Ep. 43 - The Half Halt & Collection

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 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 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 43, where we're still talking about this mysterious enigmatic half halt, trying to make it more accessible and understandable to everybody if we backtrack a little bit. When people learn the basics of my work, they learn how to pull their stomach in to make a wall, push their guts against the wall as you do when you clear your throat or make the sound. And to think of their torso like a big rectangular metal water tank, filling up through their head with high pressure with a power hose, leaving their body at bikini line level, aiming to just in front of the horse's withers where a conventionally cut rug would have its front or a martingale strap would sit. And as if the rider can push the creases out of the horse's neck, she's learning how to push the head and neck away from you to make a push forward bigger than his push back, assuming that his MO in how he does life is compressing his neck backwards so his ears come back towards your chin, which we call pushing back. But once we're dealing with half halts, we're changing the game because instead of pushing those creases out of his neck and pushing his head and neck away, we're wanting his withers to Come up his neck, to come up his poll, to come up his whole front third to be essentially closer to you. So that requires a bit of a change in tactics, and it's not a very big change in tactics. But if you imagine you have the wool, you have the push, and you have the idea that we've called braids to buttons, as if you had a jacket with buttons on and your horse had braids or plaits, as we'd say in the uk, and you had a string from each braid to each button. And we could improve that by having a right string and a left string just to each side of your midline and each side of his crest. If you think about collection, if your wall gives way and your belly hangs out and these strings are coming back up towards your front and your belly, you made the string slack. You're trying to have tension in those strings, drawing him towards you. So the wall becomes more important than it was before, although you had to have it to push the horse's neck away. But in a way, there's more wall and a different thought regarding the push, if you think about collection. So I want to do an exercise with you to help with your wall. And this might be just where you're at the stage of pushing the horse's head and neck away, as most riders are most of the time. Or it may be that collection really is your deal. If you don't have a strong wall to your front, those strings will go slack. And if your wall is leaky, like somebody has drilled holes in that water tank and the water is. Very often a lot of riders have leaks under their sternum in the upper part of their abs. If that strength is leeching out of you, it's because your wall is not strong enough. So at any stage in your learning, having a stronger wall is good. And in the process of doing this exercise, as I hope you'll do it along with me and I do it along with you, when I'm actually doing it, I can't talk, so I will go quiet while I do that. But here's the explanation. Put your tongue at the top of your front top teeth against the gum line. Imagine it's glued on and then try and suck it off. I went quiet just then because I was doing it. So maybe give yourself a break for a moment. And then as you do it again, notice what happens in your abs and. And maybe check out lower down in your stomach and higher up. So again, you put your tongue behind your top front teeth on the gum line. You try and suck it off. Most people find when they do that that they firm up low down in their stomach around their bikini line. Although some people will firm up higher up more under their sternum. Let's do the other version of this exercise now where you put your tongue on your hard palate. The dome of your mouth, imagine it's glued on. Try and suck it off. What happened in your abs? Did they draw in at all? I would expect them to. With your front wall getting stronger, did you feel it higher up? Did you feel it lower down? If you can't feel any difference in your abs at all, deliberately pull your stomach in as you do this with your tongue and see if you can connect the two. I hope you can feel a distinct difference. We'll then add another bit onto this exercise. You're going to start. You choose which one. You're going to start sucking on your tongue and then you're going to change it when you've done that for a little while and push your tongue against the gum line or your hard palate and see what happens. If you then push your tongue rather than suck on your tongue. I think you'll find if you do that, that you first will make a stronger wall as you suck on your tongue and then feel an increased pressure push against the wall as you push your tongue against your gum line or your hard palate. So this is an interesting exercise. Now, obviously you can't do it all the time because when you do it you're not breathing. But you can visit it. You can visit it when you're riding and you can visit it, say, driving your car and you can actually make a significant difference to the strength of your wall and your internal pressure. You do that, and that's tremendous way for building your strength and your skill and realize you don't need to go to the gym to do this. But teaching yourself to exist as a higher pressure water tank with very strong walls and very firm inside is important because the kind of horse that wants to put the medicine ball in his chest, that wants to be packed with particles in his chest or his neck or his head will, will be attempting to leech the strength out of you. And if your front wall is weak or if it has a leaky layer under your sternum, if you can't get your bear down to be a very distinct exit hole for your power hose and a very strong wall able to draw on those connections