Ep. 45 Can the hind legs of the horse push the front third up?

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 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 45, where we talk not so much about the half halt, but about the horse's core and how we can perhaps influence that. I want to tell you the story of an upper level rider I was coaching some years ago who had a horse doing Grand Prix but really struggling with the piaffe. Her background was very traditional and I felt she wasn't that open to what I was saying her baseline was. If I can keep doing with this, if I can just keep activating the back end, I'm sure his hind legs will push his front end up soon. And I was watching this horse virtually doing handstands. The hind legs are going up and down while he's standing almost on his front legs which are barely moving. And she did not seem very open to me talking about how the wither lifts via the muscle sling and how she might be able to get that to happen, how his front legs had to push up off the ground more with a bigger ground reaction force within that lifting of the wither, how she really connected or she really needed to connect the front third to the middle third and the middle third to the back third. They were disconnected progressively more forward and down as if the medicine ball and a whole load of particles would have been putting weight down low in his chest, in his front end, he needed to connect himself backwards. Think of a horse doing levard to. To imagine the front third connected back into the middle third connected back into the back third, but she was resolutely kicking to get the front end to come up. And I've heard this said in riding arenas a lot of times. I've heard it said loudly and repeatedly in a shouting at the natives kind of way, but I haven't very often seen it work. In her case, it definitely was a case of if you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got. Even just whip tapping on his shoulder instead of behind her leg or on his hindquarters would have made a difference because that at least would have said to him, hey, honey, it's this part of your body you need to focus on. It's this part of your body you need to activate. There's more to it than this, of course, in terms of changing that balance between the thirds of the horse, but at the same time I have to recognise that. Kick him up. Must have been some riders, some elite riders, good feeling at some point in time. And I hope you remember our little idea of from a right brain feeling to the left brain words, when you go to teach it to the student who hears the words and then endeavours to make a feeling. Maybe the words were said to this student of mine by someone who'd had that feeling. Or maybe that person was reciting the catechism of a feeling handed down through generations from teacher to student. We'll never know the answer to that. But let's talk about the horse's core and along with this, the human core. In Pilates, the core is considered the muscles that wrap around the body between your ribs and your hips, the. That create the packaging for your guts and your organs. They go in three layers. And you've probably heard of the deepest one, the transversus abdominis, which is kind of considered the God of all muscles. Here in Tom Meyer's anatomy trained schema, we're looking rather differently at the core. And if you imagine cutting an apple from the stalk down through the middle to the other end and seeing what you see, you see the thin line that bulges out in the middle of the apple to the true core and down to the other end. So this version of the core goes from top to toe. It includes the guts and the organs and the muscles around them, but it connects actually your tongue to your feet. Now, in the early days, before I Learned this model, I found myself scratching my head where I was going. I'm feeling changes in my body, and it's definitely making a good difference to my horse, but I know there aren't any muscles in there that made me wonder. But within this version of the core, we're including the various bags and slings and straps that hold the various organs and hopefully enable them to slide on each other and to be positioned and working as they should. The organs themselves can be more or less toned with pressure pushing out against that sac that pressures back. So I was feeling, I'm sure, changes within the fascia that contain and strap and hold the organs. So the deep front line is kind of the middle of a sandwich in humans, a vertical sandwich in horses, a horizontal sandwich between the front line of fascia, the superficial front line, and the back line going from our eyebrows right over the back of us down to our Achilles tendon and the soles of our feet. It mediates between the two. The muscles above the spine, in our case, behind the spine. When they contract, we get hollow. When that happens, the front line sags. This could be the human with their belly hanging out or the horse with the belly hanging down. The superficial back line tends to make us hollow and can't really bring the back up. We have to look at what's underneath the spine in the horse or in front of the spine in us to remedy that. In a human body reading course, I've heard Tom talk about the difference between core support and core strength. Now, if we on our feet are lined up really well balanced over these tiny bases of support that we have, we're going to be basically in a shoulder, hip, heel, kind of vertical line, and our core is in a position where it can support us. If we're standing in a way that maybe bows the pelvis forward. We don't have that core support. If we're fairly upright to the pelvis and the ribs, and then bow back, chest up, collarbone back again, we don't have that core support. So we could be well supported without actually being physically terribly strong. And we could be trying to make