Ep. 4 On "More!", and the question "More what?"

Hello, everybody. Mary Wandlis here and welcome to podcast number four. Last time we talked about nose blowing, space hoppers, or hippity hops as they're known in the us and matching the forces of your horse's movement by being with him in every stride and the importance in that of bearing down. I want to start this podcast by telling you a story, and this is a true story. This, that I got told by a pupil of mine in America. And she was having a lesson. This was fairly early on in the time that I'd known her. She was having a lesson with another clinician, who's an internationally known name. And this lesson was becoming a case of the clinician going, more, more, more. And my friend, in the process of this, began to realize that she was clenching her jaw and barely breathing and her shoulders were lifting and things were going rather wrong. So she stopped and she said to the trainer, excuse me, but this is my lesson and I really need to know more. What? And the trainer went, oh, nobody's ever asked me that before. And to be honest, I really don't know. Now, I have to say, I'm actually incredibly impressed by the honesty of this person. And they then decided that she would get on the horse and ride for a little. And she got on the horse, rode for a little bit, things got better and got off kind of putting her hands on her lower tummy and going, it's something around here. To which my friend. Ah, ah, yes, of course it would be, wouldn't it? And the reality is, I think that she just got so flustered within the situation that her brain wasn't really working and she, if she had had her brain working, would have immediately more almost certainly will equal more bear down. So this says an awful lot about how limited our descriptions in language often are compared to the skills that are being used unconsciously. So you could say rather like our nose blowing exercise, here was a really talented rider who did what she did largely by bearing down, but really didn't realise that that was the name of the game. And hats off to her for her honesty. That doesn't always happen in riding arenas, I don't think. And the worst case scenario is that coaching tends to degenerate into do it, do it again, do it now, do it more, do it better. And there's a limit to how much any student is going to improve on that basis. So my reckoning is that it's the coach's job to cross the skill gap between herself and the rider. The rider who's just being Told more is basically expected that more of what they're already doing is going to work and would make that rider more like the coach and make the rider able to cross that skill gap. But the reality is that 99% of the time that just isn't going to happen. And the onus on the coach to help people cross that gap. It's also true that riding in its history is very male dominated. Beginning in the military and learning to ride with young army cadets, there was not a lot of explanation and the assumption of a much stronger body than the average woman has. So muscle tone is a really important concept here. And the concept of tone is really about the texture of the body. Men have on average 35% higher muscle tone than women. That means they're 35% more solid. On a scale that measures what we might call stuffing, is the rider like a really brand new stuffed toy rider or. Or is the rider like a bit of a rag doll, a rather elderly version that's a bit empty now, given that you or I could have 35% less muscle tone than was presupposed in all of the history and the coaching going back through time, what's said is presupposing a totally different baseline. So you could get a guy who's naturally very high tone, really well stuffed going, yeah, I'm just sitting here, it's no big deal, I'm doing nothing. And you could be -35 on his scale that he's calling 0 nothing. Having to come up 35 points in terms of how firm and organized your body is to be able to even match the average fella's baseline. So for him as a fit rider, it's probably more than 35%. This is a massive big deal. That assumption, which will be made especially by guys, but could be made by any skilled, elite female rider and any talented rider, a big factor in their talent will be having that high tone that makes them really like a good stuffed rider and therefore very firm and organised. It's when you're lower tone that you're more likely to feel like your limbs flop around and don't do what they tell them and your body kind of goes bloop, bloop, bloop all over the place and you can't sit still and organise yourself. And catching up to that presupposed baseline really was very much the early stages of the teaching in this work. In terms of my own learning and as I began teaching and is where most people start off these days in their early lessons. Because if Riding does not come naturally to you. You can almost bet tone is what you really need to work on. Keep bearing in mind that what riders do and what they say they do could be worlds apart. And this makes riding really confusing. So I'm wondering if you're the kind of rider that I was back in the days before I gave up. I was there going, there's something my teachers aren't telling me. There's something my teachers aren't telling me. And I read every book I could lay my hands on to figure out maybe what it was that my teachers weren't telling me. I took the lessons, I listened, and I thought I did my best job, but I really knew very little about learning and actually tended to do the same thing harder. And of course, being told more does rather imply that that's what you should do. Nowadays, riders have more options than lessons and books. You can go