Ep. 3 On noseblowing, and core strength

Hello again, it's Mary Wanlis here, continuing our series of webinars. And last time round, I began to introduce you to the concept of bearing down. That big breakthrough I had with the horse that jogged a lot when I suddenly discovered I could stop it jogging but didn't know what I'd done. So I explained bearing down to you as you pull your stomach in to make a wall and you push your guts against the wall and you accessed it by making the sound which, or if that's difficult for you, by coughing. The deeper explanation of bearing down is you pull your stomach in to make a wall and you push your guts against the wall. Now, realise that's a bit of a paradox and a contradiction that you have both a wall and a push. Think of the wall like a retaining wall. Perhaps a retaining wall in your garden the might hold up a flower bed or a higher level of garden behind it. That retaining wall mustn't be pushed away by the pressure of the earth pushing against it. And your retaining wall must not be pushed away by your innards pushing against it. Now, this is a mistake people make sometimes they just hang their guts out. So do that now as you're listening to this, just hang your guts out. That has a sort of a blue to it and there's no power. Then if you pull your tummy in to make a wall, push your guts against the wall, strengthen it by going, you'll realize that's very different. And the truth of the matter is that some people need more focus on the wall because if they just think push without doing that, they push the wall away. Some people more naturally have a wall and, and they need more focus on the push against that wall. But there always need to be both elements. These will only really work well if when you begin bearing down, you're already in neutral spine. That means your torso is like a box. And the length of your front from your pubic bone to your collarbone matches the length of your back from the nape of your neck to your tailbone. So hollow backed riders have a longer front and kind of curve forward in a banana shape. Round backed riders have a longer back and curved back in a banana shape. So before you bear down, you really want to make sure that you've turned your torso into a box. Hollow backed riders often make the mistake of thinking, oh yeah, I have to push my guts out, don't I? And hollowing their back more so their guts fall out and their banana gets even more curved. Remember when we did the exercise in the last podcast, you Had a hand on your back and a hand on your front and your aim is to feel the push in both directions. Do that again with your hands, one on the back, one on the front, just under your sternum and push both ways as you can. You feel your back fill out. If this is hard for you, you want to do it in a hard chair. And your car seat may work well if it has a pretty vertical back where you really make sure you're pushing your back into the car seat. You can also lie on the floor with your knees up and the soles of your feet flat on the floor. And as you bear down, really feel your mid back press into the floor. So if you're a hollow backed rider, you have to make sure you really fill out your back when you bear down and you don't hollow more. If you're a round back rider, you've still got to make sure you push equally both directions. And the mistake the round back riders tend to make is to go, oh yeah, it's that down thing, isn't it? And as they do it, they round their back more and they push their weight down into the saddle. And that's not what I mean. Even if we use the term bear down, we don't mean press harder down in the saddle. We we still want you to be sitting in a way that you're supporting your own body weight. We often have the idea of as if you were hung in a harness. Think of the kind of harness that people put babies and toddlers in and hang them from a door frame so the baby can bounce. It's actually not very good for babies and I don't recommend you do it. But if you think of a harness like that and you're hung in a harness rather than really supported by the horse, especially if you're a round backed rider, that that will help you find a lighter way of sitting where you support your own body weight. And as you bear down, keep thinking you pull your tummy in to make a wall, you push your guts against the wall. This is all happening in the front back plane. It's got nothing to do with the bigger push on the down direction. The other thing that happens with people when they first try this is they go to bear down and they kind of go and they can do it as long as they just kind of hold their breath or don't breathe in. And that's really not going to work in any viable way. And if you go to YouTube, put my name Mary Wanlist in YouTube and search balloon breathing you will find a video in which we use blowing up a balloon to teach you how to bear down. And we do this blowing up the balloon a little differently to normal in, in that if you normally blow up a balloon, you pinch it off, take it out of your mouth, when you breathe in, put it back in your mouth, breathe into it on the out breath. In this version, the balloon gets to stay in your mouth on the in breath and on the out breath. So you have to breathe in through your nose. And what that means is that as you breathe in, you have to maintain so much pressure in your insides that the balloon is cannot empty itself into you. Now, if you go through that video and you buy yourself some round balloons, good quality, preferably at least 10 inches. And if you can get 11 or 12 inches, that's better, you will begin to build these skills in a really good way. And bearing down and breathing, which can seem so difficult at first, will begin to become a a whole lot easier. There's a number of ways I really like teaching bear down to people in groups. And one of my favourite involves a little game that we play. And for this game you need a tissue. And if you arm yourself with a tissue now, we can do it in this podcast. So one person in the group volunteers to be the teacher, and the teacher is going to teach all the