Ep 48. Pulling on the inside rein…

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast 48, where we're continuing our discussion of steering and the turning aids. Now, if you were to pull on the inside handlebar of a bicycle, you'd only ever do it once. And if you were to pull on the inside handlebar of a wheelbarrow, rather than just pushing both handlebars along again, you'd only do that once. But when it comes to pulling on the inside rein when you're riding, riders do this again and again and again, and of course it's very instinctive, but those riders feel helpless to do anything else. Or maybe they don't realise there's something else they could do, but they have to learn what they have to do instead. That will turn their horse whilst making the temptation to pull on the inside rein go away. Good skills make that temptation go away. And along the way of learning these, there are lots of little choice points where it might go wrong. But if the rider knows what the fix is, she can hopefully intervene, make that fix and change the pattern. And the rider has to begin realising these choice points. And at that point in time, there is a level of mind over matter to choose the new pattern over the old pattern. But otherwise, mind over matter won't work. It has to happen in bite sized chunks, where there's a distinct, definite known possibility of doing it differently. Although of course, we scrabble for that possibility to begin with, and our scrabbling gets to be more and more doable and take less time and become more slick till eventually things don't go wrong and the old pattern pulling on the inside rein is no longer a temptation. We have another way to do it. So pulling on the inside rein will virtually always end up with a horse jackknifing and acting like an articulated lorry or an 18 wheeler with the hinge just in front of his withers and the nose and the neck go one way whilst the horse's body goes the other way. And as I said in our last podcast, it blows my mind when sometimes people haven't realized that this is happening, even though it's probably been happening for virtually the entirety of their riding life. But this is interesting. If you think of a horse at liberty in the field and he wants to go from wherever he is to his mates over somewhere else, he's going to tend to go the quickest way and if anything, will lean and fall in on the way there. No horse at liberty, unless there's an exceptional situation of mud and an adverse kamba, will fall out kind of doing the articulated lorry strategy, going, whoa. I seem to be not making it to where I went to go. I'm not heading to my mate. They will fall in and take the shortest route. But as riders, I think more riders more of the time have a problem with their horse falling out than their horse falling in. And that suggests that that problem is manufactured to by the rider who pulls on the inside rein. The horses who are the most persistent in their fall in tend to be the cobs. And the cobs are the sumo wrestlers of the horse world. They're low and they're wide. They have a low center of gravity, a wider base, more distance between their front legs, wider chests, and that means they're harder to influence. So cobs are often the horses who most persistently fall in. And changing that can be a lot harder than it is on the average horse. But whatever's happening between the horse and the rider, we've always got to have the question on the table, who's the chicken and who's the egg in this interaction. And I believe I've told you this before, way back through time, in the early podcasts, that the story of myself and a really quite good rider, and she's riding a horse and she's struggling to turn left. She can ride good circles right, but her circles left aren't great. During the lesson, I get on this horse and it's a matter of minutes, probably only two or three minutes before I can turn left really well. And I'm struggling to turn right, which.

Would be my history.