ourselves physically strong when we're really not well supported. And I hope you understand that the early work you've been doing in your riding on your alignment is at least getting you core support as you gradually begin to build core strength. So if we can shorten what's under the spine, we can bring the horses back up, and along the way, we'll shorten the tummy line. But the big players here, as I'M sure you know, are the psoas and the iliacus muscles, both in us and in the horse, that lie within our abdominal cavity with the guts. And the horse's psoas muscle begins under the back of your butt and the back of the saddle and goes diagonally through his abdominal cavity into his pelvis to attach into his hind leg just. Just beneath his seat bone. Now, if that muscle shortens, what happens then is that he's able to, as it were, coil his loins. He flexes the joint between his loins and his pelvis, the lumbar sacral junction. We can have the same effect in us. And we may well come back to talking about the lumbosacral junction, because it's a really important joint for riders as well as for horses. After the vertebra in the horse's neck, that lumbosacral junction is most able to produce flexion. And if he flexes his hip joint more, then he brings his hind legs more underneath him. And we've used the image of pull on the Pessoa, noting that it works much better to think of the right side of your pelvis having some magical long elastic band going down through the horse, wrapping around the top of his thigh bone and pulling it forward in the way that the apple has this core from one end to the other, and the deep front line goes from one end to the other. I took part in a phenomenal demonstration in a horse dissection class with Sharon Mae Davis, and this is a demonstration of this beyond any other. With the horse cadaver, if you put a bit in its mouth and you put downward pressure of that bit on the bars, meanwhile, somebody at the other end of the horse's body moves the hind leg. That pressure restricts the movement of the horse's hind leg. It limits its range of motion. The deep front line actually comes up into the horse's hyoid bone and its tongue. This is dramatic, really. There's been research in live horses showing that putting a bonnet on the horse, so that's going to go under the headpiece of the bridle and under the browband covering its ears, also restricts the range of motion of the hind legs that I find quite staggering. There is controversy within the world of these fascial lines between Tom Myers and his human schema and the Danish vets who've done horse dissections to find out if these lines exist in the horse, which they do with more integrity than they have in us. And the Danish researchers believe that Horses really do have a deep back line, which Tom believes doesn't exist in humans. That deep back line involves little muscles that go between each vertebra and connects these into the horse's hind legs. In us, we have probably lost that connection between the muscles of the hind legs and the hamstrings coming directly into those little spinal muscles. So this is an interesting controversy in a very new field, and we'll find out in time whether there is a duck. This is an interesting controversy in a very new field, and we will find out in time if a deep back line in the human really does exist, or if this is about evolution and part of the cost of standing up on two legs. There's more we could say about this deep front line within the horse. And as well as the guts and the organs, we're coming up into the diaphragm, into the lungs, into the membrane between the lungs, into the sac around the heart. And one branch of the deep front line goes from the sac around the heart into the trachea and the esophagus and into the mouth that way. A higher up branch going just under the spine where there's a long ligament, continues that ligament under the vertebra of the neck into the skull and other muscles underneath those neck vertebrae. Add to that longus coli. Long muscle of the neck goes all the way from the beginning of the ribs up under those vertebrae, kind of cradling them on each side from the underneath. We and the horse both have scalene muscles going from the first rib to the first few neck vertebrae. And if they shorten, you could try it on yourself. Thinking of shortening from the first rib to the first few neck vertebrae, and I think you'll find yourself feeling out at the back of your neck, dropping your chin. And if you think of that bulge of the horse's neck, that initial downward bulge of the vertebra close to his ribs being drawn up when muscles beneath that bulge shorten, you can understand how that could change the neck and help it reach an arch into the reinforcement. And the lowest line of all of the deep front line is coming from the pubic bone in the fascia above the abdominals, which is very tough and really helps the guts be held up and helps that line be the bowstring to the bow in the horse's body when the back comes up. And that line goes through muscles in the neck that connect into the hyoid bone and and thus to the tongue and the chin. It's a complicated story, but it connects the back End of the horse to the front end of the horse. So I want to suggest an image to you now that is one of the first ways I found of connecting with the horse's core. And I've taught this to great effect to lots of people. And I have such a strong memory of the day that desperation drove me to come up with this idea where I had in front of me a very competent, skilled rider who was actually a show jumper, but a remarkably body aware and organized show jumping rider riding a young horse who was a bit of a kind of misfit. This horse did not look very capable or coordinated. Its movement was not fluid. It wasn't easy to get to go forward. It was just glitchy and unhappy. And I suggested this to her that from under