg. Make sure the nobbles, which I call your knee nobbles, they're actually on the bottom inside of your thigh bones and are touching. So your thighs are touching and your knee nozzles are touching. You stand on one leg, put your other lower leg a little bit away from your standing leg and then do that kind of slap on yourself, that quick in and out movement. And practice doing that. Practice doing it with both leg. You have to be able to choose to kick or not kick. And you have to be able to kick inwards as you've just been doing, not backwards. So you've just demonstrated, first of all with your arms and then with your legs, how your lower leg can move inwards. But it's also true that your knee joint is a hinge. And when that hinge closes, it brings your lower leg back closer to your thigh. You don't want that to happen. When you're riding as the structure of how you kick your lower leg must go inwards, like one of your legs kicking the other, and not go backwards. If you do a good but rather big leg aid, the kind of leg aid that might be a wake up call, it will make a noise, it will thunk against the horse's side. And you want to have this in your repertoire, but obviously you don't want it to be what you do every time time. It's true that almost everybody has what I call their kicking leg and their kicking leg is the one that moves easily and actually it's normally the more wobbly leg. So it moves about perhaps in a rather random fashion. And that moving about gets recruited into kicking. It also tends to be the leg where the heel too easily comes back and up and the knee joint too easily closes as that lower leg is going too far back on the horse's side to give an aid. So this is a question for you to contemplate between now and our next podcast. How far down each of your legs are you solid and in control? Think of yourself as a stuffed toy rider. We're really asking how far down each of your legs does the stuffing go? Where do you run out of stuffing so that your leg becomes what I'm going to call noodley? We could also how far down each leg does your leg obey orders? Now it may be that you don't get as far as your knee. It's highly likely you don't get as far as your foot. Some people so almost can't control any of it just below their hip. And I've known people refer to my leg and the leg as if it belonged to somebody else or my leg and the alien leg. So how to get your lower legs to behave themselves will be where we'll begin in our next podcast, taking that more into the how's, whens, whys of kicking. Meanwhile, take the time to practice these standing exercises and notice the how far down you're solid, in control in both legs when you're riding and in your riding. Have fun, enjoy your horses, and I'll be back next time.