Ep. 38 The tennis ball game.

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 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 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 38. We've been talking about rising trot mechanism. My faith in this as the gold dust skill that everybody needs to get good at in the earlyish stages of their learning and of course keep refining as time goes by. And I want to draw an analogy to help you understand more about the rider horse interaction. So let's pretend that you and I are sitting opposite each other and we're going to play a game of catch with a tennis ball. And in this game the ball is bounced once on its way between us. So I throw it and it goes bounce, you catch it. Bounce, I catch. Bounce, you catch. Bounce, catch, bounce, catch, bounce, catch. This is a cooperative game of catch, so we're not trying to catch each other out. It just goes in a rhythm and it's a metaphor for rising trot. You could think of the bounce like the sit. So it's going sit, rise, sit, rise, sit, rise, sit, rise, sit, rise. And we're in this rhythm, playing this game together. And then very sneakily, I substitute a beanbag and I throw that beanbag and it goes bl and doesn't bounce. That will be the end of the game. Let's set it up again. We've got the tennis ball. We're going bounce it, catch it. Bounce, catch, bounce, catch, bounce, catch. We're in our rhythm. And then I sneakily substitute a boingy ball. So I throw it and it goes boing and gets to you faster. And if you throw it back, it goes boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing. And again we've changed the nature of the game, so this time speeding it up. This is such a brilliant metaphor. So let's start with the horse. Some horses are more boingy ball horses. They would be the thoroughbreds, the ones maybe with a fairly short but boing, boing kind of way of going and probably a pretty motorboat, zingy attitude to life. Type A horses that use more energy than they need to. And they would be the ones that by sending you a boingy ball, when you want to send them tennis balls and do a tennis ball game, they change the game. And when they send you a boingy ball, it throws you out of the saddle probably too soon, and you boing back and the game speeds up. So they get to control the speed of the legs and will tend to eject you from the saddle when you land in it. You are dancing to their tune rather than them dancing to your tune. The horse is taking you rather than you taking the horse. This goes back to an analogy we had earlier of riding a bicycle. You take the bicycle by pushing the pedals around, and when you get to a steep downhill, you can't pedal fast enough to keep up and the bicycle takes you. This is what's happening here with the horse. You're not, as it were, pedaling fast enough to keep up, and the horse takes you. If you're going to turn this back into a tennis ball game, you have to be able to do that pause on landing and just feeling your underneath land, globbing onto the saddle for a moment longer, keeping his feet on the ground for a moment longer. Now, if you're in the correct diagonal, that will keep the diagonal pair of legs, that's his inside hind and his outside four on the ground moment longer. And ideally, you also get yourself a pause at the top of the rise Just saying there a nanosecond longer and slowing down the other pair of legs. Usually people get the in the saddle pause before they get the top of the rise pause. And that's normally enough to make a significant difference. And your aim is to learn to turn this back into a tennis ball game. If you're hollow, you'll get boinged out really easily. Technique is a really big part of this. Okay, now let's take the horse that throws you a beanbag. So in this case, we're going to imagine the beanbag doesn't actually stop the game, but it just makes it to blur, blur, blur, blur, blur. When the horse throws a beanbag, most people get seduced by that and they throw a beanbag back. So the game does kind of slow down and get a bit more heavy and soggy and blur. And the chances are that the rider keeps throwing beanbags but starts kicking and huffing and puffing. And essentially by throwing a beanbag, they've colluded with the horse and greed that slowing down and. And yet in another way, they're trying to make him go. This is the horse where you've got to land in the saddle and ping out really quickly. So you send him a tennis ball. And maybe you're going to have to kick at the same time and go land, like kick and maybe even whip tap. And you're kind of there going, I'm not going to fall for it, horse. It won't happen. Come on. We're doing tennis balls. But mostly with the horse. It's like as he throws beanbags, his clockwork winds down. He goes 10, 9, 8, 6, 7, 6, 5. And the question is, where does the rider notice? Where does the rider catch him and where does the rider go? Not with me, honey. We're doing tennis balls. We often really don't know who's the chicken and who's the egg. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it isn't. But we as riders all have our more boingy or are more bean baggy tendencies. In fact, I remember a pupil many years ago and it was her who said this, not me. She said, oh, yes, I have a beanbag butt, don't I? And her horse was very lazy. Like she blurred him. And if she rode other horses, the same thing happened. So she had a kind of beanbag butt. She would be heavy too down, too, too soggy. And that also goes with too wide, her seat bones too wide apart, her butt too wide, her thighs too wide. So any horse she got on would sooner or later get more blur. You may be somebody who has a rather boingy ball butt yourself. So the opposite version to the beanbag butt. So any horse you tend to get on would tend to get more boingy and maybe you have the experience of being run away with quite a lot. This can happen to people who do a really big holding in their insides, the same kind of holding you do if you're going to stop yourself from peeing. That, I think, is what's behind an electric butt. And along with lots of holding