other people in the group how to blow their noses. What I do though, is explain to the other people in the group that they really aren't people at all. They're Martians and they're the advance party come to colonize planet Earth. And they've been to a school on Mars which showed them how to behave like good earthlings. But they've caught their first cold and nobody taught them how to blow their nose. So they've bought in this rather nice earthling to teach them how to blow their noses. And I also make sure the Martians really realise that they always only follow instructions to the letter of the law. They do not improvise, they do exactly what they're told and no more and no less. So maybe you're willing to pretend that you're explaining blowing your nose to somebody on that basis, where they will do only what they're told and no more and no less. And if you have kids, they'll probably love to play this game with you. So most people go into great depths about the tissue and the fingers and the noses and the nostrils and how to hold your tissue. I've discovered in the years of doing this exercises that there are one Handed nose blowers and two handed nose blowers. I'm a two handed nose blower. I can never blow my nose as well with one hand. But however you do it, the potential for talking about fingers, tissues and noses is really big. And at some point in time it gets to and you blow into your tissue and then you wipe your nose and you take the tissue away. And normally when people blow into their tissue, what happens is something like this now not very much ends up in the tissue. And I've often observed this happening with mums, with, with small kids. I'm usually in a supermarket queue or line as you'd say in America and there's some mum there with a child going blow, come on, blow. And the kid just keeps going. And the mum is making the mistake of leaving out the biggest factor in nose blowing. And the chances are if you've done this in your explanation, that you did too. So now blow your nose. And when you blow your nose, notice what do you do with your abdominal muscles? I think you'll feel that your abdominal muscles get to make a wall and you push against the wall and that's part of what you do to create the internal pressure to get the gunk in your nose and maybe even your lungs and your throat out. So nose blowing is a little more complex than it appears and it's a brilliant mirror here to bearing down and how bearing down isn't taught in riding. In nose blowing, you can get really carried away about fingers, tissues, noses, nostrils. In teaching riding, you can get really carried away about this hand, this leg, this la la la la la la la la la. And in both cases you can forget the salient piece of what happens in your abdominals. And of course, if you did teach someone to blow their nose, in my response to my invitation here, you were doing this as a talented nose blower with many, many years of experience who probably never even imagined your abdominals were involved. The interesting thing is that kids normally work it out once they're old enough to have their own tissue. And it's only happened once, working with a group that somebody I can't wait to go home and tell my little brother about this. And I said really? Does he struggle to blow his nose? And she said oh yes, he really can't do it. And I said to her, does he like sports? And she oh no, she hates sports. Which I absolutely knew would be the case because a kid that has no bear down will not like rough and tumble. That kid will really tend to take good care of their body. And be a rather quiet, introverted kid. So there's various ways that various teachers and the riding culture as a whole have kind of alluded to bearing down without ever explaining it. We have the word push that's commonly said in riding arenas. And maybe I'm the only one who's ever. Excuse me, what do you push with and how do you push with it? So in the early days of coming up with all this, one of my heroes was, was Colombo, the TV detective that some of you might remember. And Colombo solved the case by going, oh, I'm just so stupid. I don't get how you could have been here at 7 o' clock and there at 8 o' clock and he solves the case by acting dumb. And in a way, I've done the same. Excuse me, what do you push with? How do you push with it? And most people think push means shove with your butt. But maybe the original version of push was you pull your tummy in to make a wall and you push your guts against the wall. But there's been some vast multi generational game of what I would call Chinese whispers and folks in America would call telephone, whereby the meaning of push has changed. I had a teacher once who used to almost have apoplexy in the middle of the arena, screaming at us, your body, your body. And that was all he knew to say. And all of us listening were trying to do the best we could with the skills we had, but none of us came out with paring down as the answer. It was also very interesting. One time, on a teacher training course in Maryland in the usa, we invited a Grand Prix rider, originally from Holland, I, a Dutch guy, a really skilled rider, to come and do a demonstration ride, which he agreed to do very generously. And I was talking to everybody watching about bearing down. And eventually he stopped and he said, this bearing down you're talking about, is it a good thing? And I said, yes, it is, let me show you. And I put my hands on his body and showed him bearing down. And he was singularly unimpressed. And he basically said, well, isn't that just riding with more intention? And yes, he's right, it is what you do if you're a skilled rider and you want more intention. But if he'd been there saying to his pupils, hey, you ride with more intention, would they have pulled their stomach in to make a wall and pushed their guts against the wall? I'm not totally sure that they would. Let's think about this another way. You may have had a lunge Lesson at some point in your life, or if you haven't, I'm sure you can imagine this. You're riding along, sitting, trot, holding the front of the