Ep. 39 Half-halts: the riding enigma

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 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 39. And I want to start this with a story. So a friend of mine in the US who used to host some of my clinics had a few school horses. She really wasn't a riding school, but she just did a few individual lessons and one of those was a real favourite for both of us. He was charming and delightful. She had bred him. He had terrible conformation. He'd been cobbled together somehow, but he was sound and robust and a delightful guy. And despite his long back and his this and his that, he could reach into the rain and do his dressage horse imitation really well. He also had a delightful attitude to life, and for him, every day was a new day. It was like he'd come into the arena every day going, hello, sky, hello, clouds, hello trees, hello birds. Like he had his own happy, interested, naive world. He would have done very well in a Disney story. Now, to interrupt with a sub story here. This makes me think of one of my old teachers and he had a number of school horses. A number of them were stallions. He had ridden a lot with Nuno Oliveira, he himself was from Belgium and he had two kinds of horses. One of them was Marie Zesos. He is an angel. And what that really meant was, so whatever's going on is completely, utterly and entirely your fault. There was then the other kind of horse, Marie, this kind of horse is not an angel. Which kind of meant he was probably a devil and was probably going to disappear into the corner, stand there and then try and dump you. And he seemed to have nothing in his gradations between angels and devils, of not an angel. And horses, of course, like people are all different. And the question is, given that they all will have an agenda, how rider friendly is that agenda? Well, this horse I'm telling you about that my friend owned had a wonderfully rider friendly agenda, but that still wasn't the same as what we might call the blank check state. The state you hope you can get your horse into within a ride, where he just says, I'm with you, I'm yours, I'm up for it. And if you don't mess up by asking too big a question or doing the same thing over and over again, you're going to have a great ride with that horse. So my favourite school horse here would just seduce the rider into letting him do his own thing. It was very polite and rider friendly, but he could spend a whole session totally ignoring the rider going, hello trees, hello birds. And I can remember a rider riding him on one clinic who got thoroughly seduced by this. And my best attempts to get her to captain the ship to lead the dance weren't working. And I think they really didn't work through the whole of the first lesson. And we came out the next day with this horse about to do a rerun in his happy, naive way. And soon into this I started singing to her and there was quite a big audience actually. So I sang to her and the audience, the Magical Mystery tour is coming to take you away. Whereupon I think she began to get it and she had to start making some interventions. But the bottom line was that while she was being carried away, she wasn't making any comparisons between how it was and how she wanted it to be. So she just enjoyed being taken off for the ride. So if you're going to run those comparisons, you have to have a reference feeling and that would be the best feeling. You have to date for this kind of work on this kind of horse. And maybe that's a very specific feeling that you generated yesterday, or it's born more of a lifetime of riding different horses. And what you need to do is to run what's known as the tote model. That's T O T E and it stands for test, Operation. Test. Exit. So the first test goes, am I getting the feeling I really want to get? If the answer's yes, then you get to exit from the model. You don't have to do an operation. If the answer's no, then you need to find an operation. This is going to be where some fix in you is going to fix your horse. You might be scrabbling around for that operation. If you're fairly early on during your 10,000 repetitions of that new coordination, or you might be getting it progressively more slick, or you may be able to come out with that operation really easily. You then have the next test. Did my operation work? Am I getting the right feeling? If the answer's yes, you exit. If the answer's no, you're back in trying to refine your operation. So you're running this model as you're riding. And also you might be asking yourself, test, am I getting the feeling I really want to get? Yes. Could I improve this and make it better? And then run the operation on that? Supposing you're much less seduced by your horse than the woman in the story I was telling you, you may have your tests running pretty positively. And then let's say what you're doing well is a 10 out of 10. The horse goes, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6. The question is, when do you catch it? When do you wake up? When do you intervene? If it really disintegrates a long way down that scale, and that happens below your radar, you're then going to go, whoa. Test. Help. Really lost it. Big operation, big mountain to climb to get it back to where you can