Ep. 42 - The learning process

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 on www.maryoneliss.shop.

Webinars.

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 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 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 Wandlis WELcoming you to podcast 42. I want to start by going back to that diagram that illustrates the learning process so beautifully, where you could put a row of dots along the bottom of a flip chart and each of those dots would be a piece, a chunk that you have to learn. Let's start in the early stages. So we're going. One is thigh on the saddle, thigh at 45 degrees, thighs rotated in foot light stir up on the ball of the foot, heel under your hip being a box, your front equals your back. Your seat bones point down, you're bearing down your breathing. And that's a kind of minimal list. And of course it is so much more than brains can cope with. So we have no choice but to kind of make it into a checklist and go through the checklist and do the best we can. And I often find myself reminding people how they learnt to drive a car, they learned to change gear. And in doing that, which I found overwhelming at the time, you take your foot off the accelerator onto the clutch, you're keeping the steering wheel, you know where you're going, you're moving the gear lever, you're getting the revs right as you get your foot off the clutch, clutch and onto the accelerator. I always think Americans cheat, actually if they don't learn to drive a stick shift and only drive an automatic, all those actions become one smooth movement. And if it were legal, you could do that and eat a sandwich and talk on your mobile phone. So the process begins as two different things become one. Thighs rotated in, thighs on the saddle becomes one thing. Foot back underneath you. Foot light becomes one thing. So it goes on as bearing down and breathing become one thing. Feeling where your seat bones are, where they point, keeping your front equal in your back becomes one thing. And when I do this in a diagram, I'll draw a horizontal bracket over two dots, and in the next line, that becomes one dot. And so we keep going through this process with 2 becoming 1, 2 becoming 1, 2 becoming 1. Very often for people in their learning process, what does that best is an image. In fact, an image can encapsulate a lot of different pieces and turn them into one. And so the rider works her way up to the top of a pyramid with one single dot and has a ride where it all comes together and she feels like she's reached nirvana. And then in the course of the next few days, either her horse will go, you know, you have another problem, and suddenly she's conscious of her incompetence in another area, or her coach goes, this is great, and now it's time to realize that. And here she goes again. And she's back down at the bottom, adding new dots and making two become one, and building up the pyramid again to make it higher with a bigger overview. I always think this is like walking in hills. You're trudging up a hill thinking, I can't wait to get to the top. Can't wait to get to the top. Really want to get to the top. It's going to be so great at the top, the view will be wonderful. And you get to the top and what do you find? There's another hill, and you have to go down the hill you're on to clamber your way up the next hill thinking, it'll be great when I get to the top. Can't wait to get the view. Can't wait to get up there. Fabulous idea. Let's get to the top. And what do you find? Not so much a great view as the realization of the next hill. And down you go before you have to go back up again. This is how the learning process works. You trudge your way up those hills and have to backtrack down again before you can go up the next hill. And often people find it really helpful to get this information as in, oh, you mean it's not just me? I thought it was just me. But nothing ever just goes onward and upward. There's always this, like, walking in hills kind of analogy. And this is just how the learning process is. And as you build up those hills, realize that as a relatively novice rider, you can have an experience where it all comes together and you've reached that top dot on your own little hill, having a wonderful experience before you discover how much more there is to know, then you're going to have a great experience at the top of that hill and on it goes. So you don't have to wait till you get to the Olympics before you have a magical feeling. And that is actually the plus side that keeps all of us in there, all of excited by the next little discovery, the next little peak. And without that, learning would be very different, even though the downside is down the hill before you go up the next one. So maybe you're in the stage of building your way up these hills with those basic deals, and believe me, they're never done. We spend our lives coming back to them, refining them, reorganising them. It's a huge amount of learning. But in the doing of this, you're building the skills that take away the wrong things. So the right things that can emerge and. And the biggest right things are half halts. Firstly, the tempo slowing, half halt. And then the rebalancing. Half halt. I want now to talk about the horse and how that rebalancing happens within his body. A lot of people know that he doesn't have a collarbone like we do. Our collarbone attaches our shoulder blades into our sternum at that notch at the top of your sternum at the bottom of your neck, the horse's shoulder blades move over muscle and connective tissue with no bony connection at all to the rest of his skeleton. So we've got the shoulder blade then coming to his shoulder joint and his humerus that's coming back to his elbow, and then the rest of his leg in between his shoulder blades. His ribcage is kind of teardrop shape, his wither still sticking up at the top, rounding out to his ribs and under the girth. And his shoulder blades moving over this soft tissue could be rather like somebody polishing a car windscreen with a duster, just making sort of circular movements, as it were, over a smooth surface. We've mostly learned that the front legs bear 60% of the horse's weight and the back legs be 40. Research has shown that the figures are actually 58 to 42. The horse's center of