Ep. 40 What the half halt isn’t.

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast 40 where we get to really look more at half halts. I've said before how it can happen that somebody arrives for a first lesson and they're walking around me on their horse telling me about how back home with their normal coach, they ride half halts. And I'm looking at this horse and rider and seeing by my criteria that a really viable half halt would not be possible. And I stay polite on the outside, but on the inside I'm thinking, oh, no, here we are again. We talked in the last podcast about how half halts are an emergent property. They happen when a whole load of right things come together, and usually as lucky accidents to begin with. And when riders first learn half halts, they learn it through learning to slow the speed of the horse's legs. And that's one aspect of a half halt. We have both tempo control, the speed of the legs and balance control. And those could be considered two different types of half halts, although of course they're related. Doing these is not going to be the same and it's not ever going to happen. It's if you as a rider live your life riding in mistake prevention mode, just basically keeping a firm hold on the reins going, got to keep the horse's head down, keep the head down, keep the head down, keep the head down, keep the head down. That is different to the got it, lost it game that we've talked about so much. You make a change in you that changes your horse. You've got it, you've got it, you're losing it. You remake a change in you, it changes the horse. You've got it, you've got it, you lose it. There's this game played between you and the horse and we could say that the half halt is the human trump card in that game when it's done well. And if you had a horse rather heavy in your hand and after your half halt, you couldn't give your hand forward and feel like you and he were independent of each other, rather than counterbalancing against each other in a water ski, motorboat kind of way, then your half halt wasn't successful. How long that half halt buys you before your horse again starts to lose balance and maybe start to splat and get heavy in your hand. That will depend on your skill and on your horse's make and shape and type. It will depend on how quickly. If 10 out of 10 is really well organised, good balance, your horse degenerates to 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3. And where on that scale you notice that will determine whether you end up doing more small, little, almost invisible corrections, or fewer big corrections, which are going to be more obvious and have more wrongness before you intervene. So the more skillful you become, the more you intervene quickly. And the corrections are small. But in the beginning, it tends to be that people intervene less often. They get carried away on the Magical Mystery tour, as we said in our last podcast, and they tend to do fewer, bigger ones. But that, I think, is inherent in the learning process. So one of my colleagues once famously said, the deal is that when you take away the wrong things, the right things start to emerge. So the wrong things are really what a half halt is not and what it's inclined to become, or the attempts to half halt a client to become, given the issues faced by humans on horses. So if you think, whoa, come back here to your horse, your instincts will have you take the rein stronger with a bigger pull, to lean back, to put more weight in your feet in the stirrups, and possibly take your thighs off the saddle to grow more tall and very likely to lift your chest. We have, through your learning and your skill development to take away those wrong things, because the half hold as an emergent property emerges from you being in neutral spine and being vertical, or at least perpendicular to your horse. If you think of a levade where the horse is in levade, the rider would be not vertical but perpendicular to the horse, as the horse is neatly balanced over his hind legs. And I have had the amazing experience of riding some levards in Portugal, actually, with Nuno Oliveira himself, with him having the horse in hand and having me stood right by a collage of tiles that he had in his arena that depicted an ancient rider on a levarding horse with the pointy hat and all. And just saying to me, just look at the picture, do what it does in the picture, just look at the picture, keep your body like the picture. As he got this horse to levard in hand. And having had that experience, I can tell you a levard where a horse is imbalanced and has a round back. It's a totally different experience to a rear. But that was an aside, really and truly. You're wanting to be in neutral spine, vertical, or if not vertical, perpendicular to your horse, still matching the forces of the horse's movement. That tends to go wrong if you start to pull on the reins, still bearing down, still with a light foot, still with your thighs on the saddle, realising that you're wanting your Thighs to create a sort of a. Which lifts and fills out the horse's rib cage so he's going to feel bigger and wider, more like a big blown up gym ball underneath you. You're still hung in a harness when it works, you are an even more stuffed, stuffed toy rider. And you've recorrected your firmness within your box shape, which your horse was quite possibly trying to take away from you. You have to be able to recognise the feeling of the horse coming up underneath you and within all the bear down and neutral spine and foot light and thighs in place, hung in a harness. We work on these skills for X amount of time with the rider and the horse until the half halt begins to become possible and emerge. Because we've taken away the wrong things, the same principle holds for the horse. And so we could ask what has to be in place in the horse for the positive effect of a half halt, A half halt that goes