Ep. 29 On stuffing, intention, and giving leg aids consciously.

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast number 29. Previously we went from talking about the three toolkits to talking about leg aids. And this is an area where so much can go so wrong. I think it works well to describe the ideal leg aid as a slap. It can be very a light slap or, or it can be a slightly more hefty slap. But either way, a slap is always a quick in and out, almost like me clapping my hands done over. Yet many riders leg aids become a squeeze or a nudge, and that's much less effective. And in its way of being more prolonged, it involves more muscles and more effort from the rider, so she puts more input to get less output. Another group of riders cling on with their lower legs. Maybe they know they do it, maybe they don't, maybe they've been taught to do it. But there'll be a subset of horses where that lower leg on all the time becomes a real danger signal and the horse flow freaks. I find this happens to people more in canter. So in trot, people usually manage more easily to get their thigh and their butt moulded onto the saddle, their knee being the hinge joint that it is, creating a separation between their thigh and their lower leg. So their lower leg can be on the horse's side or off the horse's side. Choose to kick, choose to not kick. But there's been an awful lot of relax your thigh, take your knee off the saddle in recent years. And with that, an awful lot of people going thigh off, calf on and quite often clinging on with their calves. And in canter, people seem to find it more difficult to take their lower leg away, to be able to kick, to be able to not kick. And some horses will respond to the clinging on rider, especially if she's actually really the kind of nervous rider who goes into a fetal crouch when something goes wrong. So the horse begins to speed, she tips forward, grab the reins a bit, clings on with her lower leg. Well, that's about as unhorse friendly as it can get. And of course, for that rider, her fears are likely to become a self fulfilling prophecy. So really training yourself to get your stability from the dancing partner hold of your butt and your thigh with the ability to have your lower leg where you put it and still or moving as you choose. My question to you at the end of the last webinar was how far down each of your legs are you solid and in control? That's another way of saying if you were a stuffed toy rider, how far down each leg does the stuffing go. And I hope you've been able to take some time noticing that and to come up with an answer, and I suspect your answer is different for the two legs. Many people can keep their thighs fairly solid, firm, and, in the language I like to use, well stuffed. But they really do go wibbly and wobbly at some point in their calf. And for most people, their feet in their boots are almost as if their feet were made of mush. If you were feeling yourself really clearly, you'd have a sense in your feet of the long bones, the five long bones going from the front of your ankle to each of your toes. And those long bones would help to put structure on your. Inside your foot and to make it feel as if you can get the sole of your foot at least flat and you can feel what your foot is doing, rather than it's this mushy, wobbly thing on the end of your leg. So you may know enough anatomy to know that in both your arms and your legs, your upper arms and your thighs have one big bone in them. And your lower arm and your calves have. Have two bones. And in your hand, that enables you to rotate your wrists so you can really turn your hands over. And in your feet, you can't totally rotate your feet in the way you can your hands, but it gives more possibility for movement. And the big bone that comes down from under your kneecap on the inside of the two is the tibia. And at the front of your shin, you can actually feel a ridge where there's a kind of almost corner in the tibia and a really clear sense of that bone not much below the skin. And in fact, if you whack your shin, it's really painful because the periosteum, which is the skin that covers the bone, is very sensitive, and you will bruise it and you'll really know you've done it. Now, outside of that big bone is the fibula, and it's not part of your knee. It begins from a bony knobble on the outside of your calf, about where the top of your riding boot would be. And it goes down to the outside of your ankle, forming the outer nobble in your ankle. And between those two bones, there's a membrane. And I think of that membrane a bit like the sail of a boat. And the two bones come together at your ankle, and you've got the tibia and the fibula with this kind of nobble at the top. So there's almost a long, thin triangle shape between these two bones. And you can imagine it filled by a white membrane that might be almost a bit like the sail on a boat. If that membrane is kind of loose and able to wobble around, your lower leg will be wobbly. If you can get that membrane to become taut, your lower leg will become more taut and firmer in general. So it's almost as if within your lower leg you want to get the effect of pulling those bones apart. Now, if you're sitting in a chair, you could make your torso in neutral, your back the same length as your front, your vertical and your thighs at 90 degrees to your torso and your calves perpendicular to the ground. And as you're there, could you imagine pulling the bones apart in your lower legs? I suspect you can. And if you can, you'll feel a real sense of filling out, an intensity in your lower legs. Can you add to that by bringing your toes up, spreading your toes so within your boots you want your toes to go up. So if you put your hands out in front of you with your palms down and your palms and fingers parallel to the ground, and then you lift your fingers as far as you can, keeping them straight, that's what you want to do with your toes. So let's let that go a minute. Just feel your calf as it is. If you don't think of pulling those bones apart and tensioning the membrane, and now pull the bones apart again and lift your toes. You could also here in sitting, or it might be even better if you were standing in an on horse position. Think of