in the muscles, more exterior to the underneath of your body too. So it's worth noticing. Are you a more beanbag rider or a more boingy ball rider? Do you have a more beanbag horse or. Or a more boingy ball horse? What do you do to each other? Do you wind each other up or do you wind each other down? Can you become the rising trot machine? The human rising trot machine? The human metronome who just sends tennis balls and is able to not get seduced by any of the horses beanbag or boinky ball tendencies and just goes, sorry, horse. One, two, one, two, one, two, one, two. If you're on a speedy horse, you might well be told by instructors to slow the rise down. On the whole, that doesn't work half as well as the pause. If you slow the rise itself, it tends to just go soggy and you go more bl on the up. It just doesn't work. You don't control your body weight well. You don't keep enough muscle tone. So you, you really need to be able to make pauses should it come to slowing the rise. And we do do this sometimes. The only way you can rise slower, and that would be slower on the down as well as slower on the up, is to do it as if against a resistance, as if you were doing it through water, as if you were doing it through molasses. Something's stopping you. You're doing it in a way that makes it hydraulic. One of my pupils had a great idea a while ago. She was struggling with the down and slowing the down. And she said, well, I kind of imagine this connection between the back of my calf and the top of my thigh. And it's like one of those hydraulic things that would slow me down. So as I come down, I have to kind of get slowed down by the way that this hydraulic mechanism works. A lot of people find this quite hard. I will help them do it by getting them to balance at the top of their eyes, putting a hand on their butt and deliberately slowing their down. And then I will slow the up by putting my hands on the sides of their britches, just near the front of their pelvis, and literally giving them a force to rise against. But it's not so easy to slow the up and the down. And the doing it this way is making your body have more to tone and really avoid the sogginess. Now, if you want to get ahead of the game with this and use this technique in a more sophisticated way, it can have a big influence on steering. Because if your horse falls out on the circle and he jackknifes, his nose goes to the inside, his wither goes to the outside. His wither acts like the hinge of what we would call an articulated lorry, what Americans would call an 18 wheeler. And if you pull on the inside rein, it all gets worse because the nose goes more in and the withers go more out, and the body basically follows the withers. But when this happens, the horse will always either speed up as he falls out or slow down as he falls out. Usually, horses only fall out in one direction, but if they've had a rider who's pulled a lot on the inside rein, and they may well fall out in both directions, and if they do, they'll pretty certainly do it one way by speeding up and the other way by slowing down. So if you were able to detect the very beginnings of this happening and go, uh, I don't fall for it. I'm here throwing tennis balls. And you can keep the tempo the same, you can basically stop the fallout from happening. So every steering drama will start with a little bit of speeding up or slowing down. The question is, do you notice and are you clever enough to not collude with it? You'd throw a bean bag back to the horse that slows down. Even if you kind of kicked and tried harder, or you get boned out of the saddle by the horse that speeds up. If you could be the human metronome and you caught it right at the beginning, and the beanbag horse, you might need to kick and maybe whip, tap and go tap, tap and go. Not with me, honey, we're staying just the same, you will change the steering and just get it that the steering drama that might have happened never even begins. I mean, it's remarkable the way this works. And one of the ways that if your trainer or instructor gets on your horse and rides him much better, this would be one of the ways it would happen. Whilst these aberrations are going on, the chances are that your horse is not moving in wonderful carriage. You know, if he's throwing you bean bags or boingy balls, he's probably got his ears closer towards your chin and his back hollow. So that too is making your life harder. And a good way to think of it is that we're all like a chain that's as strong as its weakest link. And when the horse has made a hollow in his back, we will tend to topple down that hollow, just helped by gravity according to that weakest link. So that might mean you might land down the hollow by hollowing your back yourself. You might fall down that hollow in a round backed way, almost as if somebody had punched you in the stomach. And you're going to need your front to be stronger. You might topple back with your shoulders leaning too far back and not keeping that slight incline forward on the situation that keeps you on the correct balance point. Or you might find yourself coming down leaning too far forward, closing the angle between your thigh and your torso. So these defaults, the hollow back, the round back leaning too forward, leaning too back. You might combine them. You might land leaning too far forward with your back really hollow and your pubic bone buried back between your legs. And it's then harder for you because there's such a big hollow. You have to get right enough to climb out of that, that hollow and get your rightness in the face of the horse's wrongness. And if he were already up through his back and reaching into the rein, it would be much easier to hold that rightness. This is where strength comes in, the right kind of strength, the strength in the chain of muscle in the front of your body and the chain of muscle in the back of your body that can keep you a box and, and keep your front and back the same length. And this strength is not to be taken lightly. It's a big deal to do this. So the art of riding lies in making the horse