Ep. 44 And now that you have your black belt…

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 at 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 44, where we're going to continue our exploration of those mythical half halts. But I want to start by telling you a story a colleague told me recently about a podcast she'd heard featuring someone who was a black belt in one of the martial arts. And he was talking about achieving his black belt and being so excited about having got that far and so looking forward to the new moves that they were going to learn and how it would develop from here and there. He was entering the sessions of the newly qualified back belts and what did they do? They went right back to basics and they redid the basics, bringing to them the skills, the insight, the kinesthetic literacy that all of them now had. And initially I think he was so disappointed. But of course it had to happen, didn't it? And it's just like our walking in hills analogy. You get to the top of the hill, you're so thrilled at the top of the hill and your teacher says okay, down to the bottom. How about this lot? One of my most fun experiences of this summer where I taught less than normal, was working with a woman who had recently achieved her black belt in karate. She was very small and she really liked it that she could hold her own when sparring with bigger, more novice men who thought they were just going to knock her about. Riding wise. She was a happy hacker and she'd come with a friend. She'd really been persuaded to come by her friend and. And they did a riding holiday every year as a way to have fun together and to stay in touch. So she wasn't really a serious rider and she'd never really related her karate to her riding. And after she told me about karate and her black belt, I found myself making analogies like, I think you do this in karate. How about doing it in your riding? And in fact, she didn't realise that she beared down when I taught her bear down in riding, she reacted like it was a totally new thing. And I said to her, well, I think you'll do this in your karate. And she went, oh, I don't think I do, and then went back to her room that evening and actually did a few moves and came back the next day. You're right, I do bear down when I'm doing karate. So it started with me saying, I think you'll do these things in your karate and now let's apply them to your riding. And it made her a really good learner and she made progress very quick. And towards the end of the week I was saying to her, well, now you're doing this in your riding, can you imagine how this might apply to your karate? And I was showing her things that really potentially impacted her stability. And each time she was going, oh, yes, yes, you're right, I get it, this would really be fun. Oh, I can't wait to try this with those big guys. And the parallels were so profound and made it so easy for her. And none of this that she was learning in her riding with me had ever been made overt in her learning in karate. And she did a bit of teaching and was really looking forward to taking those techniques back to the dojo. In our talk about half halts, I'm going to come in now from a rather different angle. We're going to come back now to looking at half halts, but look from a rather different angle, beginning with the fascia of the body, the connective tissue which we have talked about in some of the previous podcasts. You've seen fascia as the white skin that surrounds the muscle on a chicken leg. And then that skin comes together and coalesces to form the tendon. The tissue tendon becomes the ligament. As the muscle comes to the joint, the ligament becomes the joint capsule on the other side of the joint. Capsule, we have the next ligament, the next tendon and the next muscle. And whilst our traditions of anatomy have always done dissections, by cutting out an individual muscle and going, here's its origin, here's its insertion, and here's what it does, if you put the scalpel on its side, you can actually connect all these muscles together from. From the skin around the muscle to the tendon, to the ligament, to the joint capsule, to the next ligament, the next tendon, the next muscle. And this creates what are known as myofascial chains that literally go from head to toe. This makes so much more sense out of riding and how the body works and how the equine body works than just talking about being tense or being relaxed. For instance, as a rider who would tend to collapse on my right side, years ago, my right side had creases on it and it felt soggy. And yet the conventional theory told me that that muscle should be tense, but it didn't feel tense. My whole side felt soggy. I now understand that my perceptions were spot on because the muscles on that side of the body were not filling out their casing in the way that a water balloon under pressure would push out against the casing and the casing would push back into the water balloon, making that wonderful hydraulic amplification that we've without that and the water balloon not very full. Sogginess is an apt term. So let's just think about the chains of muscle at the front of the body and the back of the body, and these have been dissected out and researched in the horse as well as the human. So in us, if we start from the back of the body, you're going from underneath your toes, through your plantar cushion to over your heel and your Achilles tendon. The muscles at the back of your calf coming up to the back of your knee, and the tendons that you can feel on the inside and the outside behind your knee, they're taking you into your hamstrings, and your hamstrings go to your seat bones. And once we get to your seat bones, we have to go underneath your glute muscles, because the fibers of those muscles are going in the wrong direction. And we've got to continue on a north, south, as it were, trajectory. So from your seat bones, we go in the fascia, the connective tissue that covers the back of the pelvis into your long back muscles going each side of your spine, they go into your neck, over your skull and to your eyebrows, and literally, that can be dissected out as one line. And the one line in the horse starts from the plantar cushion of the hind hooves, goes up the tendons at the back of the leg to the hock, up to the point of the buttock, the seat bone, underneath the big glutes, again over the top of the pelvis, along the long back muscles, between the shoulder blades, where they go, just like ours, go between our shoulder blades, into the muscles along the top of the vertebra. So not so much the crest, lower actually than the crest, but you can kind of count the crest in this into the ears, and actually between his ears, over his poll and around by his eyes into his masseter muscles. So the top end and where it inserts is a little different in the horse compared to us. But essentially this is the same trajectory and what the dressage world has talked about as the horse's top line. Our front line is in two pieces. We're going from the tops of the toes, over the tendons in the tops of the feet, to the tendons