gravity is between his 12th and 13th rib. That's about where you're sitting. It's also on a line from his seat bone to the top of his humerus, which would form the bottom of his shoulder joint. So if you think of the front of his chest and his shoulder joint there, the bottom surface of that shoulder joint, if we drew a line from there to his seat bone, which would go back and up, it probably slopes down around 10 degrees from his seat bone down to his shoulder. His center of gravity is on that line, and it's also 1cm to the left of his midline. And this is because his internal organs give him slightly more weight on the left than the right. And this information I have from Professor Hilary Clayton, who's professor emeritus from Michigan State University and the MacPhail Centre, who spent her life doing the most amazing research on horses and how they move and how they can move better and their various physical issues. We think of collection really putting more weight on the back legs and less weight on the front legs, but this isn't so much what happens. His center of gravity moves up and potentially somewhat back. But in the movement up, what the horse is actually doing is pushing himself up more off his front legs, raising that muscle sling between his shoulder blades and lifting his wither. So what's called the ground reaction forces are greater. And that means that whilst the hind legs bear more weight in collection, so do the front legs. And if you're scratching your head over the ground reaction force, this is how the ground pushes back up at the horse with the same amount of force that the horse pushes back down on the ground. And this happens to us in walking. Except if you think about walking on a deep, sandy beach and you don't get the effect of the beach pushing back up at you, you know how unpleasant that is. That's what happens when there isn't the ground reaction force. So the back end goes slightly more down as the front end comes up. But really the sensation of that is more because the is up, so the back is relatively more down. It's not so much that the front end is really seriously carrying more weight. Our focus is going to be on how the front end and the center of mass moves up. Because this is what I think people learn to do first after that. Tempo slowing half halt. There is a problem, though. If someone has the history of learning to do half halts, they thinking of just compressing the horse on the horizontal plane without that up, they'll often do their intervention on one of the horse's downbeats and squash him down more and lose access to the up influence. And this actually, as a habit, is not easy to change. You can almost liken it to a habit people often have in the early days of their riding, where they will give a leg aid on the up of rising trot, where actually that leg aid would have much more effect if they did it on a down. Here we have the opposite problem. They're doing their intervention on a down when they really need to think of doing it on an up. But both of those habits at different ends of the spectrum. The more novice and the more advanced end of the spectrum are difficult to change. We all start by learning to feel how the horse is underneath where we're sitting. Is the back a hollow? Is it a flat surface? Is it a mound? Are you toppling back down? The man trap? Can you draw the back up under you? Then you learn to influence the horse ahead of you, which of course you can see, and lastly the horse behind you. This is one of the reasons why it's harder to think of the horse's center of mass coming back, because you have to really influence the back end that is behind you, and that change is significantly less dramatic than when you learn to influence the front end. We're going to talk about this now using a couple of images. As always, our intervention has to be based on the awareness of what's happening. Now, remember, you can't get to there until you understand and recognise what you're here. Are you going north, south, east or west? What direction? How long? So we have to figure out what's happening now. And this image, these two images really help with this. So, first of all, let's imagine that your horse is hollow, as in like the kind of fiberglass horse you would see in a tack shop modeling a rug. And within that hollow of his insides, there is a medicine ball. This would maybe be 6 inches diameter and. And it's heavy. The question is, whereabouts in his body would the horse put the ball? And it could be really good, even if you're not that experienced a rider to in the next week, before the next podcast, to be riding your horse out, maybe just on a hacking walk, going, so where in his body does my horse put the medicine ball? It's almost certainly in front of you, not behind you. Your aim is that you'd like to get where you're sitting on it, and it's part of what fills out his back into that bigger, more blown up gym ball. But most horses would go around with the medicine ball, perhaps low down in their chest, somewhere a bit higher up between their shoulder blades, somewhere a bit in front of the wither, further up the neck, really quite high up the neck or in their head. These are all variations of the theme of how the horse contrives to go on the forehand. The rider has to somehow get to be able to influence that medicine ball and bring it back underneath her to where she's sitting on it. Now, how to do that might become clearer through this next image. Let's imagine your horse is packed with particles and different parts of his body can be packed to different degrees of density, and I don't think so much as different packets within him, because potentially the particles can move around in his whole body. They're not just packaged in their different ways of being. So the most he could be packed would be like sand in a box of sandbags. That would be really heavy, dense packing. The least packed he could be would be like when you look at air through sunlight and you see particles just kind of floating around in the air, there's barely any packing in that at all. And between the two, we could have kind of loose sand and various degrees of packing. We then I asked, so you're there as rider, how packed are you? How packed is your torso? How packed are your two thighs? Are you like those particles seen through sunlight?