to his neck, then he will get you. And if you have that kind of horse, and we were in A lesson together, we would be setting up a numbering ex for the strength of your torso and the strength of your arms, really trying to get you more packed with particles, which is a metaphor for your insides under higher pressure. And I'd be asking you, as you're riding around me, and what are the numbers now? And now? And now. And we want your torso to have an 8 for the strength of its substance and its walls, and your arms to be at a 2, which means the contact is there but light. And if it starts going 7, 3, 6, 4, 5, 5, and if you go the other way around with eight in the reins and two in your torso, the horse has really got you. So this says a lot about how you develop strength in riding terms. And horses like this are hard to ride, but people learn a lot from them. And we hope as a rider that you can get more skillful at going, uh, honey, not with me. Hello, come back here. I won't play your game. I won't pull, I won't go leaky, I won't lean back, I won't press in my feet, I won't lift my chest. I'm just going to be stacked up, being like a box. And you might remember the metaphor of like a carousel pole going down to the horse's tummy, refusing to be budged. At the same time, we'd use walk, halt, transitions to help you keep your verticality, to help you keep your strength and to help you recognise where you're losing it. When we were in trot, we wouldn't stay in trot for so long that you couldn't hold it. In walk, we might do better going, as if you're going to halt, don't halt. In trot, we might do better going, as if you're going to walk, don't walk. And in a very broken down into slow motion, rather challenging and laborious way, the rider is developing the skill to make a much quicker intervention and to be much more resilient. And the horse we hope is beginning to agree to go in this new body pattern, agree to have you rebalance him. And his rideability on that score can vary immensely from horse to horse. My colleague Heather Blitz in America, who is a big, brilliant rider and trainer, had a horse in training. He was an unusual horse, actually, for America, because he was more chunky, more of almost a cob or an Irish cob kind of horse. He was spectacular, actually, black and white and he could piaffe and. And he was amazing. But she never got to the stage where she didn't have to rebalance him about every eight strides. He never, ever went, okay, I get it. And who knows how much that was in his head, Just the make and shape of how force transmitted through his body in a down direction rather than an up direction, or what his story really was. But it never became easy with him. And, you know, there are times when I think that trainers who call themselves classical are in cloud cuckoo land, as if there is only ever lightness, there's only ever rainbows and unicorns. But sometimes horses are challenging. They have not good conformation, not good rideability. They demand a lot from the rider. And whilst you're working on lightness, you're not working on no contact at all. You want to feel the horse into the rein, almost like his energy is then reflected back and recycled again. And he meets himself, as it were, to know where both ends of his body are, rather than he's like a leaky front with nothing to keep his stuffing and his firmness inside him. So everything we've been talking about here is the slow motion training ground for the much quicker rebalancing that you can learn to do when a horse is getting heavy in your hand. And it's the rebalance that gets good work better. It's the rebalance that's preparation for. For something else that's coming up. And the key is the idea of, first of all, the back comes up and then the withers and the front comes up and the water gets through the hoses and the 3/3 of the horse are all connected. It's interesting to me, looking back, because the Ride with your Mind Clinic book, which I finished writing in 2007, it was published in 2008, so we're going back 13 years here. The last drawing in that book has the rider on the horse and draws strings like the braids to buttons, strings from her front, but a right and a left on each side of his crest, and strings from her back low down to his loins and a bit higher up, further back and a bit higher up to his croup and a bit further back going to his tail. It's almost like the rider is a mast, like a single mast suspension bridge with wires going forward and back, left and right, connecting to the horse. And that is a great image. And I realized that since then, we very much developed the idea of the medicine ball, although I had that idea at that time. The packed with particles, although I had that idea at that time time, but since then, in the intervening years, the connections from the rider to the Horse have become less external, like that single masted suspension bridge, and more internal within the horse's body. And this has made a big difference, I think, to the accessibility for people of halfholtz and collection and really learning to change the horse's carriage. So one of the easiest ways to think of this and one of the easiest ways to connect to the horse behind you would be to imagine that if he in some magical way had ropes around his hind pastons that connected first of all through air, and then through his tummy and then to your front tendons. So the front tendons are the tendons at the top of your quads and in the crease between your thigh and your torso. And you could put your fingers there. Now putting your fingertips in a row in the crease where your thigh comes into your torso. And if you lift your knee, you should feel a tendon stick up and it's actually two tendons. If you poke around, you might be able to separate them and then maybe put your other hand on your knee. So you can't lift your knee and go as if you'd lift your, your knee and then those tendons stick up without your knee moving. But your quads get to really bulge in the process. If