through to happen in his body. So one thing to think about is you do a half halt when you're losing it in order to get it back again. But do you have a viable IT to come back to? When I'm looking at these riders who tell me about their half halts and I'm thinking, oh, no, this doesn't look good, there's not a viable IT for that person to come back to and that horse to come back to. So in a viable it, we have to get the basics of what I call the circuit being complete as if from the horse's hind feet and the plantar cushion, the back of the foot up through the tendons to the hocks, up the back of the hind leg and the hamstrings to the point of the buttock, over the croup, through the loins under the panel of the saddle, up each side of the neck to each ear, as if we had a hose. Think a big fireman's hose, not a garden hose. And that water is powering through those hoses from the hind legs through to the ears. And some of you who know my work will recognize this as the horse's superficial back line mirroring the human's superficial back line, because that's a chain of, of muscles and connective tissue that go from the underneath of your feet and the plantar cushion in the horse all the way up those back muscles, tendons, ligaments, until we get to your head. And the water through the hoses is an analogy to energy getting through that circuit. But the energy could be being deadened, dissipated or deviated and. And not get through that circuit effectively. So an example of deviated would be the horse that jackknifed, so his withers are off to one side. We have, as it were, one overstretched hose and one rather soggy hose. And the impulse where we wanted it to go from the back of the horse to the front of the horse with a straight horse, is taking the horse to maybe fall out on the circle. So that would be an example of. Of the energy gets deviated. It can get dissipated in different parts of the horse's body. Sometimes the hoses work pretty well till they get to the horse's loins. And then it's as if the hoses had loads of little holes in them. And the energy, the water just out of the hose, like, disappearing into deep sand. And the impulse just doesn't get through the horse's body. It could be deadened there. And in other places, it could be deadened somewhere under the saddle. The rider could be squashing those hoses so the water doesn't get through. It could have dissipated just in a. Generally leaking out of the hose's way between the back of the horse and the front of the horse. There could be blockages as well, near the horse's wither. Very often, that's a place where if the horse has his neck up in the air, pushing back at the rider, he's doing backflow in the hoses. And the hoses are kind of full of eddies with the water going backwards and round and round and not getting through. And it could be that the hind faucets, as the horse's hind legs are just not turned on enough for there to be enough power flow. And it may be that the rider needs to do significant power flow, almost like blowing the dead weeds and the cobwebs and goodness only knows what other gunk and out of the hoses. We have to have that baseline complete. Riders have to learn how to complete that circuit and bring the horses back up before they can learn how to bring his front up. I really remember a student of mine and one of my fellow coaches years ago who had a horse where we could get the back up. And at that point, 20 years ago, plus, we hadn't yet figured out how to get the front up. And we used to have these conversations of going, okay, we've got the back up. How the heck are we going to get the front up? And this horse was really good at just keeping its nose down on its knees and leaving the rider feeling like she was on a Very up back, almost like sitting on the top of a rainbow. But it wouldn't work well. And at that point, we didn't really find the answer to that horse. But I like to think more than 20 years on that I would have the answer to that horse. Coming back to learning about the backup, as riders learn about this, we've talked about the thigh as a lever. The weight at the knee counterbalancing the rate of the rider's upper body, stopping her just falling down the man trap. We've talked about the push forward of the rider's bear down as she pulls her tummy in to make the wall, pushes her guts against the wall. The kind of response that. That push forward becoming bigger than the horse's push back, pushing the creases out of his neck, helping the water to go through the hoses and, and to not have backflow. We've talked about the rider hung in a harness to help her with her thigh levering. And we've talked a little bit about her thighs doing suction. And we need to come back to that because that's a big piece that has to be there for the half halt to work. But it's a really good question. If you're at the stage where you're riding your horse with him pretty well reached into the rein and his back up in a pretty good way. Just to ask yourself, when he reaches into the rein, where is he reaching from? Is it partway up the neck? Is it his withers? Is it the pommel of the saddle? Is it the stirrup bars? Is it your pubic bone? Is it your seat bones? Is it the back of the saddle? Is it the area of his loins? And ideally it will be the area of the loins because that would tell you you've really got good flow through, through those hoses with no blockage and also a lot of margin for error. If he's only reaching from his withers, it wouldn't take much for him to see something prick his ears, push back at you hollow and you lose it. You might be able to give yourself a taste of this feeling, what we call giving the rider a taste of strawberry jam. By having somebody take hold of the front of the saddle paddle. Standing by your horses with us, of course, you need to be able to have someone you don't have to be socially distanced with at the point where we're recording