Ep. 41 The 3 thirds of the horse

Hello, I'm Mary Wandlis. Just wanting to tell you that I have a series of four webinars beginning next week on Wednesday 10th February and continuing through until 3rd March. These are actually webinars 9 to 12, 1 to 8 ran through November, December and January and are still available. You can find all of them on www.maryoneless.com. in this new series we build on what's gone before, really showing you what you have to do in your body to have a positive influence on your horse's body, helping him to change his carriage and his movement. And I aim to present this information in bite sized chunks and with lots of exercises done off horse with which really help you develop the skills that you need to take into your riding to influence when you're on horse. I've had emails from people telling me that these podcasts have changed their lives and we have proved over and over again that Internet teaching can really help people understand the baselines and the structure of a skill that can seem so mysterious, but that actually has rules. I'm really looking forward to hosting these webinars and hope to see you there very soon so that you too can take the next steps in your riding journey. Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis WELcoming you to podcast 41, where we keep talking about half halts and the issues therein. At the end of podcast 40 we talked about the horse needing more stuffing, which is more internal pressure, and that should happen as a result of a half halt, certainly one that changes his balance. And I invited you to think of a stallion prancing in front of a mare and the difference between that and a pantomime horse. And within those two we're seeing the ultimate difference of the muscles either being like water balloons under pressure or rather soggy water balloons. So this is known in the biomechanics trade as hydraulic amplification and I saw a wonderful demonstration some time ago which I then tried to replicate which took quite a while. So it involves a balloon and a fishnet stocking and I have to say I trawled shops and Internets for a long time to find the right fishnet stocking and felt very out of character whilst doing that. So if you put the balloon in the fishnet stocking and blow up the balloon, you are seeing a metaphor for a kind of pumped up muscle putting pressure against the fishnet tights which are the container of the muscle and have that diagonal weave just like fascia, the connective tissue of the body, the envelope that surrounds the muscle and you've seen this, I expect, in the muscles of a chicken leg as that thin white skin around the muscle. So when everything's working at high pressure, the muscle equals the balloon is pushing out against the fascia, equals the fishnet tights, and the fishnet tights are pushing back in against the muscle. And that's a very different situation to a rather limp balloon making no pressure out and then the container making no pressure in. So one kind of subtype of people and horses would be the kind of person who struggles to get this pressure and maybe gets it in one part of her body, but it disappears from somewhere else. And then she gets it from there, but it disappears from somewhere else and she manages to firm up somewhere and loses pressure somewhere else. And horses can be like that, too. And that person and that horse are really struggling to get stability and strength. And they're the opposite end of the scale to the person who would use a lot of strength, let's say, to kick and pull, and maybe the horse who would use a lot of strength in response, perhaps by into the rain. And they're just stuck that pattern of overusing strength in the wrong way and not really getting their water balloons to work in the way they should. And of course, the other problem with the kick and pull philosophy is that it's been well shown that horses cannot pay attention to two different aids, two different stimuli at the same time. So the horse has to choose one and ignore the other. So then we really have a problem. And in a half hold, it's like things don't actually quite happen at the same time. There's several stages to that rebalancing, even though they happen very quickly, but they take away the problem of the two contradictory stimuli, and thinking of the horse coming up underneath you changes that a bit too. So we talked as well about water through the hoses and the possibility of backflow, especially around the horses, withers how that flow of the water through the hoses can be deadened or dissipated. And I saw a horse a while ago that I looked at him and I thought his hoses are full of sludge. And I suspect he really didn't feel well and that his body might actually have been very toxic. The water through the hoses is a great image and a really good start, and it really helps riders fairly on in their early on in their learning. But here's another image which says it rather differently. We're going to imagine the horse having a back third, a middle third and a front third. So the back third butts up to the middle third pretty much at the back of the saddle pad. If you thought of a vertical division from the bottom of his tummy up to the back of the saddle pad, you'd be splitting the back third from the middle third. And the middle third butts up to the front third pretty much at the front of the girth, coming up to the pommel or slightly behind the pommel. So these three thirds need to connect to each other, but very often they don't. If they don't connect, we're not going to get a half halt to work because the circuit is not complete, and disconnects are losses of stuffing that result in reduced or distorted force transmission. So put your hands out in front of you with your palms touching each other and your palms vertical. And let's pretend this is just near the girth up to the front of the saddle and the junction between the middle third and the front third. So with some horses, it's almost like the front third is running away from the middle third. So let's pretend your hands are this junction in a horse whose head is to the left. So if you move your left hand to the left, we now have a disconnect with the front third running away from the middle third. And when that happens, the front third might drop down, so maybe lower that hand. Of course, we would want it to come up rather than down, but we're not going to do anything when there's that disconnect. Put your hands back together again. Now make a V where your fingertips come apart. So now we've got a kind of empty space at the top of the horse, under the front of the saddle and into the withers. And