at the front of the ankle, up the front outside of your shin bone. You can feel that very prominent edge to the bone, and it's in the muscle to the outside of that edge, to the big tendon that encases your kneecap, into your quads, and from there to the top front of your pelvis, and then beginning again at your pubic bone to come up through your abs, up each side of the neck in the muscle that makes a sort of inverted triangle from each side of the front of your sternum, top of your sternum, up towards your ear, and actually inserts in behind your ear into the bony's prominence just behind your ear. And in the horse, we're coming from the front of the hind hooves, up the front of the hind leg to the hock, to the stifle within his butt, in his adductors, up to his pubic bone. And where there's more of a disconnect in us from. Okay, start that again. In the horse, we're coming from the front of the hooves up the front of the hind leg to the hock, to the stifle internally in the adductor muscles, kind of in his butt crack, back up towards his pelvis and then to his pubic bone. And the connection between the two there is much more robust in him than it is in us. From his pubic bone to under his tummy, through his abs, between his front legs, in his pecs, up on the underside of his neck. What are considered those rather naughty Muscles when they're really big and strong in a horse that goes around with its nose up all the time up into his masseter muscle again. So we've got this chain of muscle and connective tissue with on the front of the back and us the top and the bottom on the horse. Now I'm eternally grateful to Tom Myers for an exercise that I did with him in a workshop that I went to that he co taught with movement teacher Karen Gtner, who does wonderful work based on the anatomy trains. And we did this workshop in Maui, Hawaii. Wasn't that sad that I had to go there for this information, but it was so worthwhile and I was managed to arrange a clinic while I was there and work this in with teaching I was already planned to do in San Francisco, one of those rare occasions in life when everything comes together and I'm so grateful it did. And we all stood and you might like to do this by a wall with your heels very close to the wall and your butt against the wall and as much of your back as you can against the wall and your head, back of your head against the wall. Your neck won't be against the wall and then from there, which is a very upright posture, you'll need a little bend in your knees to make it happen. We let ourselves slouch forward as you would if you were working over your computer. So if you imagine from somewhere around your shoulder blades or lower your back, neck, head, come away from the wall, there might be your arms out in front of you computing, and you're in a posture that most people reach at some point in old age where the front line has become shorter and the back line has become longer. The back line of muscles are slow twitch muscles designed for the endurance test of holding you upright for 90 years and usually failing at some point. And it always frightens me when I feel when I see them failing in some 17 year old who comes up in front of me. And this does happen fairly regularly. So the question is, if you are curved forward like this so your back comes away from the wall, what do you have to do to get your back against the wall? And if you just talk about your back and you say, well, you've got to get your back against the wall, get your shoulders to come back and the back of your head against the wall, but all you're allowed to move is the back of you, it's impossible. You can only get your back against the wall by also involving the front of you and maybe predominantly involving the front of you and the bottom of your sternum has to lift. The top of your sternum has to come back, your chin has to lift, as the back of your head potentially comes back against the wall. The biggest change is in the front of your body, not the back of your body. And as we were doing this, my mind immediately went to horses. And I thought, I'm going to really understand how this works in riding. Because if you think of the horse that likes to go too deep with his head and neck, the horse who's maybe ridden in Rolka or for some reasons of his own body, puts himself, himself into Rolke and wants to live life with his nose on his knees. He's doing the exact same thing as we were doing, curving the upper part of the back away from the wall. And the horse world says of that horse, well, you've got to get his poll up, you've got to get his neck up. Come on, get his pol and his neck up. Come on. He's too deep. His nose is behind vertical. Get the front of him up. Without ever talking about the muscles of. Of what we call in the human, the superficial front line. And I'm going to use the same term for the horse, although the veterinary term is different. That chain has to lengthen. We cannot make the change by just talking about the chain of muscle and fascia of the back of the body, in which, for the horse is the top of the body. So I started having this idea and began to home in on it. And I'm sure it wasn't an accident, because I was primed for this to happen. But I was riding my horse one day and I have one horse who really wants to do this. This is his M.O. i began to think about this in my riding and I began to formulate the idea of what I'm going to call the horse's chest plate. And let's imagine this on you. If you imagined a rectangle going from. From just under your neck, across between your shoulders, down the sides of you a little bit to a bit in the way into your cleavage, and then horizontally across again to the other side, you'd have a rectangle. Now let's imagine that rectangle on the horse. Its top side would go from the root of the horse's neck across to his shoulder joints. Then we go down and then horizontally across at the point where his pecs kind of go around the corner and his chest goes from going vertically down to horizontal back between his legs. And we're going to imagine he has a metal plate riveted onto him there. Now, that plate could be higher up or lower down. It could be closer to you or further away. It could be tilted with its top more forward and its bottom more back. Or it could be tilted with its bottom more forward and its top more back. So in the horse that goes around with his nose on his knees, it's tilted so the top of the plate is more forward and the bottom of the plate is more back. If you think of the Arabs going around gazing and playing to the Arab gods, the plate is tilted so the bottom of it is more forward and the top of it is more back. And that Arab. If you go back to our image of the carousel pole going down through the core of the rider, down through the saddle, down to the horse's tummy, that Arab has pulled the bottom of the carousel pole forward. The other guy with his nose on his knees, might even have pulled the bottom of the carousel pole slightly back. But clearly the Arab has really pulled it forward, Just like somebody lifting their sternum too much to make a hollow.