easy to ride. And if he's going around boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, really hollow, he's not going to be easy to ride. And your life has just become a load harder. And it is so cruel that people who need all the help they can get are not going to get that help. And they climb the mountain, dig away with it at a teaspoon until they finally begin to make the horse easier to ride. But you have to get you right to get him right. Then he gets more right and you can get more right and you're finding your way into the virtuous circle rather than the vicious circle. So I want to recap something else here that we've said before in relation to to halt, to walk transitions, and this will help you understand how your hollow and his hollow, let's say, are so intertwined, or that his hollow just gets you to lose the plot and lose your ability to keep your torso as a box, your balance over your feet, a martial arts position. So we talked about if there was a carousel pole in your insides from the top of your head, down through your neck, down down in front of your spine, through your core, down to your pelvic floor, down to the bottom of the horse's tummy and towards the ground. If your horse was in halt and you're there sitting well and you're vertical, and this carousel pole connection goes down through you, down through him. If he goes to take a step by elongating his underneath, that step will bring his ears back towards your chin and it would elongate his tummy and his chest through between his neck and the underneath of his neck, all the way to his chin, which goes up. So the bottom of the carousel pole would both drop down as he hollows his back, but also get pulled forward as he elongates his stomach, he pulls his navel towards his sternum, his sternum up towards his chest and his pecs and his pecs up towards his neck and his chin. And if you're not careful, the same thing happens to you. As the bottom of the carousel pole goes forward, you, as the top of the carousel pole top tipple back, and probably in a way that lifts your chest and makes you hollow as well. So the horse elongated the underneath chain of muscle in his body and got you to elongate the front chain. If you elongate the front chain, you give him permission to elongate the underneath chain. Now, it's easier to understand how that works in the halt to walk scenario than it is to understand how that works just within rising trot. But it's just the same. If you had yourself really well organised and him really well organised and you suddenly did a rise where you lengthened your front, he would almost certainly lengthen underneath, probably in the same stride, but if not a short time later, if you could fix yourself, you would fix him. This interaction is just so powerful and it's easiest to illustrate through both horse and rider hollowing. But you will make him hollow when you round your back, you lean too back or you lean too forward. Any response that you have, that's the wrong one will almost certainly end up making him hollow. The strength to hold your rightness in the face of his wrongness is a really, really big deal. And it's, of course, so much easier to be right when he's right. But if you have skills, you hold your rightness in the face of his wrongness, and you hold your rightness so well, maybe like in the idea of him speeding up or slowing down, you. If the rider doesn't fall for it with the boing, boing, boing or the bleh, bleh, bleh, the problem never even happens, it just dematerialises. It's not there. So skill has this magical effect of just dissolving problems that other riders would experience. And this is why, I think when you look at a horse rider combination, the result you see is so down to the rider and the rider's skills rather than the horse. Yes, the horse brings his issues and some bring harder issues than others, but when a more skilled rider gets on the horse and those issues just aren't there, we have to say that rider was responsible for that level of rightness. And so we also have to say when the less skilled rider is up there, that she has much more responsibility than she realizes or would possibly like to admit for that level of wrongness. It's in rising trot that people work this out. It's here that they really build skills. The tennis ball game is a brilliant way to think about it. Your body like the chain of the weakest link. The asking the question, is my horse's back hollow? Is it flat? Is it a mound? As you land, being able to sense that in the very short time or of the landing, being able to stop yourself by the way you hold your box and you hold your kneel and you hold the front angle between your thigh and your torso just right, letting it, of course, move freely on the up and on the down. The ways you do that just say, sorry, horse, I don't change my framework. I'm a framework around you playing a tennis ball game. And this is how it is. And if you do that well enough, the horse goes, oh, shucks, this is how it is. And as he develops the muscle and the ability to hold that for longer, he'll even get to like it and to find it home and find it easier. So I hope the tennis ball game makes sense to you. I hope you can really try and determine, is your horse a boingy horse, a beanbag horse, are you a boingy rider or. Or a beanbag rider? Can you turn yourself into a tennis ball rider? Can you get more clever at realising that there's a hollow in the back that I call the man trap and that you are falling down it? Can you get more clever in the strength to not fall down it, keeping yourself organized a bit according to that carousel pole analogy. This is the name of the game. This is what riding is in those moment to moment interactions of getting it, losing it, getting it, losing it, getting it, it, losing it. I hope you can do something with this input. Take it to your riding and have fun with your horses and I will be there soon. Bye to you.

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 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 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.