the horse's seat bones, she thought of through the horse's body going horizontally. A treadmill. Now, with most riders and most horses going horizontally through the horse's body from its seat bones or just below its seat bones will take us to about the level of the rider's knee. But obviously that will vary between horse and rider pairs. And continuing forward on that line, you get into the lower part of the neck, not much of the neck, but a little bit of the neck above the top of the chest plate. And that treadmill has to go smoothly through from the back to the front, recycle back to the back again, and keep traveling smoothly. Our biggest interest is the from the back to the front. So how smooth is this treadmill? Does it have glitches? Can the rider begin to feel her way into this imagination and somehow smooth out those glitches? And you know what? A remarkable percentage of riders can do this. Sometimes it helps to think of the right side of the treadmill and the left side of the treadmill being different because it's possible that one side goes faster than the other and the other side goes slower. With more glitches, one side might be lower than the other or maybe tipped slightly, probably away from the horse's midline. Down and away from the horse's midline. The treadmill needs to start right at the back of the horse by its seat bones. But quite often it doesn't. It starts somewhere near the flanks. It needs to go all the way into that root of the neck. It mustn't stop somewhere by the girth. Very often it doesn't begin at the back and it doesn't go to the front. That's another way in which the back third, the middle third, and the front third don't connect and function together as they should. So people are very often able to feel their way into this idea of the treadmill and to change how it functions. And if you don't believe me, you keep doing mental rehearsal, you keep working on your basics, you keep improving your feel, you keep getting where you can work in bigger and bigger chunks until this kind of perception becomes possible. I can remember a horse too, where it was like the treadmill got through, the horse got to the front, went clunk because it hit the chest plate, and the horse kind of went ding and couldn't recycle the energy, and everything got horribly disorganized. But the horse changed an awful lot by thinking of this idea. These kind of images make a massive difference. As you think of the chest plate coming closer towards you and higher up, you could be affecting those muscles under the neck vertebrae, the near neck vertebrae C6 and C7, maybe even C5, close to the ribcage, that they come back up towards you. You already know the muscles north of those vertebra that can help pull them as well. So the front third connects to the middle third and the wither comes up. Being able to do suction on these different parts of the horse is a little different to what we've just said in terms of the treadmill. There's no suction in that, there's just creating flow. I thought of something recently on one of my horses that proved interestingly helpful, and we've talked before about a big water wheel that has its diameter as the spine of the horse's shoulder blade. And as it turns over the withers towards the neck, it's taking the water through the hoses of the horse's long back muscles to really send that energy over the wither. And I found myself thinking of a small water wheel that would fit between his shoulder blades and had the diameter, or rather, let's say, had the radius of the spinal processes themselves. Now the spine is deeper into the horse's body than you might think that is with us, there's a long spinal processes. But here we've got a little water wheel. And if that water wheel was fed by energy coming diagonally forwards and ups, think of from the area of the horse's stifles low down in his tummy, forward and up to turn that little water wheel. And on one of my horses, who doesn't easily fill out between the middle third and the front third, I found myself thinking of this and then feeling I needed to kick, and my kick, being able to channel more of that imaginary water through her abs, through the core, through that deep front line to turn that water wheel. And as I could kick and put more stuffing in the front of the middle third and the back of the front third and turn this water wheel, I found myself going, oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Maybe I'm doing what was meant by kick up the horse's hind legs, kick him up from the hind legs. And my kick created more tone, created more stuffing, created more lift, turned that wheel and made a massive difference. And I thought to myself, maybe I'm experiencing here in my brainscape the words I've heard, Kick him up. Come on, kick him up. That never made any sense to me and made a difference to my horse and never made any sense really to anyone I saw doing it, whether my pupil, who was passionate about it, as she was trying to make me AF or anyone else. But that if you had that image and that direction of flow and power and energy and organization within the horse's body to begin with, then kick to get the hind legs to push the front ends up kind of makes sense. That's not something I've had the chance to teach to many people because of all the lockdowns at the moment, where most of the images I give to you in these podcasts have been well tested. But whether you just think of the treadmill, whether you're just working on your basics, whether actually you have the skills to bring what I've just said and into your toolkit to find what it does to your horse, the noticing, the experimenting, the playing with ideas and images is to me an awful lot of the richness of the time I spend with my horses. So enjoy your horses, enjoy 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@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.