Back and their chest too up.

So this is implying that the top of the horse and the bottom of the horse can kind of move against each other. And if you put your arms out in front of you, this is a little tricky. With one arm above the other arm, there's a gap between your palms of maybe 6 inches to a foot, but your palms are facing each other. And one of those arms, the top arm, is that top line of tissue in the horse, and the bottom arm is the bottom line of tissue in the horse. So the Arabs are sliding the bottom line forward and the top line back relatively. And you can do that with your arms. And then you can imagine the tilt in the chest plate, which would kind of be between your fingertips, connecting the top hand and the bottom hand. And then the horse that likes to go around with his nose on his knees moves relatively the top line forward, the bottom line back, until he has no support at all for that top line. He kind of goes, bloop. And you could let your hand sort of just fall to be more vertical as it comes ahead of the bottom hand. So this point in the time, the top line of the horse has no support because it's gone so far ahead of the bottom line. And I kind of knew this many years ago, but not in a way that I could really articulate it well and go, this is what happens. It sounded just too bizarre for a body to do that. But the whole anatomy trains model makes it really close, clear that bodies can do that. So I was riding my horse one day and I had this on my back burner and I'd been thinking about it a lot and I just thought of making a connection from the back edge of my box. In other words, the line you might trace across the back of your butt, where the back of your butt is on the saddle, and that line went to the bottom edge of the horse's chest plate. And just thought of sending that chest plate further away. Now, I'm not going to call it a push. Push will give the wrong idea. Just a connection in my mind. And behold, the bottom of the horse's chest plate did go further away, making it more vertical and bringing his nose up more, away from his knees and making him support the weight of his own neck more. And then I thought about the top of the chest plate coming towards me and this began to happen. And I'd had the idea before that if you were taking somebody's little dog for a walk and the dog had a collar on, but you didn't have a lead, and the dog's walking along by your heels rather well, and then it goes to whiz away and you bend down and you grab it by the collar, you would pick it up essentially from the root of its neck, and it might be there in space with its front legs, making running moves, movements, but unable to run because you've got hold of it there. So you've picked up the dog by its dog collar. And I know some event riders who always ride with a neck strap, and if they take hold of the neck strap, that horse understands that it means, hey, whoa, come back here. Come on, lift your weight, bring it back. And that's great, sensible training for event riders. So this was a variation on that theme and a more profound way of thinking of that theme. So. So the bottom of the chest plate went away. The top of the chest plate came towards. Then I started thinking of the two shoulder joints as the two upper corners of the chest plate and an inverted V of how they would come back up towards the wither within the muscles of the horse's body, not on his skin, how they would come up towards his wither, up towards my pubic bone, my. Underneath my inner thigh. And I could think here of doing suction in a diagonal kind of way to. And get the particles that would have been in his chest plate back to under where I was sitting, and to get his front third much more connected to his middle third, drawing on those muscles and bones in the near part of the neck to get them more towards me. My first experience of this was a real. Oh, whoa, whoa. My goodness. What just happened? Well, I knew what had just happened, but I was astounded by what had just happened. And having worked with this now with a number of different horses and a whole load of different people, I've been amazed at times how relatively unskilled riders who I had thought might not be able to do this, that I might be asking too much in terms of, imagine this connection from here to here and there to there. They were able to do it and their horses went, yeah, I can do that. I could make my chest plate be vertical rather than tipping over. And it has become a really good way to work with, collection, to work with, rebalancing the horse to work with, giving his front third a strong foundation as it connects back into his middle third. And. And as an observer, you really see how the front legs change and the chest changes in really positive ways. Where we tend to think of those under muscles of his front line, his underline, our front line being naughty muscles. They have a job to do in terms of how they support the top line and the front third. Maybe this is something you can do. Imagine the chest plate on you. Imagine the chest plate on the horse. Imagine from your back edge to the bottom of the chest plate. If he's the kind of horse that has his nose on his knees, realise you need to draw the bottom of the chest plate towards you. If he's an araby, hollow nose up in the air type who pulls the bottom of the carousel pole forward, you may find that you can make more impact than you think. And I think this idea is functional anatomy at its best and that when it comes to it, functional anatomy will trump our riding traditions. All the best to you. Have fun riding your horses. Enjoy being with them. 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 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.