this and just pull on the saddle cloth, pulling it forward, and that will kind of give you the feeling of that reach happening from behind the saddle. And that's a feeling that you're trying to learn to create as the rider. Another way of giving yourself and your horse this feeling is by doing a belly lift. And you can do this when you're grooming. And you may be able to have your coach do it when you're riding where you stand by the side of the horse and you put your fingers under his tummy, just behind the girth on his midline, and you wiggle your fingers a little bit to get his belly to come up. But you have to be very careful doing this, because a horse whose abs or back are not in good shape might well kick out in the doing of this. And you maybe want to have a skilled body worker show you how to do it. Having a horse that does a good belly lift says that his body is capable of coming up through his back and really helps you to know what the right feeling is and have a horse where you can do that right feeling. So let's add the idea of suction into this, because one of the big deals about a half halt is it has to include suction that brings the back up, the ribcage up and the withers up. I grew up with the idea that it kind of compressed the horse. If you kick from the back and held a little more in the front, a you get crinkle cut horse. If you do that, you kind of squish him between the back and the front, but there's no way that he comes up between the two. It doesn't change his balance in a constructive way. And the element of up is a big part of a half halt. So we may have done this before, but let's do this action again. Put one hand out in front of you so your hand makes a roof shape with the line of your knuckles as the top of the roof. This hand is a metaphor for the horse. It and your knuckles are like his spinal processes. Then put your other hand on top, making the same shape. This hand is you moulding onto the horse. Press down with the top hand. That doesn't work very well. That's only going to tend to squash the horse. Rest your top hand rather than press. So your top hand is, as it were, hung in a harness. This is one stage better. Can you use the skin on the top hand to pick up the skin on the bottom hand? So you're making a kind of upward movement with the top hand, feeling the skin on your bottom hand. Respond. This is what happens with a rider's thigh on the horse's Ribcage where she does good suction. Now put your hand so your knuckles are on top of each other, but the fingers and the palm of the top hand don't actually touch the bottom hand. Well, you couldn't do this manoeuvre like that. You have to have contact. Put maybe your fingers against your hand, but not your palm. So one side can do that upward draw, but the other side can't. Now take the skin between your thumb and your first finger of the top hand and put that over your bottom hand. So you again have an inverted V on an inverted V. And think of your thighs this way. And just kind of push down, stretch your finger and your thumb down your top hand like you're pushing the skin away from the knuckles in both ways. Well, that's not going to work either. But this is what an awful lot of people do when they try to stretch their leg down and then make a pick up kind of movement with your thumb and your finger. This is much more how suction works. It's one of the hardest ones to explain. And sometimes I think of it almost like there's a system of ratchets under your thigh and against the saddle and you can your thighs up with those ratchets and draw the horse up with you. So this is not gripping up. It most definitely is. Not that you have to have your thighs against the saddle before you can do it. And sometimes it helps people to think of getting out all the air bubbles, thinking of their thighs like attracting magnets, thinking their magnet can draw on the horse's magnet, thinking of their inside thighs having suction cups on them. Number one thing, the suction cups make contact. Number two things, the suction cups help draw the rib cage up and out. I wish I had better ways to explain this, but this is about as good as I can do. That upness is very different to what would just happen if you kicked the back end and you held the front end. And in the upness, you're increasing the internal pressure in your horse's insides. Think of all of his muscles and all of your muscles like water balloons. If they're water balloons with not much water in, everything's going to look pretty soggy. If they're water balloons with good pressure in, everything's going to be much more firm and solid and there. And we have to put more water in the water balloons for the horse, more pressure in the whole system and hold that pressure in our own system. Think of a stallion prancing in front of a mare and how much pressure there would be in his insides and maybe think of what rider you'd have to be to sit on that horse and do it confidently in an organised way that kept you in control of the game. So you know a little bit more about what a half hold isn't and a bit more too about what it is. And we need to come back to this again in our next podcast. But keep noticing, is your horse reaching into the rain? Does water get through the hoses? How much can you hold your own body like blown up water balloons full of pressure? How much pressure is there in your horse if he were going around like one of those pantomime horses of two men in a suit, you would have no chance at all of doing a half halt. We have to have a baseline level of pressure before it becomes possible. In the meanwhile, keep doing mental rehearsal, do mental rehearsal of maybe the half halts you've done as lucky accidents. Enjoy your horses, enjoy your riding 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.

With 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 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.