if we come back to our stuffed horse analogy, this could be an area that really doesn't have much stuffing. And this horse is disconnected in a pretty big way. Make your left hand vertical. So this horse functions better in the near part of the neck towards the wither, but it's kind of empty from where your pubic bone is between your thighs under the stirrup bars in the middle third as it butts up to the front third. This is very common. And often the horse that does this gets behind the rider. He doesn't go well and doesn't go forward, doesn't respond to a leg aid. He might be quite negative in his response to a leg aid. And the rider tends to get sucked into sitting in that chasm, whereupon her center of gravity is too far forward and she can flail all she likes without much happening. Now, Put your hands together again, and this time take your left fingers away from your right fingers. So this horse is filled out pretty well up to the junction near the wither, and the near part of the neck is empty, and his neck is kind of disconnected from his body, and it's going to kind of fall down towards the ground and maybe in just a rather straight and heavy way, or maybe with his nose down on his knees. This could be rather like the horse I told you about in the last podcast from 20 years ago, where my colleague who owned him and I, we'd worked out how to get the horse's back up, but we failed to work out how to get the horse's front up. And this could work completely the other way around if you have your hands together, palms touching in that position again, and now you separate the heels of your hand. That horse has emptied himself under his tummy near the girth, and think what's going to happen to his head and neck? Well, I hope it's pretty obvious that it's going to go up in the air. This is going to be the Arabs, the horses that do lama drama. And the separation is very much in that bottom area of the front third disconnecting from the middle third. This horse is rather like the rider who lifts her chest. So we've had the analogy of the rider being rather like a Rubik's Cube in her torso. And the Rubik's Cube has three the pelvis layer, the middle layer between the ribs and the hips, and the upper layer. And if you this time put your hands horizontally with your palms touching, and imagine that's the junction in the rider between the middle layer and the top layer. And. And she's facing away from you, and you lift the fingers of the top hand away from the bottom hand. That would be her tilting the top layer of the Rubik's Cube off the rest of the Rubik's Cube, almost like there's an open mouth at about the layer of her sternum just underneath her bosom. And that needs to reconnect in her as she lowers her collarbone and puts the top layer back on top of the middle layer. Some horses do the same thing in just pulling themselves apart from the girth. They can be pretty okay further back than the girth. But the disconnect, like we saw in the human, is very localized. These examples are all examples of imbalances between the chain of muscle and connective tissue that goes along the back of the body. In our case, from underneath your toes, underneath your feet. Feet, the Achilles tendon, calf muscles, thigh muscles over your butt, actually underneath your glutes, near to the bones of your pelvis, in your long back muscles, into your neck and over your head to your eyes. And essentially the same in the horse from his hind legs right over his top line to his eyes. And we've all got the underneath layer of tissue or front for us, underneath for the horse, going from the tops of the toes, front of the shins, kneecaps, quads, and then into the pelvis and from the pubic bone right up the muscles of the abs and into the neck and into near the ears and in the horse cases, near the eyes. So these two chains have to kind of have a balance, and a disconnect in one of them that isn't so much a disconnect in the other of them becomes a problem. So we talked about the disconnect in front of the saddle. We've got another disconnect behind the saddle where the back third would butt up to the middle third. So again, put the palms of your hands against each other. Imagine your horse is facing with his nose to the left. And we're mirroring the connection between the back third and the middle third. Just separate your hands a bit. So there could be a disconnect. So this will be the horse whose hind legs are going up and down, but force is really not transmitted in his body. He might be not a very pleasant trot to sit. That biomechanics would not be nice to sit. And the biomechanics would have to change to be less up and down and more transmitting force forward to be more sittable on. So somehow there's that disconnect and the rider has to be able to draw the hind end of the horse towards her. Now, in response to all of these, you're allowed to go, ha, ha, ha. Yes, lovely idea. I get the image. But drawing different parts of the horse to different directions, well, that's crazy. And actually it's not crazy. Although whether I can get you within this series of podcasts to be anywhere near being do it is another question. But I promise you, keep looking through more and more refined microscope lenses, as it were, till you reach the point where this kind of sophistication is possible and doable. Put your hands together again. The horse is facing to the left. Now take your left fingers away from your right fingers. So this horse is empty in the area of the loins behind the saddle. This is very common. So here the problem is not that the back third doesn't Butt up to the middle third. It's that the middle third doesn't have substance in it. Extending back to butt up to the back third. This is an awful lot of horses. And again, filling in this part of the horse's body is something the rider can learn to do. We might have the opposite. If you put your fingers together again, where it's just the back third that disconnects near the top of the horse, this happens too. But I would say, in my understanding at this point in time, less commonly than the mirror image we just did. And then we've got the possibility of the disconnects in the horse's tummy. So if you take the heels of your hands away from each other, we've got a disconnect that takes the horse's hind legs out the back of him. They and his pubic bone and the lower part of his abs are going backwards, whilst disconnected from the rest of his abs, pulled more forwards. Or we could just have one affected. If you keep your right hand vertical and take the heel of your left hand away from your right, that horse, from about his belly button, is pulling