your ankle nobbles and as if they were pulled down towards the ground. So at this point in time, you've got your bony knobbles pulling apart, your toes up, your ankle nobbles, pulled down to the ground. And I'm hoping you've been able to make a feeling out of my words and that you can go, oh, my goodness, yes, that really changes my calves. Now, it's harder to do that ridden than on the ground, but actually you can practise just sitting, driving your car, walking, and practice too on the horse. So if your leg was like that and you then gave a leg aid, the leg aid would have more clout. If your lower leg lacked stuffing when you gave that leg aid, it would be almost like your calf was a piece of limp lettuce, you know, and you couldn't easily make that quick in and out slap with a piece of limp lettuce. So you want to have that firm quality in your calf. You want to train yourself to be able to do that in Walk, rising trot, sitting trot and Canterbury. It's not that easy for a lot of people, especially in sitting trot, where their legs just tend to go noodly and wobble about and canter, where more people tend to kind of cling on. And when clinging on goes really wrong, what will happen is that you'll curl your toes inside your boots, like your toes grab onto the stirrup. And we've talked about this before in a previous webinar. This is part of a prehensile reaction in the deepest, oldest parts of the brain that if you were an ape in tree about to fall into the jaws of the hungry tiger, grabbing onto a branch on the way down might just save you. So your instincts, when you think yikes. Will have you curl your fingers and curl your toes in the hope of grabbing onto something and saving your life. Grabbing onto the stirrup, though, does not work well. And the effects of curling your toes like that go into your calf and into your thigh. Maybe if you sit and do it now, maybe you can feel it going up into your thigh muscles and even potentially into your pelvic floor. So developing that quality of firm stuffing under your control, no limp lettuces makes no curling toes makes a massive difference. Another thing is around how conscious you are of this kick. And quite often I will say to a say the word kick every time you kick and they go something like kick, kick, kick. I won't go on with this because it'll get boring. But the time span between each time they say kick could well be longer than I just did. Then I say to okay, now I'm going to say kick every time I see you kick. And then I end up kick, kick, kick, kick, kick, kick, kick. Normally in almost exactly that rhythm. And the person sometimes really, I don't mean to kick then I don't know, I'm doing it now. My answer when somebody doesn't know they're doing it is to have them exaggerate the problem until they can feel it. So I have them go, okay, let's exaggerate that kick. And sooner or later they get where they can feel themselves going, kick, kick, kick, kick. Or doing at least what we might call a pseudo kick. So it may not be a really dramatic kick that catches the horse's side, but there could be a bit of a closing of their knee, a bit of a lifting of their heel, a bit of a turning out of their toe. So something of a contortion. That's a kind of sort of kick. They probably learned this in the riding school, in their early days of riding on a variety of lazy horses, and it's just become part of what they do on being unconscious of their incompetence. And yet there's part of them, even though they're unconscious, of using that leg aid, that expects the horse to consciously respond to that leg aid. Now, that's a bit sad. The reality, of course, is that the horse will either go autistic or ballistic. As my friend so beautifully said one time, thoroughbreds go ballistic. Warm bloods go autistic. Well, the horse probably hasn't gone ballistic because she'd really know she had a problem if that happened. But the horse might have gone within itself, retreated away from the world, and the rider hasn't really realised this. It is the easiest thing in the world to train your horse to be dead to the leg. If your philosophy were that you needed to kick to make every step of walk, then I ask you, however might you be able to ride a canto pirouette? Now, perhaps you don't aspire even to a canto pirouette, perhaps you just want to be a happy hacker, but you're even there on your happy hack, going, kick, kick, kick, kick. And it's draining for you, even though you maybe don't know you're doing it. And your horse has to either go, yeah, right, whatever, or freak out. Another version of this is the person and they're going kick, kick with their inside leg. And then they say to me, but I have to get a bend. And then I say to them, well, all the kicking you're doing, is it working to create the bend? You. You seem to have to keep doing it. And what I'm actually seeing is not a bend. If anything, I'm seeing what I would call a jackknife, where the vertebra by the horse's wither are working as a hinge. And the horse is being like what we would call an articulated lorry here in the UK and folks in the US would call an 18 wheeler. And it could be that his nose is to the inside, his wither's towards the outside. He might be really falling out on a circle. And this person riding is keeping kicking because they want their bend, which isn't a bend, it's a jackknife. And they can't steer. So I really just try and get them to stop kicking, because that is not how you make a bend and it is making things really not work well. And the horse may well have tuned out to that too. So it's just passing the time of day. The moral is, if you don't mean it, don't use it. If you use your leg, you need to mean it. There needs to be a consequence for the horse if he doesn't listen, which. Which is your series of light, quick whip taps, which you stop immediately that you get a response. Sometimes I think people need a personality transplant. And I hate to say it, but I think this is particularly British because there are the people who. The extreme of this I've said before, is the person who's kick, kick, kick, kick, kick, and would like to tell you, well, I'm trying to make him go, but at the same time, maybe unconsciously, what's really happening is they're making sure they