Ep. 49 Seat bones, feet, and compass points.

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis WELcoming you to podcast 49, where we're going to do some more experimentation around seat bones. So you may not be able to do this podcast driving your car. Some of it might work, some of it won't. I hope if you're doing that, you will come back to it. To do these exercises in a hard chair. Some of them we've done before, but they really bear repeating. To set up the ground for what's coming here as we talk more in depth about turning and asymmetries. So, sitting in a hard chair with your feet on the floor, push down in one foot. What happens to the seat bone on that same side? I'm pretty sure you'll find as your foot goes down, your seat bone goes up. And this is the way I'd expect it to work. This is Newton's third law of motion, which says every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So you push down into the floor and that side of your body lifts. Your knee straightens a little, your hip straightens a little, your seat bone comes up, and you probably lean the other way. If you push down in your seat bone at the same time as you push down in your foot, that isn't normally how it works. Certainly when you're riding, it's also not how the joints are designed to work, because your knee and your hip are what's known as reciprocal joints. When the knee opens a little, the hip opens a little. When the knee closes a little, the hip closes a little. Now push down in the other foot again. I'd expect you to find your foot pushes into the floor and your seat bone comes up. That side of your body elongates. You maybe lean a little the other way. The chances are, though, that one side feels less familiar than the other. And the chances are that you chose to push down in the foot on the side that feels more familiar doing that first. Somehow we totally know how to operate within our asymmetry with no conscious awareness of how we're making choices on that basis. So pushing down in one foot will tend to make that seat bone come up whether you're in a chair or whether you're on the saddle. Now, let's do another variation. Push down in one seat bone again. Notice which one you chose. Then push down in the other seat bone again. This will probably feel less familiar. You almost certainly chose the one you'd push down into first, the one that feels more natural. You may or may not have done that. That's the normal way it happens. And Right now, you might be scratching your head because you might be going, well, I pushed down in that foot and my seat bone came up. But quite possibly you pushed down in that same seat bone, which would be the opposite kind of issue. Well, it will be pushing down in that seat bone and tending to lighten your foot. So it's the reverse of the pattern. And it might help to think of one seat bone as the point of a compass and the other one tending to move like the pencil of the compass, but in an arc on the vertical plane. So it would go down more easily and up more easily with the other one, as it were, as the pivot. And sometimes when you do these exercises, the results you get really make sense. And sometimes you're doing them going, well, that's a little bit strange. And you just store that information and wait for one day when you hope it might make sense. But bodies can be so creative and so idiosyncratic that it's not always where you have a pattern and you can just tie it up with a little bow and understand it. Let's just do an exercise while you're sitting here for the seat bone that didn't so easily push down. You can do this exercise in the saddle, too, but we'll do it first in a chair. So in a hard chair, reach with the arm on the same side and get your fingers underneath the seat of the chair. If you pull up on the chair, your seat bone will more easily go down. Again, we've got the same thing. You pull up, you create an equal and opposite force where your seat bone goes down. And then when you let go of your pull up, can you keep that seat bone more down? And maybe that feels like a pull or a stretch somewhere on that side of your body. Maybe it feels like you're tilting your pelvis. It may be slightly strange, but it's a very good exercise. When you do this on a saddle, there are several options. If you can get your fingers under the panel of the saddle, just to the side of your butt, so you pretty much hang your arms straight down, get your fingers under the panel at exactly that place on the saddle that your arm would hang by, pull up to help your seat bone come down. If you can't get your fingers under the panel of the saddle, try getting your fingers just under the back of the flap. I'm sure you can make that work. It's not quite so effective, but it'll do. You pull up to feel your seat bone come down. Best of all is one of those Sheepskin half pads, which only goes under the panels of the saddle and not down under the flaps, because that has an edge that you can grab. Really, you want to try and do this pulling up on the saddle or on the sheepskin without rotating your body, without leaning. Hopefully you can reach easily without lifting your shoulder, so staying as neutral and organized as you can. Now, if you've just done this on a chair, I really recommend repeating this in the saddle. And you want to start just standing still, reins in one hand, pull up on the saddle, feel your seat bone come down, let go of the saddle. Can you keep it down? If it goes away, where does it go? Now this is really important. You want to do this really slowly. Let the seat bone disappear back to where it would normally go. Where does it go? Does it go up? Does it go out from wherever it's gone? Can you find it again? Do you need to pull on the saddle to do that, or can you find it without pulling on the saddle? There's immense value in knowing where your seat bone goes, when it goes, and therefore knowing how to retrace your steps and get it back. I cannot emphasize this enough, so you get to do this exercise sitting still. You pull on the saddle, you find the seat bone slowly and mindfully, you let the seat bone go. Can you get it back again without pulling on the saddle? If you can't, you take the saddle again. You then aim to do this in walk. Reins in one hand. Assuming you're in a safe situation, the chances are that riding in one direction, there's no big deal, but riding in