to the lecture demonstrations, you can watch the DVDs, you can watch the webinars. There are so many sources of information and you could be out there going, well, my coach said this, but I saw that on a certain dvd and then I went to a lecture demonstration and the person said this, what the heck am I supposed to believe? And the answer is, the person you're supposed to believe is your horse. Because when you make a change in your body that changes the horse's body underneath you, that is such a magnificent, wonderful moment of learning that we'd really hope nobody, whatever their name or qualifications, could talk you out of it. And that you have just discovered for yourself one of the cause effect rules of riding, that when you do a the horse does be. And when you understand that and you can reproduce it and it becomes a skill, then you're becoming your own best teacher. Or let's actually really say your horse is becoming your own teacher. And my reckoning of myself in the arena with somebody as a coach is I'm part of helping a guided exploration whereby the person gets to make these changes and therefore begin to figure it out from their horse's response. And there are occasions when the person's there on the horse going, this is really weird. This is really weird. This feels very odd. I'm not sure I like it, but oh my goodness, my horse has just gone fantastically well, changed his posture, reached into the rain, come up through his back. And that's a moment that you can't deny. A lot of things can stop this happening. And I'm going to ask you what is a really serious question here. And I really Want you to think about your answer to this question and be honest in your appraisal of it. The first two numbers that come into your head are going to be the appropriate numbers. If we took 100% of your attention and we divided it into two parts, and one of those parts is on the reins, the contact, the horse's head, his neck, whether his nose is vertical, whether he's on the bit, what's happening with your hand, your arms, the reins, his neck, his head. The other part is on your torso, especially your pelvis, your inner thighs, your contact with the horse's back, the shape of the surface he gives you underneath to sit on, the. The feel of your sitting surface as you sit on that. And so we're not giving a number for any extraneous thoughts you might be having about who's watching or what's for supper or what else you're supposed to do. We're just assuming that isn't happening, which, of course may not be the truth. So we're coming back to these two figures that have to add up to 100%, and it's about the reins, the contact, his head, your body, his back, the feeling underneath you, what would those numbers be? Now, very many riders have admitted to me that those numbers would be 80% on the horse's head position and no more than 20% on their own body and the horse's back. Some have told me 90, 10 and even 100 0. Sometimes people go, well, maybe 50, 50. I'm going to suggest to you that riding is not going to begin to give up its secrets until you turn those figures around and you have 80% of your attention on your body, its organisation, the centre part of you and the centre part of the horse, his back underneath you and no more than 20% on your arms, the reins, his neck and his head in front of you. Now, I'm going to confess that back in the days before I gave up riding, I would have been in the group of people doing 80, 20, the wrong way round. That horse was going to have his head down, whatever, you know, whatever it took. And I was willing to kick and fiddle and pull to make it happen. And it's also true that none of my teachers had ever really directed my attention away from that or onto my core, onto my body, onto what I was doing. And it took me giving up trying to be a good rider, giving up trying to get results, to become willing to just start noticing myself and my contact with the horse. It was very interesting, I would say, many years later, I'd been coaching Sandy Howard, who sadly died a few years ago, but was a member of the American dressage team back in the early 80s, a much respected trainer and judge. And she said to me about five years into our work together, oh, my gosh, I've just realized I have to teach people how to pay attention. I thought everybody paid attention and noticed things just like me. Well, she was so wrong. Because between that body and horse's back versus hand and the reins versus also the attention we didn't talk about that might be leaking out to who's watching and extraneous thoughts, very few people are paying attention in the right way. And changing how you focus your attention could be the biggest task for facing you if you're really wanting to revamp your riding skills. So a number of years ago, we had a working student over from the US for three months, a young woman who had done a college degree in equine science that involved more riding than many of those degrees. And we used to joke that she had a BSC in fiddling horses heads down. And she'd taken three years to learn that. And of course, it took three years at least for her to really undo it. I taught her in the US when she went back there afterwards regularly, and I've watched her progress over years. And it was a very big unlearning process for me. It was also a very big unlearning process. And bringing your attention back to the notion of you and how you sit being cause and the horse's carriage being the effect of that cause is huge. So you can think of it that as soon as you put weight in the middle of the horse's back, the horse is more likely to hollow his back. When the back goes down, the head and neck tend to