his abs forward. So he's pulling his belly button towards his sternum and his sternum, if he was human, towards his collarbone, but towards his pecs and between his legs. So he's elongating from much further back in his underline than the horse who just did it from the girth. And then he could disconnect the other way, just kind of pushing his pubic bone backwards and his hind feet backwards. The way that both horses and people over elongate the front line in the human, the underline in the horse can be rather different. And that tummy line of muscles in the horse extending all the way from the front of his hind feet, up his hind legs to his pubic bone, under his tummy, all the way between his front legs and under his neck and into his head just near his eyes in his masseter muscles, the muscles of the jaw, those muscles are not just naughty muscles. People tend to think that the horse that's gone around really elongating its underline with its nose up in the air, that has very developed muscles on the underside of his neck that those are naughty muscles. Well, we really have to think about the whole chain, not just those muscles on the underside of the neck, and to realize that much more length of the chain can be involved. And when that chain works well, it has a function. It has to have its own water balloons at just the right amount of pressure. And it's not just a case of it should be soggy, it should be relaxed, or it should be switched off. So I'm saying that learning to feel what's happening in the junction between the back third and the middle third and the middle third and the front third is a learnable skill. Learning to influence and change those disconnects is a learnable skill. But the rider has to have a lot of sensitivity, as we said, and she has to be able to operate in rather large chunks. She has to be able to sense her own body pretty much as an entirety, top to toe. And she has to be able to sense her horse's body pretty much as an entirety from the back to the front and also from the bottom to the top. Now, you can understand by just thinking is the water going through the hoses is a very good step along the way to this. And you might think back to us talking about learning. And I think I talked to you the idea of how when you learn something new, you've got all these pieces. When I do this, when I have visuals available, I draw a row of little circles along the bottom of a flip chart, maybe. And each of those circles remembers one little thing that the rider has to remember. So we've got things like foot, light weight in your thigh, think of kneeling, the way your underneath is on the saddle, how you bear down, how you breathe, how you're holding the reins, how you keep your back in your front. And so the list goes on. And in the learning process, two things become one. So foot, light, thighs on the saddle become one thing. The way you keep your front and your back becomes one thing. The way you bear down and breathe becomes one thing. And again, two things become one. So we build up a sort of pyramid of these dots. I normally draw a horizontal bracket covering two dots to make them into one. And so we build up to that pyramid. And then I made the point that the writer has a wonderful experience where all quotes come together. She's in the one single dot at the top of that pyramid. And either her Taurus or her teachers say, well, you know, there's more than this. What about here, here, here, here, here, and here? And here she is down at the bottom layer again, rebuilding the pyramid until it ultimately creates a higher peak. If you're going to have this level awareness of your own body and your horse's body, you have to have built up that pyramid again and again and again and had the, oh, here we go back to the bottom, build it up again experience. Goodness only knows how many Times. And in the process of this happening, it starts by the rider being able to feel and influence the horse as he's underneath her. Is his back up? Is his back a hollow? Is she sitting down in a hollow on a flat surface or on a mound? And she begins to process the horse's body as it is in front of her. Is his neck off to the right, off to the left? Is he reaching into the rein? Are his ears coming back towards her chin? And of course, she's going to be able to process that visually before she can process it kinesthetically. But we want to get her really good at knowing what's happening in the front third and not being so sidetracked by the contact that she never, ever gets to consider other parts of the horse. And, of course, that is many people's beginning point. They're obsessed by the horse's nose being vertical and don't think of any of the rest of the horse or them other than his nose, their reins, their hands, the contact. That's sad. The rider has visual input to the front of the horse, which is a blessing. And in the case of the rider that just sees his nose and wants it vertical, a curse. It takes a lot more to get from the middle third of the horse to the front third of the horse, to really perceiving the back of the horse, because, of course, this is behind you and you can't see. May be a fair amount of time before you go, oh, my gosh, every horse I ride has its quarters off to the right. That's certainly been my history. And figuring out my right side and my horse's right side and what's going on behind me and how I really connect to that back third, straighten it behind me, can change the hind legs, how they step that junction from the back third to the middle third, I cannot tell you how many years that's taken, but I can tell you that that using this schema, people can become able to do this so much faster than I did. We don't have to be scrabbling around in the dark. So it may well be that water through the hoses and the deadening, the deviating, the dissipating is where it's at for you. And in this, I'm not so much telling you things that I think you can just go out and do. And I do like to put out information that's actionable that people can do. So this is more telling you where you're going and showing you a schema that can potentially guide your actions and that if you were to have lessons with a coach who understands this work and hanging there for a while, this would start to become clear. In the meanwhile, whatever level you're at, your aim is to be taking the next steps, your learning in bite sized chunks as you build your skills. Enjoy doing that. Have fun with your horses, fun with 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, 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 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.