the other direction, and most often when that disappearing seat bone is on the outside, the you may struggle more again, you're noticing when it goes, where does it go? Can you get it back? Do you need to pull on the saddle to get it back? What happens in particular on a turn? Is it harder to keep it in place on a turn? Does it disappear more easily? Is it harder to get back again? Then you'd be going, what happens in trot? Can you sense if that seat bone is there in the sit of rising trot, or does it all happen too fast for you? You. You're trying to slow down time and hone your perception so you would know in each sit. Got it, got it, got it, lost it. And hopefully you can get quick enough to make the correction that gets it back again. Many happy hours can be spent doing this, and it's time very well invested. But really we need to back up a level because to do this, we're presupposing that you have your seat bones clear and in a good organization just in your basic work. And whilst we've been through this before, I think we need to go back to it. So we need to start with the notion of plugging in. And a great way to understand this is by doing an exercise where you just put the palm of your hand flat on the top of your thigh. And in this exercise, the palm of your hand is representing your backside and the thigh is representing the sadd and the horse. And now make movements of your hands parallel to your thigh bone, towards and away from your knee over whatever layer of clothing you have there. And you're making friction. This is a disconnect. You're moving separately to the flesh and the clothing underneath your hand. Now see, is there a way you can move your hand, that plane of towards your knee and away from your knee, that moves your flesh with you. If you're finding that tricky with your knee at a 90 degree angle, put your foot a little more in front of you. Can you move your fingers side to side with them still touching the same bit of fabric and the same bit of flesh which is now moving underneath you? Try making clockwise circles and anti clockwise circles. This is the essence of what I call plugging in. Go back to the disconnect movement which makes friction and moves your hands separately to the fabric of your clothing and your flesh and your skin. And then go back to the way of plugging in that makes that connection. Skilled riders are always plugged in and I've always known this is important. This was one of the very early discoveries 40 years ago, and since then I understand it much better. And I watched a webinar recently which involved something you may find a bit distasteful, but I'm going to tell you anyway. It was in a dissection and the cadaver had been cut along the spine, through all the muscles along the spine. So you could see the, the bone and the layers of muscle and the skin. And the experimenter was moving his hand in that way on the skin, parallel to the spine, up towards the head, down towards the pelvis, up towards the head, down towards the pelvis, staying connected. And you could see all layers of flesh moving underneath his hand, between the skin and the bone in a way that was so profound. And research has shown that that kind of movement of the different layers of muscle and fascia, some of you will understand fascia better than others, but all the different layers can have profound effects on joints. A fair way away from where that happens. But when you make a disconnect and you do friction with your hand, moving backwards and forwards over the skin, there's no profound effect like that. And a lot of bodywork is based on the practitioner using that kind of touch. And when we use that kind of touch on our horses, albeit with thighs and backside on, we change the game. Now let's come to your seat bones themselves, an experiment that I want you to do whilst walking your horse. First of all, do your seat bones move one side at a time or both sides together? Take a few moments to notice that before you try and change it or adjust it. You want them to move one side at a time. Once you have that notice, is there movement more on the front back plane that will be parallel to the horse's spine, the up down plane or the side side plane. Now, up, down and side side are rather similar, and the side side version is kind of like a teeter totter. Your weight goes on your right seat bone, the left one lifts, left, down, right up, right up, left down, one up, one down, one up, one down,. Alternating. And that rider, when you look from behind, often does side bends where one seat bone goes down and that side of their body expands into the outside of a C curve and the other one goes down. And they have a kind of side to side dance. And in fact, if you're hacking your horse out, you might find it's harder to not do that going down a hill. So those seat bones are both going up, down and side side. What you want is more of a back front movement. Think of your seat bones walking along, and they walk along, making little movements from within the seam lines of the saddle. So your seat bones need to sit on the seat of the saddle within those seam lines. And think of the shape where the seat bones go forward, up and in towards the pommel. You want your own seat bone to make a stroke that goes forward, up and in a little bit. The next one goes forward up and in the first one, forward up and in the next one forward, up and in. And your seat bone is moving over the layer of flesh that's between the seat bone and the saddle. The flesh itself is not moving on the saddle, but your seat bone is moving over that layer of flesh. And this realization is really important. So your seat bone is moving a bit like a horse with bad action that plaits, or in the US you'd say braids with its front legs. Now, a lot of people have that movement far too big, which is very understandable because We've all heard we should be supple and go with the movement. And I often find myself saying to people, give me a guesstimate. How many inches do you think your seat bone moves? When it moves? And really they're just guessing. And let's suppose they say 2 inches, and I'll often say, halve it. That takes it down to one inch. Sometimes it's still too big and it's still a disconnect. And I say half it again, and the person might be having an existential crisis going, but I'm too still. I'm too stiff. But we're trying to find