Ep. 47 The turnings aids - a rampant example of deletion, distortion and generalisation.

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis WELcoming you to podcast 47. After a last one, I heard a story from my colleague Karen, who teaches locally here at Overdale Equestrian Centre, of course, when we're not in lockdown. And she told me the story of a client who came in, I think, having just listened to the podcasts, and early on, maybe in her first lesson, was saying how hard she find it to be hung in a harness. Meanwhile, Karin's looking at her, thinking she looks very down and wide and heavy, which is exactly the opposite of what we mean by hung in a harness. And in talking about this, back through previous podcasts, I've talked about the paradox. Torso is like a French press cafetiere coffee maker, where you put in the coffee, you pour in the water, you let it brew, and. And then you push down the plunger so you can drink the coffee. And in your body, this push down the plunger is getting your breathing lower down, getting your center of gravity lower down, getting your energy, your awareness down in your pelvis. And yet while that happens, you're not heavier, because paradoxically, you're supported from the underneath as if in a harness, keeping yourself light. In many parts of my map of riding skills, there is paradox and contradiction. And from the podcast, she hadn't understood that paradox of the low center of gravity, of plunger down. And yet it's like you're suspending yourself and not relying on the horse to hold you up. No map of rider biomechanics is a viable map, and unless it contains paradox, and our culture is full of statements that contradict each other because somebody's talking about one side of the paradox, but not both. Even without that deletion, distortion and generalization are inevitably going to dilute, distort and disorganise somebody's wise words. And nowhere is deletion, distortion and generalization a bigger deal than the turning aids. There's a particularly big version of Do X, the elite rider, telling you about the end stages of a learning process, not the beginning and the middle stages. And that's confusing to people. And what's more confusing still is that when it comes to turning in the various layers of the onion that you peel away as you learn, there are contradictions.

We're doomed.

Perhaps. But I'm going to give this my best shot. In the next few podcasts, I meet people who think they know all about turning and they've heard the words. Now, there are, of course, a variety of words they could have heard, but whichever words they've heard, they Those words have stayed in that person's wordscape. The penny hasn't dropped down to the brainscape, which is the level of the neurological patternings that makes coordinations change and evolve. So these people could recite the catechism, but probably wouldn't show a lot of skill in the least. Perceptive people. I'm often gobsmacked when they'll ride around me on a circle to the right and to the left, and I'm seeing what I'm seeing in of the horse's response in each direction. And I'll ask them, which way do you feel do a better job? Which direction is easier for you when it comes to the steering? And they go, oh, I really don't know. And I'm seeing very distinct differences. Meanwhile, there will be more perceptive riders who would say, oh, I hate riding to the right, it drives me insane. They can feel tortured by their inability to steer well in one direction. And I think this really is one of the biggest brick walls that people bash their heads against because our asymmetries are so profound in the effects that they have. And it's tricky to learn your way through them. So some people feel tortured by their inability to turn. And I remember one person who said to me, right, I get so determined that I must ride more on my more difficult rein. So I change onto that rein, full of good intentions, and then I wake up and I find I'm on the easy rein again. So somewhere, her horse and her unconscious mind contrive to get her out of the tricky situation into the easy one. And it kind of implies that she's riding somewhat on autopilot and is somewhat asleep, as this is all happening. But even if it were happening, she'd be on dodgy ground here because she's assuming that if she rides more on the difficult rein, it will just get easier. Whereas my take on this would be that when she rides more on the difficult rein, she's practising her ways of doing it wrong, getting them more ingrained until she does them permanently and. And perfectly, and is going to have a harder problem changing those patterns. As someone rides around me in those early lessons, I like to ask, so what have you been taught about how to turn? Well, there are some interesting replies here. Riders who've grown up in the riding school might tell me, inside leg on the girth, outside leg behind the girth and. And an opening in side rein. We've got a number of problems here. You'll know that I would dispute on the girth if that contradicts a shoulder, hip, heel line. What I want is the Brider with that vertical shoulder, hip, heel line. But at least we know it's the inside leg and the lower leg that the person's talking about. We have a missing outside rein, which is a problem. But the biggest problem still is we have a missing body. And no rider ever is a set of disembodied arms or legs. That opening inside rein will morph into a pulling inside rein very, very easily on the rider's harder direction. And counteracting that will be a lot of our learning process. Other riders have been taught to put the hand and rein across the horse's neck, taking the inside hand across the neck to the outside to turn. And also that's very instinctive if their horse falls in. But if people do that as their main way of turning, and they do it in both directions, they can end up with a very wibbly, wobbly horse. The inside leg on the girth, outside leg behind the