Ep. 36 Rising trot in depth.

Hello, it's Mary Wandlis here. Following our series of podcasts, which will continue and which I know a lot of people have enjoyed, I'm proposing a series of webinars beginning in late November, Four Before Christmas and Four After Christmas, happening weekly and giving me the opportunity to show you some of the facets I haven't been able to show you through anything other than my words during the podcasts. This will enable me both to use PowerPoint and to be on camera explaining things to you, at times using a flip chart and at times using our riding simulator at Overdale Equestrian Centre and one of my colleagues on that simulator. I think I can add significantly to your understanding and your skills by doing this. And we have demonstrated in many different ways that people really can improve their riding skills over the Internet. I promise to be interesting and fun and slightly different and to give you very practical viewpoints both on learning and skill development and on showing you the skills that it really is you need to develop. So it may be that we're facing a rather long end and dreary and possibly isolated winter, but there might be a little possibility of some wonderland here between you and your horse as you discover skills that really can make a difference to your riding, your relationship with your horse and how the interaction between the pair of you pans out. So please join me on this. You will find joining information for on maryonelist Shop webinars and I would love to see you, albeit on the other side of the camera, in a way that enables you to personally ask me questions and personally benefit from seeing as well as hearing. I hope to see you there. Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis WELcoming you to podcast 36 where we're going to get really forensic about rising trot mechanism and you can get the best from this by doing the exercises we're about to do sideways on to a full length mirror. If you can pause this now to get yourself beside that mirror. If you're listening to this, driving your car, you can certainly listen to the words and I hope you'll come back to do this in front of a mirror. If you, if you try and do it in your car, as a mental rehearsal, I think you're going to compromise your safety as a driver. So that I wouldn't recommend. I'm going to assume now that you have yourself sideways onto a full length mirror, put the foot and leg furthest away from the mirror, just one step ahead of the leg that's closer to the mirror. Now I'll explain why you're doing this later. Ideally, you then bend your knees enough to get your thigh bone at 45 degrees, which is halfway between horizontal and vertical. The truth of the matter is, though, that without anything under your thigh and your butt as support and just having to hold your own body up, you're going to find that very hard. It's going to become a strain on your quads pretty soon. So I'm going to let you have your thigh a little more vertical than that 45 degrees. And at the same time, I'm probably going to be not strictly accurate in the way I talk about a clock face, as if there was a clock face on the mirror to the side of you in your standing. Look at the side of you closest to the mirror along with that leg and ask yourself, do you have a vertical shoulder hip heel line? If you have that shoulder hip heel line, if you were riding and your horse was taken out from under you by magic, you would land on the arena on your feet. So you're really looking going. Are you lined up in a way that you could just support yourself on one leg? This would be your alignment for walk, sitting, trot and canter. Realise we're ignoring the further forward leg. We're just looking at the side close to the mirror. Then lean forward from your hip joint about 10 degrees. So to do this, you might want to put your fingertips in the angle between the top of your thigh at the front and your torso and then close that angle just that little bit. Another word of caution here. Whenever you look in the mirror, be sure to just turn your head and not rotate your entire torso. If you do, you're going to distort everything. So you just need to turn your head on your neck and not turn anything else. Put your fingertips on your panty line on the nobble of your trochanter. So don't confuse this with the top of your pelvis. It's at the bottom of your pelvis where your thigh becomes the side of your pelvis. There's a bony knobble in there that most people can feel relatively easily. Then put your fingers on the outside of your knee joint, or at least on the bony knobble that you can feel on the bot outside of your thigh. This is a good enough approximation. Then trace your thigh bone upwards from that nobble to the top nobble of the trochanter and you're tracing the line of your thigh bone, which of course you can't really feel because there's too much flesh on top of it. Now we're ready for Some action. Think of your knee on that side as the centre point of a circle, your thigh bone as the radius of that circle, and the bony knobble where you have your finger moving on an arc of a circle. You're not quite going from 10 o' clock to 12 o', clock, but let's just use that for convenience. If you had the left side of your body closest to the mirror, you're then moving your body, let's say, between 10 o' clock and 12 o' clock and 10 o' clock and 12 o'. Clock. Don't go over the top of the clock to 1 o'. Clock. At 12 o', clock, your knee, your thigh, your pelvis, your shoulders form one vertical line with your foot and calf back behind that line as you land. Land leaning that little bit forward. But be careful because you might well be tempted to stick your backside more out behind you, which makes life a lot easier and takes away some of the muscle strain. It's a less demanding vers and it's what a lot of riders do. So on the sit, you only want to be about 10 degrees forwards. Now we're going to do it a little differently. Now, put the side of one of your hand across your front