what is just right. And especially it needs to get smaller and slower with a horse who's taking the rider because the horse is in charge of the speed of his legs, and the rider needs to get in charge of the speed of the horse's legs, which is. Which means she needs to be in charge of the speed of her seat bones. Here's another way of taking this exploration a little further. If you had a pencil point on each seat bone, what would that pencil point draw? Now, quite often there's a reliable shape on one side, but a rather unreliable shape on the other that involves the seat bone going on a semicircle to the outside. You're trying to get equal opposite shapes. Not one that's a very light pencil line and one a much darker pencil line, and not one that's moving and one that's going outwards or both going outwards, or rather random. You're trying to make this very reliable. Remember, horses like stability. They don't want you up there doing random things. They want to know where you are, know what's happening. Now, here's another exercise, and it's to do with how clear your seat bones are to you. So this is where riders vary enormously. As I've said before, it's where the Goldilocks principle operates almost more than anywhere else. And it's to do with whether you have very clear, bony seat bones that tend to be a bit down and heavy, or whether you struggle to feel your seat bones. And here we have an exercise that you can do in your chair. Now, so if you sit yourself in neutral, where your front is equal, your back and you're vertical, and you put your fingers under your seat bones, you'll be a little bit more sensitive if you go palm up, but your fingers will probably get ouchy quicker, or you may last longer if you go palm down, but you won't be quite as sensitive. So if you put your fingers under your seat bones. Are they really clear to you? Are they really bony? Are you already going ouch? Whatever your baseline is, I want you to pop up, which means you're tightening the muscles between your seat bones and your fingers and you should be able to make your seat bones completely disappear. And you may be one of these people whose seat bones are way too disappeared the time. So now slowly let go. If it's easy for you to let go, you'll get your heavy seat bones, which I often talk about as stiletto heel seat bones. Really clearly. If you're not someone whose seat bones are really clear to you, letting go will this time will probably make them clearer than they were at the beginning. From this let go. Can you firm up just a little tiny bit? And you're attempting to firm up a muscle pad to the outside of the seat bone. So you find yourself sitting on the seat bone plus a pad. Some of you may not need to firm up very much at all to get that. Some of you will feel like it's more significant. Now pop up the whole way. And when you do this, a pad of muscle comes in under your seat bones and you can't feel them anymore from this extreme of popped up. Let go slowly and can you stop when you feel. First begin to feel your seat bones. That should give you the seat bone and the pad. Pause there for a bit. Then let go to the point of stiletto heel seat bones. Pause there for a bit. From there, can you firm up that little bit to find the seat bone plus the pa. Firm up the whole way to where your seat bones disappear. Slowly let go till you can feel just the seat bone coming in and you have the seat bone plus the pad. Let go the whole way to stiletto heel seat bones. And then can you refind the pad? I hope this is clear to you and it's an exercise that really bears repeating even at the office or working from home, whatever you're. When you're not near your horse, driving your car. And you may find the two sides of your butt are rather different and one side. Let's go and make some more. Stiletto heel seat bone. And you have to firm up a little more to get it to where it needs to be. Or maybe one side struggles to let go enough. The putting your hand on the underneath of the chair and pulling up might help you with that. You want to get good at finding the right place with the seat bone and the pad because the seat bone coming or going and feeling that as you're riding your horse presupposes that you can feel your seat bones at the beginning. We're trying to get this just really clear and precise as your baseline so that you can find that Goldilocks place where you haven't got stiletto heel seat bones digging into your horse's back and. And you aren't so popped up you can't feel them. Where you can get the pencil points on each seat bone to be mirror images of each other. No deep, dark lines and barely existing lines. No wiggles and jiggles or seat bones that go out to the side. Learning to feel. When you lose your seat bone, where does it go and how do you get it back? These are really important baselines. Everything else and every other correction you make is really built on this. The bottom line when you're riding is how often you check in with yourself and whether you're riding in noticing mode. And you may find your brain going off into extraneous thoughts. You may just tune out. You may start berating yourself and talking to yourself. But can you just come back into noticing? Maybe just saying to yourself the word seat bones or left side or plug in or let go or just right when you're trying to find the right texture for the seat bone plus the pad in your underneath, any excess movement, you're doing the unplugged version, like your hand just moving over your thigh in our exercise is like static on a radio which isn't well tuned. It's noise which gets in the way of communication between you and your horse and gets in the way of you being able to notice and make really fine distinctions. So I really hope you're going to work on these baselines between now and our next webinar and I promise you it will really help you. And I can also promise you that changes might not just be yep, got it. You're going to be fixing that disappearing seat bone in walk in trot in canter for maybe a very long time to come. But being in process of Got it, lost it, got it, lost it, got it, lost it is the name of the game in learning and getting. Where you can just do that and be there in the journey is the answer to making good changes in your body. So have fun riding, enjoy your horses, and 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.