I hope you're not.

Are you like sand in a box of sandbag? That might be a bit overdone, but are you rather wibbly, wobbly? Are you full of polystyrene beads that move around? You know, how packed are you? So if your horse is more packed in his most packed place than you are where you're most packed, we could say that he's got the vacuum cleaner. He's essentially emptied you to get your packing into where he wants to be, densely packed and heavy. What has to happen is that you, as Ryder, have to get the vacuum cleaner so that you can somehow go to him as you draw the packing, let's say, out of his head and into his back, your body. Now, depending on your size and your horse's size, your horse's head might actually not be that much smaller than your torso. How packed is your torso compared to his head? So we're going to pretend that his head is the most packed place, as it often is, and that horse is going to be so heavy in the rain, he's going to be difficult to ride. And. And you're easily going to find yourself with your torso almost empty and your arms aching as you hold him up. If we gave numbers for the packing and strength you have in your torso to the packing and strength you have in your arms, maybe at that point your torso's a one and your arms are a nine. These numbers have to add up to 10. The horse in that case has really got you. We have to get where the packing in your Torso is an 8, to your reins is a 2. So you might start with walk holds, and in those walk holds, if you lean back, if you pull, if you push in your feet, you do all those wrong things, he's going to go, yep, gotcha. Enjoy pulling, I'll pull back and I'm bigger than you. And he might enact water ski motorboat in slow motion as he eventually grinds to a halt. But he won't react to the bit, as we said before in previous podcasts, by feeling the bit and bouncing off it. That's what you're trying to train him to do. And you have to get so strong within your packing and also within the boundaries of your torso. The wall of your front, the wall of your back, the walls of your sides. The pressure inside you has to become so much to counteract the pressure inside his head. And you have to be suctioning like crazy. So at this point, we're talking about a rebalancing that isn't quite so much a half halt because it doesn't happen in a short instant, it takes longer. But this is going to lead you to where you could do, oops, no, not that. Regroup, come here. And in a little moment, to get that to happen, there's actually a wonderful video sequence in the Naked Truth of Riding DVD set on DVD 4, where Heather Blitz, my colleague Heather Blitz is riding a horse that has not been very well trained. And coming across the arena, she does this row of half halts that just go, hey, come back here. Hey, come back here. Hey, come back here. Hello, me again. Where his rider, his normal rider, had gone around just basically with a horse pulling on the rein and her pulling on the rein and him water skiing to her motorboating and the weight in his head. So you have to be able to do suction under your thigh using the hand on hand pickup, which we've talked about before. You have to be able to really build your own strength and bear down. You have to use the numbering exercise here to really clarify where is the horse most packed with particles? How packed are you compared to him? How Packed is your torso compared to your arms. Can you build your bear down? Can you build the strength of your wall? Because you can try and get yourself full of packing, but if your walls kind of go bloop in the process and you become a bigger package, your pressure does not increase. I think this analogy explains very well what strength is in riding terms. It's so tempting to kick and pull, it's so tempting to flail about. This rider who's really packed with particles in her torso is not flailing, is so still might be appearing to do nothing until you kind of. Until she might be appearing to do nothing until you see the kind of obvious interventions that Heather was doing on that DVD or that happen during a test and during preparing for various movements and so on. Getting yourself packed with particles is a big deal and really what you need to learn to do, strong innards pushing out against strong walls. And obviously nobody's born with this skill. We're born more or less stuffed, if you like more or less packed. And we learn this skill over time. And I, by my nature am a bit of a weakling and a bit of a sapling that would blow in the breeze and over time have learned to be an awful lot stronger than that. I'll never be as strong as a man. I'll never, never be as strong as somebody a lot bigger than me. But I can do the right kind of strength in the right kind of way and teach my horses that these are the parameters. Hello. Come back here. When you're hacking out over the next week, notice this. Where would the horse put the medicine ball? Where is he most packed with particles? Where is he least packed with particles? How packed is he under where you're sitting? Maybe all the packing goes down into his tummy. So he's empty in the area of his back. Maybe he's really empty in his loins. He's likely to be empty where his middle third butts up to his front third and his back third butts up to his middle third. Can you kind of almost get where you could draw a drawing of where his packing is or make it a kind of three dimensional map that you can get a sense of. And even as a relatively novice rider, you might be able to go, oh, his butt's really empty. Ooh, his shoulders are really full already. There you have good information. So as you think about these ideas over the next week, enjoy your horses, have fun 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 talk 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.