So my pattern caused that horse to reverse its asymmetry within minutes. And there's always the question of the asymmetry that we blame on our horse and thinks belong to our horse might perhaps belong to us. And I think that experience is mandatory for coaches. It has to happen to just kind of wake you up to that possibility. There's been research, relatively recent research, though, that suggests that the horse sets up the asymmetry and the rider either falls into the pattern and amplifies it or is able to not get caught up in it. And this is really quite clever. And this is research you could have a go at repeating. You have a saddle on your horse and somebody holding the horse and. And you have to get your horse to stand square. That's the hardest bit of this. It always is. And you look at the horse from behind and ideally somewhat higher up, and the handler, without the horse moving its legs, gets to turn its head and neck to the right and turn its head and neck to the left. And the observer at the back gets to see, does the back of the saddle move or does the back of the saddle stay in place? Now, this would be your homegrown attempt to replicate research done by Dr. Russell McKent McGuire here in the UK. And what he's found repeatedly is that the horse turns its neck to one direction and the saddle doesn't move. The horse turns its neck to the other direction, and the saddle does move. Now, I suspect I know what's going on here in terms of each of the horse's long back muscles, which run from the croup through its loins, under the panels of the saddle, in between its shoulder blades, connecting into the lower neck vertebra. And one of those, I suspect, is keeping really solidly there when the horse turns its head, while the other one kind of goes wimpy and slack when the horse turns its head. And that, I suspect, is the difference. And the rider who becomes really skillful in turning becomes really skillful at maintaining her body in a place that enables her to influence the horse's long back muscles. So both of them stay in place. And the one that normally doesn't behave itself is the one on the outside. That's not true every time, but it's mostly true. And it's almost like that long back muscle becomes too long, too low, too narrow. I think of it like somebody pulling on a string of chewing gum. They get their chewing gum pull on the chewing gum string, and this muscle becomes like a chewing gum string, losing the height, the width, the shortness, the substance, the. It needs to be solidly there under the panel of the saddle. So this means that the rider can be faced with the challenge of organizing her horse well enough that she can prevent the horse from doing that disorganization that the horse would naturally do. And she has to be so in charge of her own body before she manages to get that level of being in charge of the horse's body. So what we need to do now is an exercise that will help you just identify where your main weakness is. And what I want you to do is to cross your arms over your chest. So this exercise obviously cannot be done. If you're driving your car, listening to this podcast, and if you are, I hope you'll come back to it. When you're on dry land, as it were, and sitting in a hard chair, begin by crossing your arms over your chest and then side bend to one side, and notice how easily that side bend happens and how easily you make creases in the area of your waist, between your ribs and your hips. And then undo that side bend, come to upright again, and side bend the other way. Does one of these side bends feel less familiar? Now, I would lay a bet that you chose to side bend to the side that works more easily in your body, where your body makes creases and falls into what I would call a lateral C curve. So let's just check again. Side bend again to the first side. Feel how easy that side bend is, how you make creases. Straighten yourself up again. Side bend to the other side. From there, straighten up. Now, we're going to add a rotation so you side bend, and then you're left with the shorter side and a longer side, a lower shoulder and a higher shoulder. Take the higher shoulder and rotate to the side of your side bend. So the higher shoulder is going to come forwards as you add a rotation to your side bend. And then as you experience that for a moment or two, come out of it in two stages by going, undo the rotation, undo the side bend. Now, in all of this, go slowly and carefully, especially as you go to your less familiar side. You might just be taking your body out of its comfort zone. So. So don't push anything in this and definitely don't do anything that hurts. So let's go the other way where you side bend and then the higher shoulder, you're going to bring forward to add a rotation. Notice how familiar or unfamiliar that feels. Then undo the rotation and undo the side bend. Now, Lovett's law, going back to early in the 20th century, says that anything that side bends will tend to rotate, and anything that rotates will tend to side bend. And here you're experiencing the rotation that naturally goes with a side bend. We're going to repeat the exercise, but rotate the other way. Now, this is very much what bodies don't do. So don't push it. And only do it if it feels like your body will do this. But it's not a natural thing for bodies to do, but it gives us an interesting contrast for you to appreciate the patterns. So, first of all, side bend to your easy side. And now going very carefully, take the higher shoulder and rotate so that side comes back. You're now looking up towards the ceiling of that longer side. Then undo the rotation, undo the side bend. Let's go the other way. So this is going to be the least familiar of all. Side bend to your less familiar side. And if you can do this, don't push it, don't cause any pain. Rotate the higher shoulder back. That's probably going to feel very weird. Again, you're looking up at the ceiling. Undo the rotation, undo the side bend. And now we're just going to go back one last time to the way that comes most naturally to you, where you side bend and rotate forward the side of the higher shoulder. And realize that what you're now doing is looking down at the floor on that same side. Undo the rotation and undo the side bend. As an observer, before anybody ever gets on their horse, I've often got a fairly good idea of what's going to happen just by noticing which way they tend to tilt their head. And most of us will tend to tilt our head slightly, bringing one ear towards one shoulder