don't succeed because if they did succeed, they'd be scared. This person, if you remember back to our podcasts on Polyvagal Theory, may be one of these people who's been scared to death and who has a somewhat defeated attitude to life and riding. So they go through the motions of trying to make something happen with no expectation of succeeding. And yet in riding with a leg aid and many other facets of riding, intention is a big part of the game. The horse picks up on your intention and if your intention is not, come on, we're going to. Your intention is just kick, kick, kick, kick. You're going through the motion in some semi conscious or unconscious way. Your intention and probably your bear down is playing no part in making that leg aid have value and meaning. Sometimes people have to believe they have the right to set some parameters for the horse they're riding. I was teaching someone recently and the issue wasn't so much around go, it was more around a rather full of his own ego Cobb, who could go around with his ears in her chin and his chest leading the way. He was elongating his underside and he looked very proud of his bosom. And as the rider began to change this, and he really needed to become proud of his crest because actually this horse has a rather nice crest and not just a nice pair of pecs in his bosom. But I was saying to her, you're doing it right and you have the right. Hang in there, you're doing it right and you have the right. And she said after the lesson, it was so helpful when you said that to me because he would convince me that I don't have the right and he would be there going, yes, dear, I know you think you can run this show, but really, I'm sorry, this is my show. And we're doing it this way. And you really are sewing context consequential. And you don't have the right, but she does have the right. Someone has to lead the dance, someone has to be the captain of the ship. And our aim is that that's going to be the rider. And yet there's this legion of riders who would just keep nagging in an ineffectual way. And a useful analogy, I think, is the following. When you're lying in bed in the morning, thinking about getting out of bed, thinking about getting out of bed can be pretty miserable. And maybe you're someone with kids who have to get out of bed in the morning and go to school. And there could be this conversation that goes on that goes, come on, you've got to get out of bed. And the person or the horse goes, I don't want to. And you go, you've got to. I don't want to. You've got to. Don't want to. You've got to, don't want to. Well, the whole time of your ride could be spent doing this. And the reality is you as the human are not having a lot of fun and he as the horse is not having a lot of fun. And you know that you have a much better time in life when you get out of bed, when you're finally up and running. So it's a little brutal to say you have to rip the bedclothes off him, that's overkill. But you have to get him out of bed. And getting him out of bed might need a lighter kick, a bigger kick, a series of whip taps. But you need to change his brain chemistry so he has more get up and go brain chemicals and way less ho hum, whatever. We're just being in bed, rather miserable, depressed brain chemicals. And this could mean you need to change your own brain chemicals. But you're coming at this and a kind of here we go, nag, nag, nag, nag. You're putting in such a blur kind of energy that you're likely to get blur out. Now, this is an experiment that it's really worth you trying. And it's a little hard to explain just through language on a podcast, but I think we can do it. Most people who are kick, kick, kick, kick, kick. That kick is happening as one of the horse's shoulders is going back. What you want to think of, you could maybe say that rhythm to yourself and then you want to turn it into both legs kick. And then on two occasions where you would have gone Kick, kick. You don't kick. So the rhythm would then, kick, don't, don't. Kick, don't, don't. Kick, don't, don't. Kick, don't, don't. This strategy is actually one of Dr. Andrew Maclean's, the founder of equine learning theory, and it's a very good one. First of all, you have to stay conscious to time yourself on kick, don't, don't. You can't just fall into unconsciousness. The second thing is that don't, don't, don't builds in a reward. You get off his case when you're just going, kick, kick, kick, kick. It's like background music in a supermarket. You don't notice it after a while, or he doesn't notice after a while. And with no reward, why should he bother? You're training him to be dead to your leg. So if you can find the timing for when you would have gone, kick, kick, kick, kick, kick, and say to yourself, kick, don't, don't. In the don't, don't. Your heels are away from his side, both legs together. Kick, don't, don't. Kick, don't, don't. Kick, don't, don't. That might have to become kick and whip, tap till you get a response, don't, don't, Kick and tap, don't, don't. Kick and tap, don't, don't. And very soon you'll only have to kick, and very soon you want to back off completely because he'll get the message. Then you don't kick at all. When his clockwork starts to wind down, as it were, and he starts to back off, at that point you go, kick, don't, don't. Kick, don't, don't. And a few repetitions should be enough for you to be able to completely get off his case and leave him to go. And it's only when he backs off that that you come in again with kick, don't, don't. So the sooner you notice he backs off, the better. If you go unconscious, you won't notice. I really hope you can try this on your horse and find a difference. Remember, your whip tap is not a punishment. It's not a whack. It's a series of little taps. They may have to build an intensity, but usually they don't. And they're a consequence of not a punishment. The aim here is that a horse doesn't bully you and you don't bully the horse, but you find yourself in a cooperative game where you call the tune you're the captain of the ship. You're the leader, he's the follower. And every horse wants a really good, clear leader. On that thought, I leave you till next time. Have fun with your horses. Enjoy your riding. I'll be back soon.