girth. People are often kicking like crazy with the inside leg. And I see them going, kick, kick, kick, kick, kick. And often, if we haven't talked about steering, I'll ask them, you're kicking a lot with your inside leg. What's that aim to do for you? And they say, oh, I'm making a bend. And I say, well, I'm not so sure, because I think your horse has become dead to that very rhythmic, predictable kick, kick, kick. And what I'm seeing is certainly not a bend. Meanwhile, riders could be taught to make their inside seat bone heavier, and some are told to make their inside stirrup heavier. Personally, I think those instructions, if one seat bone goes down heavier, the other tends to come up, and we're encouraging the rider to come off axis. If they push down in their inside stirrup, they're likely to lift their inside seat bone. And then things are going wrong another way. The original inside leg on the girth, outside leg behind the girth opening inside rein morphs as people go up through the levels, into inside leg to outside rein. I understand what this means, but I don't think it helps many of the riders at the lower levels. We have to fill in that missing piece about the torso. And when that does get filled in more, it could be, turn your shoulders to the inside, point your belly button where you want to go, make your hips parallel to your horse's hips, your shoulders parallel to his shoulders, and the ultimate of just make him bend, really. I'm going to cast doubt on all of these statements and hopefully build up this skill in an ABC and going through the Alphabet kind of a way to diverge a little bit. You could well argue that we should have talked more about steering and asymmetry before we built our way into the most recent set of podcasts on Collection. But Collection, where we're learning to bring the withers up, the muscle sling, lifting the front end of the horse and lightening it and the loin coil happening is more of the same building from those initial versions of is the horse hollow? Is it flat? Is its back and mound? Can you kneel your way out of the man trap? It's kind of more of the same building through the Alphabet on that. But with steering we've opened a new box and believe me, it's Pandora's box. And in these webinars and anything I do that isn't hands on teaching, but really there as well. I'm always faced with the problem of making a field of knowledge, a skill that is not linear, become linear. It interested me a lot that in my dissertation where I worked with three elite riders who all rode six year old horses with me in the arena with a video camera. What are you paying attention to now? What are you paying attention to now? What are you paying attention to now? And recording their replies. And sometimes I ask more searching question. I think I've told you before of the time when I said to each rider when, when they said the horse is swinging more through his back and I said would that be an up down swing or a side side swing? And I would say there was a very long silence in each case before I got the answer and the answers didn't agree. In the scales of training, straightness does come before collection. I kind of have a problem with the scales of training and I confess I always forget them. I have to look them up from time to time and they are relaxation, rhythm. It was contact but most people have replaced that now by connection then impulsion. But dresswise judges in this country I believe are now no longer supposed to write impulsion on their sheets in the comments. So that's going to change too then straightness, then collection. And the reason I keep forgetting this and not doing well with it is that it's a linear model of a non linear field and process. We need something in three dimensions that spirals in on itself as it homes in on a goal. It has many iterations and I looked this term up. It's a term that's come in vogue more from computing than anything else. And it means, I quote, a Procedure in which repetition of a sequence of operations yields results successively closer to a desired result. So it's honing in on a goal through successive approximation, just as riders do. And just as we talked about in our early webinars, with that cybernetic mechanism homing in on a goal. So we need to be able to have these iterations and a three dimensional model that really describes it much better than this, to this, to this, to this, to this. So these riders, the first thing they said in each of those sessions was about straightness. It was the first thing they paid attention to, which might suggest it should be at the beginning, but actually it can't be at the beginning because it can't be the first thing. For more novice riders, they need a little while before they home in on that. And that makes me think of one of the most wonderful school horses we ever had here at Overdale, who was charming and delightful and would be really quite tolerant of more novice riders for a while, until one day he'd say, right, dear, it's time for the steering lesson. And he would deliver the steering lesson from hell. And the steering lesson from hell, you can probably imagine, is the rider pulls on the inside rein and they think he's going to turn, but what happens is his nose and his neck go to the inside as he keeps going straight along the arena fence with the rest of his body. Now, any rider who's ever lived and ever ridden has had this experience at some point in time, and some of you will had this experience a lot in one direction, if not both. And this is what I call a jackknife. What's happening is just by the withers, the vertebrae are acting like the hinge in what we in the UK call an articulated lorry and Americans call an 18 wheeler. And when that hinge hinges, the nose and the neck go one way towards the inside, where the rider wants to go, and the withers and the rest of the body go straight on. And if that's happening on a circle, rather than the person who