and do that habitually. And if you don't see that pattern on the ground, you're likely to see it in a rider. And maybe this is something you can notice in yourself. Do you, in one direction tend to look down to the floor of the arena on the inside of the circle, whereas on the other circle you tend to look more straight ahead. It's really worth noticing this. And quite often people are looking down to the inside of the circle and I say to them, you keep looking down towards the inside of the circle. And they go, well, I have to look around the circle. And then we go the other way to their more naturally easy rein. And I say, well, when you go this way, you don't look down to the inside of the circle. And they kind of go, oh. And don't realise that if they had a rule that goes, you have to look around the turn, they're breaking it actually, on the side where they steer better. And having that rule slightly distorted in that it's looking to the inside of the circle, around it and down on the harder side. The other thing that can happen is that people are so busy looking around the circle, as they've been told to do, that they start to use their focused vision. And it's like their eyes are going boing, jumping out of their head, going, next marker, next marker, next marker, next marker. And in doing that, they're losing their ability and to notice vision has become their dominant sense. They've cut themselves off from their field sense. And looking around the circle has, for that person, become bad advice. You could check this now, sitting in your chair, that if you put your arms straight out sideways, so your extended arms make one straight line, you can probably just about see your arms and your fingertips in your peripheral vision. And if you can't bring your arms slightly forward until you know that they're there and they won't be much in focus, but you can see them. You can see them, but you're not looking at them. And you're actually not looking at anything because your peripheral vision kind of sees the hole. And if you wiggle your fingers in your peripheral vision, you probably see that more clearly because your peripheral vision is designed to detect movement. So you can actually see around the circle very easily and rarely have to turn your head. Now, if you're jumping, that might be different because you might have quite a steep turn that takes you back on yourself, but you want to do that turn thinking of looking over your shoulder, your inside shoulder, as you make the turn. And if you're looking at pictures in magazines of riders riding canter pirouettes, elite dressage riders dress, look at those pictures going, is that rider looking over her shoulder around the pirouette, or is that rider turning her body in the direction of the pirouette? See which one you see happening more and which strategy you think those elite riders are choosing. In terms of what you take away from this podcast, whenever you feel yourself to tempted to pull on the inside rein, you need to know that there is another way to turn. And your aim through these podcasts is to discover that other way. And I'm hoping we can do this just through the medium of language, which is a very big ask, realising which side you would tend to side bend and rotate to really significant, maybe even redo the side bend and rotate exercise on your horse and ideally have somebody observe you as you do it. And the observer in the middle of the circle needs to be asking themselves, are you seeing this rider in profile or are you seeing her rotated into the circle? So I am categorically saying here that rotating to face the inside of the circle is the wrong thing to do, because as you do that, the rotation and the side bend are making your outside longer. As that happens, your outside hand will give forward along with your outside elbow, along with your outside shoulder, and you are very likely to find yourself with less weight on your outside seat bone. This isn't always the pattern, but it's very often the pattern. So if you do that rotation, an observer in the middle of the circle is going to start to see your chest and to see, I'm sorry to be this crude, both of your bosom. If she's seeing you in profile, she'll only see one bosom. And I learned this many years ago, as I believe I've said before, back through time in the early podcast, I realized this from a teacher who was very eccentric and didn't mince words. And he would be working on the lunge and we'd be on the lunge on the left rein, which was my better direction, and everything would be fine. And we'd be on the lunge on the right rein and he'd go, marie, I can see two of your bosom. It is not good enough. And I kind of go and attempt to straighten myself up, but my best attempts never lasted very long because the side bend and the rotation would grab me, along with the pull on the inside rein, the giveaway of the outside rein, and the losing of the outside seat bone. So in our next webinar we're going to be talking more about the weight on your seat bones and your spine as your central axis. Because if I could just say to you, keep equal weight on both seat bones and keep your chin and your zipper. If you were wearing a waistcoat with the zipper, keep your chin and your zipper over the horse's midline. If I could say that to you and you could just do it and be obedient and not be hijacked by the side bends and the rotations and the asymmetries in your own body. If I could just say keep 50, 50 weight on each seat bone and keep your forehead, your chin and your zipper over the horse's mane, I'd probably be out of a job, because it's not that easy. Willpower and obedience will fail you until we can break this down into bite sized chunks and give you some really good strategies for getting the wonky bits to come back into line in you so you can begin to turn your horse, as we've said, like a bus. It always pays, though, to understand the pattern you're trying to fix before you try and fix it. Trying to be there without figuring out what really happens when you're here and putting a mark on the map that goes I am here is impossible. So take this time to figure out. Do you side bend? Do you rotate? Do you look down to the inside.

On one part of the circle?

Do you look down to the inside on the circle in one direction? And if you can get to it, notice as well what would happen to the weight on each of your seat bones in the process of this exploration. Have fun riding. Enjoy your horses. 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.