come up and back towards you. I call that the horse pushing back. It's as if somebody put their hand on, on the horse's muzzle and pushed his muzzle back into his poll, his poll back into his neck, his neck, back into his wither, his wither back into his back, and his back makes a hollow and you end up being toppled backwards down into that hole. And if you start using a backward pressure on the range to make his nose go back, the chances are in doing that you come back more and you become more weight down that hollow, creating or perpetuating it. This would be the concept of riding the horse from front to back, rather like we talked about in the last webinar. If you're going to ride the horse from back to front, then you're going to be much more aware of how you support and organise your own body weight. So everybody's heard the notion of the rider being like, quote, a sack of potatoes. That would be a rather low tone rider not supporting her body weight. Well, that person is very often not very stuffed, to go back to our analogy we had earlier. So think for a minute about picking up a horse's hind foot to pick the foot out. Some horses hold their foot up for you and it's no big deal, and some horses don't. And you find yourself struggling to hold up the weight of that horse's back end. So if the horse holds his foot up for you, he's contracting muscles from the hock to the stifle and the stifle to the seat bone and the seat bone to the croup and the croup into the back. And he's doing the work. The rider who's a sack of potatoes is doing no work to hold herself up. She's just going, okay, horse, be my armchair. Treating the horse like a mobile armchair. She might ride tired at the end of the day after a day's work. And I appreciate that's not an easy scenario for anybody, but supporting your own body weight is really key. You could think as well about the difference between picking up a child who wants to be picked up and picking up a child who doesn't want to be picked up. But if you're allergic to children, just think about the horse's hind leg. You've had that experience, I'm sure, even if you stay away from kids. So we can make ourselves into a rider who wants to be picked up and into a rider who just tends to be dead weight. This is a really key deal. And supporting your own body weight is a great way to think. So think of the idea of hung in a harness, which I think I introduced briefly in one of the previous webinars. So you could think of the kind of harness that. That people use when they'll suspend babies or toddlers from a door frame and a little harness so the baby can bounce. If you were hung in a harness like that, we could pick you up by the front and the back of the harness. We could pick you up by the sides of the harness. And if you imagine the horse was adhesive to your britches, the potential is that as we pick you up, the horse gets drawn up from underneath you. If you. And by hanging yourself in a harness, you're really beginning to support your own body weight. Now, this is just a Little introduction into the plane of up, down. Are you down heavy? Are you supporting yourself? We've been talking with bearing down with pull your tummy in to make a wall. Push your guts against the wall about the plane of back front. When we talked about the horse pushing back to you and making a hollow in his back, we're talking about that pushback as a from the front towards the back. That too is the front back plane. So breaking it down into these different planes is an artificial thing that just helps our thinking, but it's worth doing for that. Meanwhile, there's another exercise that I'd like you to do that comes back to bearing down in your kitchen. Stand by your kitchen units with one foot slightly ahead of the other. So that's going to put one foot underneath where you're standing and the other leg slightly back. Bend your knees. Can you keep your torso a box with the length of your front matching the length of your back? Put your hands out in front of you in a riding position, and as you do that, push your hands against the edge of your kitchen units or your countertops, as you might say in the US and as you do that push, notice what happens in your tummy. Notice to your general sense of stuffing. Are you more stuffed, more firm or less stuffed? So we're looking for you being able to make that strong forward push, like pushing your hands against the kitchen unit and doing that when you're riding. I'll often do whole lessons where I'm asking the rider in, is the push of your tummy against your wall stronger or is the hold on the reins stronger? In other words, are you making a stronger forward push or a stronger backward pull? So I might keep asking, are you pushing or pulling? Are you pushing or pulling? Are you pushing or pulling? Is the push of your bear down stronger? Is the hold you have on the rein stronger? The more you can get your focus on onto your torso, onto bear down, onto hung in a harness, the more you're going to begin to get in a place where you might be able to really start noticing differences in your horse and turn around that 80, 20 from 80 on the reins and 20 on your body to 80 in your body and only 20 on your reins. If you can start to do that, you're going to feel differences in your horse. That may happen quickly and it may happen longer. But what I want for you is that you begin to have a aha. When I do this with my body, he does that in his body. That's what you're really looking for. So you can begin to understand the cause effect rules of how the rider horse relationship works. My best wishes to you. Enjoy your horses. 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.