just can't turn away from the long side, the rider might be thrilled because she can see her horse's inside eye. And that's the criteria for a bend. But I'm there telling them, this is not a bend, this is a jackknife. And in the early stages of learning to steer, and really quite a long way through the stages of learning to steer deer, the deal is learning not to jackknife your horse. Because if your what should be opening rein becomes a pulling back Rein, the nose and neck will go to the inside while the withers and the rest of the horse go straight on. Sometimes it takes me a long time to convince riders that this is happening. Sometimes they're riding around me on a circle and I'm saying, okay, which way is his head going? And let's say it's a left rein. They'll say left. And I say, which way is his wither going? And they go left. And I are you sure about that? Hang on a minute. Let's think about this again. Which way is his head going? Left. Which way is his wither going? Well, it must be going left. Sometimes I will walk along by the horse, take hold of the reins and make him jackknife more to make it really clear to the rider and go, is he wither really going left? Until they go, oh, his wither's going right. So there are people to whom this concept of the jackknife, where the wither goes one direction and the head goes the other, where that concept has not entered their head, even though I suspect it's been their reality that for quite a lot of the time. And other people have I said, who really struggle to turn and know they pull on the inside rein and know the horse isn't turning well, probably have at least figured out that their problem is the jackknife. One of the things I say early on to riders and one of the things I would like to be your big takeaway from this podcast in terms of something you can go away and do, is to imagine a line drawn on the surface of the arena with a can of paint. And we're going to make that line a 20 metre circle, a perfect 20 meter circle. And if you were riding around me, I would be asking you, can you keep the horse's withers and front legs along that line? I would be sure that you understood that the only way you could do that would be by keeping his head and neck straight on in front of his withers. In other words, we're trying to stop his withers from acting like a hinge, which might take his withers to the outside of the line. That's the most likely scenario. Or might be taking his withers to the inside of the line. But could his withers go dead along the line? Could he? And in the early stages, that's going to need his head and neck straight on in front of his withers. It often helps people to imagine the horse had a light on his chest, at the root of his neck, the very bottom of his neck. And that light, when it's correct, would shine between the horse's jawbones on the underside of his face. If his jawbones aren't ahead of his chest, then the light will be shining somewhere else. And this means that the horse will be going round a circle, doing what I call turning like a bus. A bus has no hinge, like the 18 Wheeler or the Arctic. The front of the bus always turns around the back of the bus. So this means every step or two, the front goes a little bit to the inside and a little bit to the inside and a little bit to the inside and a little bit to the outside. Inside. As you steer around the circle and that you as rider, have to stop the outside of the horse from getting too long and the inside of the horse from getting too short. People sometimes have an existential crisis when I say that, because they're going. But the outside of the horse has to be longer when he's bent. Well, that would be true, but we're not doing bend. The rule is you don't even think about bend until you can bus. And we have to equalise the length of the horse on the outside, let's say, from his hip bone to his nose or the bit, and on the inside, from his hip bone to the bit. If one is longer, he's jackknifing. We need them both the same. And this is only going to happen as we get both of your sides, let's say, from underneath your armpit to where your thigh comes out of your pelvis, looked from the side where we'd see your pelvis coming down and there's your panty line and then your thigh comes out around the horse. Getting that level on both sides in you is a requirement if we're going to get the length of the two horses sides the same. So we're really trying to wipe the slate clean, both in terms of the physiology of one side of you and your horse being longer than the other, and in terms of your mindset to stop confusing a jackknife with a bend to realise a jackknife is a jackknife. To really learn to steer the withers and not steer the nose. Because as soon as you think of steering the nose and you pull on the inside rein, you lose the ability to steer the withers and the horse jack knives. Figuring out that you've got to steer the withers between your thighs rather than the nose with your hands is a big deal. And I will have much more to say to help you do this. But as you go away from this podcast, please think does your horse jackknife? He may steer very easily in one direction, but jackknife a lot in the other. Is the trickiest problem that he jackknifes with his withers going out? Is your trickiest problem that he jackknifes with his withers going in? Do you try and fix it by pulling on the rein? I promise you it's only going to make it worse. Can you think of steering on this imaginary line and begin to find your way out of the problem? And I hope you can approach this with an element of exploration, discovery, noticing, finding out what is because that's how the learning process works best and it's also how you get to have the most fun and satisfaction whilst doing it. So enjoy your horses, enjoy your riding, enjoy your attempts to figure out where you are relative to this imaginary line and I'll be back 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.