go. Test. Yep, got it. Exit. There's also the question beyond the idea of is your horse an angel or not an angel? As to whether he has agreed to let you reorganize him to be rearranged and regulated by you. Is he the kind of horse that's easily interrupted, or is he more like a diesel engine? Maybe he's slowing to get going and then he's like a tank. And stopping is a big deal. And turning is not easy either. You're like trying to turn the Titanic. The opposite end of the scale would be he's hyper Reactive, you do something small and boom, he's off. So part of your training is helping him to find the middle ground between the two extremes of being uninterruptible, hard to disturb and reorganize, or so hyper reactive. That again, in a different way, he's difficult to regulate and rearrange. If you're going to go out into a competition and ride a test at a certain level, you need to know that at that level, you can run the tote really easily with fast, slick operations on a horse who's easy to reorganise at that level, or at least relatively easy to reorganize at that level. So you need to be out of the tote more than you're in it. If you're in it, you're going to find it harder to look up because you're scrabbling around going, can't quite help. Wait. Ooh, ooh, ooh. Losing it. But where, if you can go test operation. Got it. Here we go. Little fix. Got it. Little fix. Got it. Oh, regroup. Little fix. Got it. That reminds me of telling you some podcasts ago about Chris Barthol and his mental rehearsals of the Grand Prix test with corrections, just as he expected to do them moment by moment, step by step, half halt by half halt. Out of the tote more than in it, but making those tiny little corrections. So that means you'd be well through your version of a thousand repetitions that you need to make those corrections at that level. Which means you can easily have the dual focus you need for riding. A test of where you are and where you're going in the geometry and the geography of the test and how you're riding those fixes and organizing your horse in the way that you want. One case where people very often get seduced by the horse into not intervening as they need to, would be the horse that gradually starts to speed up, but they don't do anything about it. So this could be in walk, the legs gradually start to speed up, or it could be in trot, where the legs gradually start to speed up. And in each case, well, the rider needs to be able to put in pauses and slow his legs. So in walk, we have that slowing your seat bone movement, and in trot, we have the pause in the sit. But when the rider has the technique to do this, the next question is, does she do it? How often does she do it? Does the horse speed up under her radar and then she finally realizes she has a problem, or does she wake up to these problems sooner and does she really admit the reality that maybe she has to do that pause eight times on a 20 meter circle? Because if she doesn't, his wrongness will take over. And if she tunes out and her brain isn't on the job, her horse will know and that will be his cue to speed his legs up. So in many ways, you could say she needs to generate more rightness before he generates more wrongness. Can she beat him to it? Or can she catch him at the moment when the thought goes through his head? That will be a little conversation between her and him that the dressage judge and maybe even her coach won't even see? Slowing the speed of the horse's legs in walk is often the beginning of learning half halt. When the rider does that fix really well, she regains control of her seat bone movement. She makes it smaller, slower. That is a half halt. And I'll say to her, you just did a half halt. When the rider does a really good pause in rising trot, slowing the tempo and putting herself back in control where she leads the dance again, I'll say to her, you just did a half halt. But I'd never stand up in front of either one student or a group of students and say, right, everybody, today we're going to learn half halts. I really don't believe anybody can do that, not with what I would consider a half halt. Because half halts are an emergent property. They emerge as a function of the rider's rightness in a certain moment. So I've said that a lot, but it really motivated me before doing this podcast to look up emergent properties and see what that really means. And it's talking about a whole that's greater than the sum of its part properties that arise through the interactions of the parts of a system. So, for instance, a group of buildings becomes a city. And a city is so much more than, than just a group of buildings. A group of insects can become an ant colony with phenomenal delegation of jobs and building work going on. Atoms can combine to create complex chemical systems and reactions. Atoms combine to make your brain. You need a whole heart to be able to pump blood around the body. Heart cells alone can't do that. And within fetal development, nobody knows to this day quite how that first heartbeat happens. It arises as an emergent property of that tiny little heart. There are many different types of half halt, but this is the way that people first discover half halts. I'm not going to say learn half halts. I'm going to say discover half