saddle. Everything's fine until the moment when the teacher says, let go of the front of the saddle. And in that moment you start to bump. And you'll bump up and down and also backwards and on the circle to one direction. Your backside might bump off to the outside while your shoulders end up leaning to the inside. But I noticed that when everybody lets go and bumps, they always bump backwards. And in response to this, my little physicist's brain thought this means a force is required to hold you up the front of the saddle. And when you're holding the saddle, you've been given permission to use that pull on the front of the saddle. Take that pull away, you bump backwards. Now, the problem is that there's a lot of riders out there doing the equivalent pull on the reins in the lunge. Lesson, you were given permission to pull on the saddle. But in general riding, pulling on the reins has a knock on effect for the horse, which is not good news. And most people know they shouldn't be doing it. But the instinctive way that you're going to stop yourself just bumping backwards is to pull on the reins. And I've met people who were in permanent pull the whole time, but had no idea at all that they were doing it and were ultimately shocked when I begin to draw their awareness to this. I've also met people who are desperate not to pull, who really want to not pull. They so know that pulling is wrong. They vow they won't pull again tomorrow. But they get on their horse and you know what happens? They pull because the laws of physics demand that this will happen unless they can find the other possibility. And the other possibility is that within your torso, you generate a force which acts from the back towards the front. In pulling on the saddle and the reins, the force is acting from the front towards the back. Now bearing down as you pull your tummy in to make the wall push your guts against the wall. That is a part of that force. It's from the back of you towards the front of you, from the front of you. It's like you're making a power push, aiming towards the horse's neck just in front of the withers. And when you learn to make this way of matching the forces from the back towards the front, you can push your hands forward and find yourself not needing to pull. So maybe think of it as well like a Child's space hopper balloon. So in the uk, we call these space hoppers. In the us, they're called hippity hops, the kind of balloon that has two little handles that kids used to hop about on before they all got glued too firmly to their computers. So imagine your horse is like a hippity hop. He's hippity hopping along in trot, and you on the hippity hop have to be very proactive to hop with him. Him. This really involves bearing down. But if you're not bearing down and you were on the hippity hop, the hippity hop might bounce away from you and you would fall off the back of it. Unless, of course, you had reins to stop that happening. So you really have to get where you can generate a force within your torso from the back to the front. And that is how you get to match the forces of the horse's movement and develop what's called an independent seat where you can stay there pushing your hands forward, matching those forces step by step by step by step by step. Every step the horse takes without needing the reins to save you from toppling backwards. If this concept interests you, on my website, mary-onelist.com in the product session, you'll find the rider's belt, which is a belt I invented that goes around your pelvis and has what we call the overstrap that you can put your thumbs under. So literally, you get to pull on your own back. And that belt often really shows people what they have to do in order to make the push of bear down, begin that force in their back and match the forces. And then they go. Can you let go of the over strap with one hand and keep it. Can you let go of the over strap with both hands and keep it. Pick it up, put it down, pick it up, put it down. As you begin to train your body into the right reaction. Of course, it's highly confusing that there's a lot of elite riders who just, no, I'm sitting here, I'm just relaxed. It's no big deal. Just sit. And if they really are elite riders, they're sitting there bearing down with no concept that they're doing it bearing down and breathing is just so easy for them that they're like the nose blower. Who doesn't know you blow your nose using your abdominal muscles? But this does really confuse people. And a skilled rider can just sit there pushing their hand forward, looking like they're doing nothing, but within their insides, a phenomenal amount is happening. Here's Another little exercise that you can do, which is a real helpful one. Put your fingertips together to make a kind of claw and put one hand just under your sternum and the other hand on your bikini line. Now make the sound with a P on the front. Which of your hands gets a stronger push against it higher up or lower down? Now try a slightly different sound, which is a sh, sh, sh with no P. Is that stronger, higher up or lower down? This varies a bit between people, but most folks find that when you put a P on the front, the lower down bear down gets stronger. And when you do it as a sh, the higher up bear down is stronger. And I learned a great exercise from somebody's husband once in a clinic who sung in a choir and he told me about his warm up exercise. And you can do this with your two claws again, your fingertips against your front and the exercise goes. And that's a great way to teach yourself to bear down. So bearing down is a fantastic, important skill. As I said in an early webinar, it's like throwing a six in a board game that begins to enable you to then go up the snakes or up the ladders, down the snakes and really take part. It's really worth getting good at this practise. Look up balloon breathing, put your hands on your body, get really good at this. It will pay you so handsomely. And next time I get to talk to you, we'll flesh this out a bit more. Bye for now. 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.