by your belly button and put the side of your other hand in a horizontal line across your back behind that front hand. So now you've got the side of your hand on your belly button, the side of the other hand on your back. And this time round, you're not going to do the rising trot mechanism. What you're going to do is move your back from this hinge in the middle of your back. In reality, you have a little hinge between each of your vertebrae, but this is one of the places where you hinge the most. So just move this area, press in with the side of your front hand and feel your back round. Then press in with the side of your back hand and feel your back hollow. Keep repeating this, doing it fairly slowly. You're moving between round backed and hollow backed. And just turn your head so you can see yourself doing this in the mirror. You've separated this movement from the movement we were doing with your hip joint. So now we're going to add the rise. And there's a number of ways in which these two movements come together. So as you rise, press in with your back hand and hollow your back. And as you sit, just release that in the rise. Press in with your back hand, hollow your back, turn your head. See how your front elongates and how you Become a banana shape in each rise. Now, let's do the opposite. You're going to press in with your front hand and round on the down. So see if you can go up with just a hip joint motion and press in with your front hand and round on the down. See how that brings your butt underneath you on each down. Now try hollowing on the up, pressing in with your back hand, rounding on the down, pressing in with your front hand. Hollowing, pressing in with your back hand on the up, rounding, pressing in with your front hand on the down. Do that a few times and then do press in with your back hand to hollow on the up and hollow, if anything, even more on the down, which means you're really going to be leaning forward again. Hollow on the up, hollow even more on the down, hollow on the upper, hollow even more. So you'll really be closing the angle between your thigh and your torso and leaning forward a lot as well on the down. Now change your hands to put your fingertips in that crease between your thigh and torso at the front. You can do both hands, even though we're just paying attention to the back leg. Feel this angle open and close with your rise and sit motion. And can you do this without either hollowing or rounding? Repeat this a number of times and again, look in the mirror to assess. Is your torso staying a box as you do this, or are you elongating your front at the same time? It is possible you might tuck under and round on the up, but for women especially, that's less common. The most likely option is hollowing on the up. But can you really not hollow and just isolate this movement as a movement of your hip joint? I've deliberately put you in this stance with one foot forward, because the movement is hard to do with just your feet underneath you on both legs at the same time. If you try to do it that way, you might find that if you try to get to the top of the rise, you only get to 11 o' clock and you don't get to 12 o', clock, or you might find that you really hollow, because the truth is that you have to have so much weight supported by your knees. So to do this really well. Now, if you could find something with a reasonably well cushioned edge that you can rest your knees on, or more accurately rest just below your kneecaps on, then you can do this with two equal legs. And this is worth doing. Now, if you're rather short like I am, it's difficult to find the right thing. A portable mounting block One of the ones with just two steps, or rather one step and then a flat surface. That might work for you, or you might find something in your house. For me, a chair is too high, it's higher up than my knees. But if you can find something and be reasonably comfortable, and I accept you won't be very comfortable because it's a not very nice edge just under your kneecap, it's worth practising this way and you'll realise how much support you you need under your knee to do the equal on two legs version, you get that support from the saddle more than most people realise in terms of your thigh and your knee. And that doesn't mean you're gripping with your knee, but it means your thigh and your knee are weight bearing and your knee is on the saddle being an effective centre point to the circle. Now, you might want to actually do this or you might want to imagine it, but you can move away from the mirror now and think of sitting in a chair with your feet out in front of you. This might be more tempting in a sofa or a really soft chair, but it could be a hard chair as well. And with your feet a long way out in front of you, imagine getting out of that chair or physically do it, but it might well work for you as a mental rehearsal. So you go to get out of that chair and you have to lean forward a long way and do a real heave to get yourself out. And then when you go to get back into the chair, your feet are so far ahead of the chair that you're going to fall backwards into it. You might find that disconcerting, the worry that the chair won't be there and won't quite catch you, but you'd have little control going back into the chair. Now, this explains why your feet need to be underneath you as you're doing the rising trot mechanism. If they're in front of you, it's such a heave and a big lean forward to get out and you're so likely to just fall back. So your feet need to be underneath you and nothing from the knee down will move. In a smooth, sophisticated rising trot mechanism, all the action happens from the knee up. You're controlling the up and you're controlling the down. Now, Tom Myers, who's one of my mentors and a very big name in the field of human biomechanics and movement, tells the story of his elderly mother who died a few years ago. And he would watch her getting into a chair, just going splat and Basically falling into the chair. And