you look at the shape of your thigh, you might notice the shape of your thigh changing as you do this. So if you had your front tendons up and you had these strings, right pastern to right tendon, left pastern to left tendon, and you could pull on those strings, sometimes the effect of that's really significant. You might want to try getting the strings to come up to your sternum at the front of your sternum at the top of the inverted V made by your ribcage. Try that. It's a bit of a different angle. See if that works better. We used to have the idea as well of as if there was a Pessoa strap around your horse's butt. And many of you will know the Pessoa. It's a training aid named after Nelson Pessoa, who is a famous show jumper. And it has a string that goes around the horse's butt below his seat bones. And that string comes back to a roller just behind the wither. And I've often used the idea with riders as if they had a string like that and they could pull on it. But it came clear to me a couple of years ago that it worked much better if somehow from your right side you, you had a string that would go around his thigh bone just under his right seat bone. So realise this is magical thinking, you know, because we're thinking inside the horse's body. But if you could imagine a long rubber band going around the top of his thigh bone, which would be just under his seat bone to the side of his tail, and one on the right goes from there to maybe the back of your pelvis on the right, and perhaps through you to the front of you. Then there's one on the left from his left seat bone through his body, through to the back of your pelvis, through to maybe the front of you. And you could pull on each of those strings, and that can make it clear that one of them tends to be rather soggy and disorganized compared to the other. So you've got a very viable, if metaphorical way to really realize that one hind leg isn't strutting its thick stuff in the way it needs to and to extra pull on that string. And if you round your back and get soggy and flop backwards, that string will go slack and that won't work. Well, since then, I've also found ways to pull on the whole of the horse's pelvis behind me. And maybe you'd need to look at a horse anatomy book to kind of go, well, where, where is his pelvis? It's remarkably flat and almost horizontal. And if you can pull on the whole of his pelvis and pull it towards his loins and pull his back third, towards his middle third, and like, pull power from his back third into the rest of him, you can make a huge difference. So thinking these connections from your body to your horse's body is massive. I mean, absolutely massive, and makes a huge difference. But the deal is getting to be able to think these things. And back through time, when teachers said to me, well, just imagine it, I went, yeah, ha, ha, very funny. That might work for you. Which, of course, in short, it wasn't going to work for me, but it's taken me a long time to be able to think of my body and the horse's body this clearly and in this bigger chunk and with enough basics and as we've said in other podcasts back through time, like getting a microscope lens that shows you a certain amount of detail and then another microscope lens that shows you more detail and another one that shows you more detail and another one that shows you more detail, and all the time you're building up your effectiveness to influence the horse for from one end to the other. Sometimes I think of pulling on his stifles like, I've got bands connecting to his stifles, to under my seat bones and the back of my butt, and think of pulling on them. I think that can work particularly well in canter. And you could imagine from his neck vertebra, if you know a little bit the anatomy of how his neck vertebra are almost kind of like the spout of a teapot, only when he really reaches his head down do they become one continuous curve. They start lower than you think and then curve up and then curve more horizontally towards his pole. And you could imagine strings from those neck vertebra drawing on the near part of his neck to keep his front third connected to his middle third. And those strings will come back to your low tummy and. And they might go into his muscles a bit deeper and a bit further away from the midline than the braids to buttons type strings. And you might be able to get in there really deep thinking of pulling on those vertebra pulling them towards you. And if your horse wants to go around all the time with a neck almost too long and too low that you're trying to pull Those especially probably C6, 5 and 4 closer towards you, rather than letting them be too far away from you. I know if you haven't thought this way before, this can sound bizarre, but I think the strings from the horse's hind pastons to your front tendons or maybe up into the inverted V of your sternum, is something you probably could really go away and do, having listened to this workshop, thinking of those strings from his hind fetlocks magically coming through his tummy and up towards your front tendons, or maybe the inverted V of your sternum, that. That's something you really could have a go at, even if you don't aspire to collection yet and half halts aren't in your repertoire. See if that can make you feel like you have an influence on those hind legs and you can tell more where they are and what they're doing. The idea of the Pessoa straps a right one and a left one around his seat bones, and that's following the anatomy of his psoas muscles, which are really important muscles we'll talk about more next time. Or maybe from his stifles. So I leave you with those ideas. I hope you're still doing lots of mental rehearsal. If you've hit some little half holes, I hope you're using them as cannon fodder for your mental rehearsal, because they are the most important thing in to get slick at. So until I get to talk to you again. Enjoy your horses. Have fun riding.

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.