Halts in slowing the speed of the legs in walk or slowing the speed of the legs in trot. And it was really quite early on in these podcasts that I told you the story of my own first half halt that happened going around a corner on the right rein, riding a grey horse at a very well known riding school in about 1972. And I knew I'd done it. I didn't exactly know what it was and I don't think the term half halt was used so much then, but I knew I'd done it. And then it was a job interview in about 1976 that I next did one, so only a four year break and I think I got the job on the strength of that. And then for the rest of the two years that I was on that job, I didn't do another one. And then I can't tell you quite when the next one happened, but it was by the time I had given up riding and started again and had my own horse who was a very wizzy, wonderful soul, the one on the COVID of the Essentials book. And I got to learn to half halt, but it took a long time before I could knock them out consistently. And this is just one type I hartfold. So let me tell you a story that somebody told me in America. This was a rider who'd ridden Grand Prix fairly young, and she and her husband had decided they needed to do something together just to have more fun together. And so they signed up for a ballroom dancing class. And this was, I think, going reasonably well. And one day the teacher set everything up and the whole class are in couples dancing to the music and she finds herself saying, whoa, whoa, you've got to half halt, I'm running away with you. Whereupon the whole class stopped, turned, looked, and her husband apparently just wanted to sink into the floor. So she, as the woman in that dance, had inadvertently started to lead. And of course she is a rider, she lives her life professionally leading the dance. And he had begun to be the follower. And she was saying to him, hey, I'm running away with you, you need to lead the dance. I hope the poor man recovered and they got to enjoy the continuation of those classes. I often hear some neighbours of mine who are also coaches calling half halt. And I always have the is that a bite sized chunk for that person? Is it a doable piece for that person? If it was a doable piece, would they just forget to do it? Now in the early stages, like I'm talking to you about slowing the horse's legs People do forget to do it. They don't realize quite how interventionist they're going to be. They think they're going to get it just nice and then float off into the sunset. And it's going to be wonderful, really, rather than they have to fix it again, make the fix again, make the fix again, make the fix again. But once you know how to do a half halt and you've made it repeatable and it is established, people don't forget to do it, they're much less likely to get carried away on the Magical Mystery Tour, rather in the same way that riders don't go, oh, I'm sorry, I forgot to get the horse on the bit today. When coaches are yelling, get him on the bit. That rider didn't forget to do that. She didn't not want to do it. She lacks the skills and the tools to do it. And she's probably up there sweating, praying and wishing. Once people know how to do a half halt, they're very likely to do it because they really like the vintage feeling of having done their half halt, leading the dance and being on an organised horse and get much less keen on having the disorganized horse whizzing off with them, getting heavy in their hand, not functioning well. So people who know how to make that change are going to make that change. When people yell half halt, we have a case of multifinality rather than equifinality. Saying the same words to different people is going to lead to different end results and unfortunately, to many evils that I would collectively call a half hall. You're not going to see people on the balance point really well organised, pretty certainly. You're going to see people getting desperate, leaning back, pulling, pushing in the stirrups, doing, doing all the things that might make them the water skier to the horse's motorboat. So half halts are emergent properties. People have to get quicker at realizing they need to do them and begin to admit, okay, this is so much more intervention than I ever thought it would be. I thought I'd just do a fix and ride off into the sunset and everybody would be lovely. But they have to make it again and make it again and make it again. And in my own experience, the ability to be able to do it just like that, oh, I need an operation. Boom, bang. Done. Took a very long time. I think I can make this quicker for people, but half halts are elusive and difficult to learn. In the next podcast, I'm going to come at this another way by talking about what a half halt is not, because by figuring out what it's not, we get clearer to finding out what it is. And along with other riders and trainers, I would agree that it's elusive to find, difficult to teach, hard to explain, but if we can set up the circumstances that can make it work, we can begin to make those emergent properties emerge. Meanwhile, enjoy your riding, have fun with your horses and I'll be back again 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 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.