Ep. 37 Rising Trot - The ‘gold dust’ skill

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 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 on maryonelist, shop forward slash 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 Wandlis WELcoming you to Podcast 37, where we continue our discussion of rising trot. And I'm going to give you a true confession. I have more than once been accused of subjecting riders to terminal rising trot, but I promise it doesn't go on forever. There is an end in sight, but really it's the gold dust skill. It's so worth having this skill to come back to when other things go wrong. And it is the place after walk where you're going to learn how to. How to get your horse to come up through his back and reach into the rein through how you do this mechanism and the baseline qualities of foot light thighs on big thrust bear down. But for most riders, this notion of big thrust feels so alien. And even if you did the exercise on our last podcast by the mirror, and you took that into your riding, the chances are that you're still not thrusting enough. And if we were working together in a lesson and we weren't socially distanced, I would probably put my hand on the back of your pelvis while you're stood still and push you up to the top of the rise to really give you the sense of how much force it takes for you to match the thrust of your horse's hind leg. That's one of the very common problems. And for most women, one of the big deal problems is being too hollow basically all the time, with that tendency that often doesn't go away in a hurry. And to get more hollow on the rise like we demonstrated last time, with the distance between your pubic bone and your sternum getting longer. So if that's you, I'm going to give you some images that might help you. One would be to imagine you're wearing a man's shirt with a really long shirt tail, an old fashioned version of a shirt, and you take that shirttail underneath your butt between your legs and you can pull on it in the front so you're pulled up by that shirt tail as well as pushed up from the back. It can also help and I'm sorry, this is a horrible idea to imagine a big hook that dangles down from the sky and grabs you by the pubic bone and pulls you forward and up over the pommel at that pretty much 45 degree angle. And I'm sorry to give you such a horrible thing to think about. So that helps you between the shirt tails, the horrible hook pushed up from the back, keeping your front short, thinking of leading with your pubic bone and not your belly button. Because once your belly button gets ahead, you're banana shaped rather than still being a box. And here's a question for you too. When you land, can you feel your seat bones? Does the landing happen so quickly that you can't do that? Can you tell if you're landing with your seat bones pointing back? That would be hollow backed pointing forward, that would be round backed or pointing down, which is what you want if you land with a hollow back. One way you might know if you've got a rather speedy horse is that you will be catapulted out of the saddle. He will determine the length of time of your sit rather than you. It's like he goes boing and ejects you and if your back is hollow, you get ejected so much easier. So you need as you land to be sure you're not hollow. If you are, you're probably burying your pubic bone back underneath you on the sit back between your legs, but you need to think of keeping it out in front of you. We have the idea of it being like a pubic chin. And if you need to exaggerate the idea of a chin even more, think of a full face motorbike helmet and. And think of keeping that out in front of you. You definitely need to think of landing on the front triangle, but further back on it than your pubic bone. You could land on a certain part of your body that I'm not going to name that's further back than your pubic bone and further forward than your seat bones. If you do the opposite and you tuck under as you sit, it takes people a little bit to wrap their brain around the connection. So just listen to this. If you tuck under as you sit, you're landing too far back on your underneath. You're landing with your weight coming down on the part of your underneath behind your seat bones, which we don't want, and you're pulling that underneath you so that that too far back place on your underneath lands too far forward in the saddle. You need to land further forward on your underneath and to put that place further back on the saddle than you're used to. Your habit is to land too far back on your underneath, scooting your butt under you to the front of the saddle, so that too far back place lands too far forward in the saddle. You need to land further forward on your underneath and put that place further back on the saddle. I hope you can wrap your brain around that one. Now, whoever you are, whatever your defaults, you need to get your pubic bone up over the pommel in the rise. That means you have to clear the pommel and that won't happen unless you're opening the front angle well. So remember our exercise by the mirror, where at one stage you had your fingers in the crease at the front of your britches between your torso and your thigh, really feeling that crease move through its arc of a circle. And you had your hands on your front and your back at about belly button level, feeling the difference between rounding and hollowing. So if you hollow on the up and your front gets longer, your pubic bone ends up going down, almost pointing down and back underneath you. And your pubic bone needs to go up, which means you have to have the mechanism of pulled up by that hook, opening the front angle so you can practise this. First of all, a halt. Can you balance at the top of the rise? Can you get yourself to trochanter of Your hip, the bony knobble at the top, outside of your thigh, up to your shoulder and down to your knee as a vertical line with your calf and your foot back underneath you. Can you balance like this at halt? Can you balance like this at walk? Can you balance like this at trot? Is it scary? I hope it's not, because you want to be comfortable and familiar with this place. In fact, when we first teach rising trot, within this way of coaching, we start with getting people balanced at