he would go, you know, Mum, that really isn't good for you. You need to control the down and have your feet closer to the chair and go slowly. You'll stay much more mobile for much longer if you do that. And she would go, yes, dear, and do it for the next couple of times. And then he would see her going splunk into the chair again. And as he says, it probably really is true that when you've changed somebody's diapers, it's hard to believe that they might really know what they're talking about once they've become a actually a very accomplished adult. So the movement you've been making by the mirror is a fairly big movement, and very few people naturally do the movement with enough thrust. And many of the people I meet have been told to make that movement small and tidy. Now, it's intuitive to me that the rider should match the thrust of the horse's hind leg. The thrust that she makes should have her go the same amount that the horse goes in his movement. He pushes off his inside hind leg as she pushes off out of the saddle. Now, someone needs to study this, probably using inertial sensors, and that person isn't me. But if you don't go as much as the horse goes, from his perspective, he's dragging you along, your center of gravity didn't move as much as his. Now he has choices. And we've got Type A and Type B horses, just like we've got Type A and Type B people. So Type A horses and people rush around, utilise far more energy than necessary. And Type A people are famed for giving themselves heart attacks. And if you're on a Taipei horse, when you make too little movement, you become the water skier to his motorboat and he's going to tend to whiz off with you and drag you along. If you have the Type B more couch potato kind of horse, he'll take his cue from you again, but go, oh, you're doing the itsy bitsy rise. And he'll very happily do the itsy bitsy trot to match you. So a good rising trot doesn't fall into any of those traps. And actually it's what you as rider use to control and dictate the size, the tempo, the speed of the trot and to get you and your horse is in sync. Otherwise you might be whizzed around with, like the water skier to the motorboat or lesson, or you'll do the itsy bitsy version whilst Kicking and huffing and puffing and wondering why your horse won't go. You're also very likely to elongate your front as you rise, just like we did in our exercise by the mirror. And you need to get yourself so your pubic bone gets up over the pommel to the top of the rise without your front getting longer. Now, that is quite challenging for a lot of people. If you lengthen your front as you rise, you're sending a message to your horse that goes, we can both lengthen through our abs. That's okay. And you are encouraging your horse to lengthen from his pubic bone through his abs, under his tummy, me in his pecs, between his front legs, into the underside of his neck with his nose coming up and essentially to pull himself along with his front legs as you are pulling yourself up from your chin and your chest and your ribs. And you know that he should push himself along from his butt and his hind legs. And that's what you're doing when you get your rising trot to work well and you get to stay a box. So in your rising, really notice the length between your pubic bone and your sternum as you rise. Does that distance lengthen, shorten, or stay the same? Now, we have been known to do some very profound interventions here, and I think I might have told you this story before. It began with one of my friends in California, who's also a physical therapist or physiotherapist, as we would say here in the uk and she was teaching an adult riding camp in Kansas, which is very conservative. And she had 20 minute private lessons with people, which is not a long time to make a difference. And she had somebody. She could not get this woman to stop lengthening her front. And in her car she had a roll of duct tape, and between them, they put this duct tape from her cleavage down her front down to her pubic bone. And they taped her with her front short. So they taped her as a box and off she went out onto the circle again to ride, went into trot, and on the first ride she went, ouch. And they had actually taped the tape right down to her pubic bone. So they taped it back onto what was left of her private parts down there. And she went on a little wiser and began to get it. Now, I've been known to tape people too, but we don't use duct tape. And it also doesn't work to use kinesio tape because it's too stretchy. But if you can find sports tape or tape that looks like Elastoplast but doesn't have the dressing on it. And you tape yourself all the way from your cleavage down to your bikini line. And I don't recommend going lower than that. You will learn how to do the rise without elongating your front because the tape will tug on you every time you do elongate your front and you will get instant feedback and kind of learn that feeling in the high speed, very effective way. And I really recommend this exercise. But when you tape yourself, you need to sit on ideally a bench by a wall, something with a vertical back, push your back into that and then tape yourself so you know you taped yourself as a box rather than beginning from being a banana shape. The way that this works with your elongation, encouraging the horse to elongate is hard for people to believe, but I think I can show you, as the next few podcasts happen, just how profound this mirror effect is and how much you don't want that to happen. Meanwhile, you have a lot to work on. I hope you will do this exercise by a mirror. If you haven't managed it through this exercise as I've narrated it today, please come back to it and do it. Transferring that onto your horse has way more chance if you've done this physically by the mirror than if you haven't. And next time, when we come back to this again, I will give you more clarity on it still. In the meanwhile, enjoy your riding, have fun with your horses, and I will be back again soon.