the top of the rise, and they do that in halt, they do it in walk, and kids can do it, sticking their arms out, counting, doing all sorts of things that make it fun. And they then get to do it in trot holding the neck strap or a piece of the horse's mane. And they start from the top, and then occasionally we'll get them to do a down up, and then they balance at the top again. And every now and again they'll do a down up. They'll start this in halt, they'll do it in walk, and then they'll do it in trot. They're balancing out at the top and every now and again they do a down up. And then we make the down ups more frequent. So they're going down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up. And this is so much easier than starting from the bottom and trying to heave yourself and out to the top. And they and everyone need to have less weight in their feet, more weight in their thighs. And if you're one of these people who's pushed in the stirrups an awful lot in your past, you might need to think about being amputated from near the top of your boot to make this happen. We have the idea of the bony nobble at the bottom of your thigh being hooked onto a bar that passes through the horse's tummy. Now, remember, the bar is not elastic. It's not grabbing your knees and pulling them in, it's just giving them a place to be, a place to hook onto, as it were. And this is a very common problem. When you rise, your knees must stay hooked on that bar being the centre point of the circle. And the bar in your knees must not slip slide down past the saddle as you go up. This happens very often to people, especially people who hollow on the rise. So the bar and your knee and the cent of the circle must stay in the same place. And you have to catch yourself before your thighs and your knees slip slide down past the saddle. I often do a little demo of this using my Fingers. And you can do this too, if you take the fingers of one hand and touch your first and your third fingers together at the tip underneath your middle finger, and then put the middle finger on top, and this little triangle of fingers is the horse's back. And take the first and second fingers of your other hand and make a V shape of them. And put that V shape like it's your thighs on that horse's back. And your fingers will be maybe at that 45 degrees, or in this case a little more horizontal. And then pretend that V shape is going to do rising trot. It's going to go up, it's going to come down, the V is going to go up, the V is going to come down. The point of the V is going to get definitely to where there's daylight between it and your fingers. But if your fingertips slide down on the up, and is it where your knees don't stay on the bar, then you really don't get your pubic bone to get any daylight, or rather the V of your fingers to get any daylight between that and the fingertips that are representing the horse. So do this again, keeping your knees, as it were, hooked on the bar. And in your way of doing this on the horse, the whole thigh is in contact in the sit, and the bottom half to two thirds of the thigh are in contact in the rise. And the knees and the thighs must not slip, slide down past the saddle, or you just don't get to make it to the up. I hope you understood that there and that that helps. If you find yourself feeling like you're gripping with your knees, remember how you can use your fist on the side of the pommel to snug in your opposite thigh. And do that exercise regularly. It really needs repeating. The rule is you can have the same amount of snugness or pressure, if you like, from the top of the thigh down to your knee. But you don't want more at your knees than you have at the top. Your aim is to go up with your foot light, with barely any more push in your foot. And here's another thing. It really pays to think about how your thigh rotates over your knee, and if that happens, your kneecap points down with every rise. But often people straighten their knee in the rise, more often one knee than both knees. But if you push in your foot, you straighten your knee a bit. Maybe your foot doesn't go that much forward, but it just has a little bit of movement to it, and you're not really getting that thigh rotating over your knee, which is really critical if you're going to get the horse to reach into the rein and get the effect of kneeling, spreading weight down through your thigh and not having too much weight in your butt. So really notice. Does your kneecap stay still on the bar? Does the bar jiggle? Does the bar slide down? Does your kneecap point down as you rise, with the bar staying really in the same place? Now, I want to tell you some interesting research that was done in Sweden on diagonals. So we all learn that the downbeat of the sit should happen when the inside hind leg and outside front leg are on the rise, are on the ground. And your rise happens when the outside hind leg and the inside foreleg are on the ground. So you're sitting on the correct diagonal when you sit with the inside hind leg on the ground. And if you hack a lot, I hope you do change diagonal while you're hacking or your horse. And you will get very used to you sitting on one hind leg and rising on the other, but on a circle. We all grew up learning that the inside hind leg works the hardest. But actually, now that they've really been able to do experiments on this, it turns out that the outside hind leg has a bigger push off the ground than the inside hind leg, which means it's the outside hind leg that's working hardest. But if you land in the sit on the inside hind leg, you even this out a bit, because your landing and your rise adds a little more momentum to how this leg moves. So the push off of the two hind legs gets more even when you land with the inside hind leg. But you make it even less even when you land with the outside hind leg. So there is actually some science behind the idea of sitting with the inside hind leg. And somebody got that one right back through time. Now, let's think of your thigh like it's a windscreen wiper, which is a great idea. If you're on a lazy horse and you get tempted to try and fill in for that horse by overcooking your own movement, or what you'll find yourself doing is going over the top of the clock. We talked about 10 o' clock to 12 o', clock, you'll probably go to 1 o' clock and get your pelvis ahead of your shoulders. And you'll also tend to accelerate on the up like you go with your eyes. Now, of course, windscreen wipers never do that. They don't accelerate on the up. They don't accelerate and go into free fall on the down. They're absolutely rhythmic. In fact, you're becoming the human metronome when you do this well, you're almost like the human rising trot machine. Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. And you don't get deviated out of that. And on the lazier horse, or the horse that really holds his energy, you have to stay out of getting desperate and starting to go right horse, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. And overdoing it and accelerating on the up. If you do that, you're filling in for him by doing too much to fill in for his lack of go and lack of commitment. And it really comes back to how you give leg aids and how you organize your center of gravity and stay in control of yourself. But what you do need to do with that horse is to, when you land in the saddle, ping out quickly. So he will be almost as if he was trotting through thick mud or porridge and he can't get his feet out of the mud and the whole thing is going to. He's too slow, too heavy, too long in the down. And guess what? He'll seduce you into being too slow, too heavy, too long in the down. Even if you then make a boing out of the up. So you're trying to ping out of the saddle quickly to get him to ping off his hind legs more and not get, as it were, stuck in the porridge. Now, you may have the opposite problem rather than the horse that lands and seduces you into. So you too are too slow, too down, too heavy. You might have the opposite kind of horse, the more boingy type, a horse who goes boing and pings you out the saddle. And as we said earlier, if you're hollow backed, you'll easily get pinged out of the saddle. And you need to be able to pause on landing and to stay in the saddle a fraction of a second longer. So you keep your horse's feet on the ground a fraction of a second longer. So if the landing happens so quickly, you can't sense the landing, feel it happen, feel your seat bone, feel you're underneath there, you're in trouble. And you have to do your utmost here to really get where you can sense the landing, to make your sense of time slow down. Now, if this is a speedy horse, this may need to happen in walk. So is he in control of the speed of his legs in walk or are you. Do you take him? Does he take you? We've talked about that before. Can you slow the speed of your seat bones in walk. So you get to be in control of the speed of his legs. You have to have that skill before you try these pauses in trot. The deal is you have to be not hollow pubic bone out in front of you. Maybe you need to think of the full face motorbike helmet for your pubic chin. You're trying to get your tailbone to come down closer to the saddle. You're wanting to get where you can feel your seat bones and feel your underneath. And if you manage to stay in place that nanosecond longer for even one sit, you'll know you did it. You'll feel him keep his feet on the ground that moment longer. He's too much like what we would call in the UK a cat on hot bricks or folks in the US call a cat on a hot tin roof. And you want to think of Velcro, think of globbing on, think of being able to stay glued to him for longer. Think of the imprint your butt would make if it was covered in ink and you were a stamp. Like a stamp to stamp page or stamp a date or stamp something. Not that you want to land heavier. It's not bang. You don't have to stamp it down like that. You have to land lightly, land in control and do your best to glob on. You might get this if you're in a circle in the place on the circle where you're heading towards the wall. And that might help you because horses tend to back off walls, horse backs off the wall. That might give you a chance to get your pause to happen. So you have to somehow get time to slow down enough and to get the hollow out of your back to have a chance with this. And if you just feel that your horse is whizzing off with you and boinging you out of the saddle, you need to stop and start again and really reset yourself back into your lineup. Being a box, having your foot back, having your foot light. And if you really get into water ski mode, you're going to find your weight is in your feet, your heels are down and forward, you're pulling on the reins, you're sucking in your stomach. All the things you might know by now in theory that you shouldn't do, but that it takes a little more trickiness in practise to become skilful enough to not do. Especially if your horse, let's say, is a minor 7 you in his patterns. And you're going to have to be a plus 8 to get the both of you into the positive. I can't tell you though, how much difference it will make when you manage to lose the hollow. And it might help too to think land more up the front of the saddle, because if the horse is speeding out from underneath you, you're to end up on the back of the saddle as well as hollow. You're trying to land up the slope of the saddle towards the pommel, as if you could land your butt ahead of your feet. And it's not that we really want your butt ahead of your feet, but we definitely want your butt not behind your feet. And thinking butt ahead of feet will help you keep your feet back underneath you and stay out of water skiing. So can you land as if you'd land with your butt ahead of your feet, your pubic chin out in front of you, feeling you're underneath, thinking of Velcro, thinking of globbed on, blooped on, glued on, staying there that little fraction longer. It will take you a while to turn that into a repeatable skill, but I promise you just one sit that works and you'll know. Keep stopping and starting again. Once you're being run away with and you're losing the plot, you probably won't find it. There's a point of no return. So good luck with this. I hope what we've done in the last few podcasts with Rising Trot is really helping you any good little moments. Remember, use mental rehearsal to help you repeat those and above all, enjoy your riding, have fun with your horses and I'll be back soon.

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.