Ep. 52 Slingshot!

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis WELcoming you to podcast 52. I hope you're beginning to get the idea that there are principles to how most of us become asymmetrical. And whilst that's true, it's also true that we can be really idiosyncratic and that accidents especially can create out of the box, asymmetries. Let me tell you the story of one of my colleagues who, who I've known for a very long time and who has a massive asymmetry to the degree that to get her both legs to hang underneath her in that shoulder, hip, heel line, she had to feel like she was doing the splits with the leg that should be forward going back and the leg that should be back going forward. This was a massive version of what is for most people a small but significant difference in the way both legs would like to hang. And I spent years saying to her, you've never had any really serious accidents or falls or nothing's really happened. That's strange. And she's gone.

No.

And then last time I saw her, she said, well, actually, when I was 17, a horse came over backwards on me. We both came over backwards and onto our left side and it really squished my left side. But I've always thought it was no big deal because I didn't break anything. Well, she thought she came out of this unscathed. From a bone point of view, there are such things as bone bruises which can affect us on through time. But her soft tissues had really suffered. And this became clear when I did an exercise with her, one that I'll explain in a later podcast. And she came out of it going, oh, my gosh, my left side is just expanded. It's got this width I didn't know it had, I'm finding bits of me I didn't even know existed. And I explained it to her almost like if her left side was a sponge. She landed on it really hard. All the water got squeezed out of the sponge. And even though there would have been metabolic implications of this and waste products and inflammation and all the rest of it, it's like the water never came back into the sponge and it was just dehydrated, stuck to itself, a shadow of its former self without her ever really knowing, until suddenly it sprung back into fluidity and life. It was a fascinating, absolutely fascinating case study. Most of us, our asymmetries are off the shelf following certain principles, and we're just going to review these briefly. So whilst people talk about the two point or the three point Seat I, I would really advocate for the sled runner seat with these two ridges of bone that join your pubic bone to your seat bones, like the runners on a sledge. And with virtually all of us, one side is at a different angle to the other. And on the one that's steeper, as it goes back to our seat bone, we roll back onto that seat bone in a way that puts a lot of weight on it, might make it point forward. And if we regard those sled runners as feet, amputate your legs and they're like feet with the heel at the seat bone end and the toe at the pubic bone end, you have to roll towards the toe of your fake foot. This enables you to bring your real heel back underneath you. And it's as if your thigh's the diameter of a big wheel. But we advance you on that sled runner to have your thigh go down, your knee go down, like turning the wheel in that direction where your body really wants to turn the wheel the opposite way. Knee up, thigh more horizontal, back onto the heel of the seat, feet rounding your back, collapsing backwards. And you will pull on that rein, however determined you are not to. We then did the exercise of putting the back of your fist on your back just above your pelvis and spiraling it around your side to just under your bosom. And this helps you to get that side of the body to elongate and to come more forward. And you could think of your torso like one of those garden waste bags, but the pop up kind of garden waste bag that has a spiral wire within it. And what you're doing is from a collapsed bag getting that wire to come around and up to add structure and keep you upright, just like it does with that bag. Keep repeating this hand rub. Do it driving your car. Do it when you're riding just in walk, put your reins in one hand and run your fist like that to help encourage you to bring your front more forward. In fact, you could even consider this your new understanding of grow tall and stick your chest out. You're losing the roundness and the collapsed to be taller and to be advancing your ribcage just under your bosom. The other side of you in the mirror image of this might have some missing or soggy parts to the wire, but it will be stronger overall. And my experience is that most women have a bit of a side bend in their asymmetry, where guys might be likely to just lean, but getting the side bend out, popping up your rather collapsed bag on that side is really Important. So along with the side that rolls back that seat feet, we have the side where your point of hip wants to advance and rotate. And if you can stand up, imagine you had flashlights on the points of your pelvis. So if you were to become round backed, those flashlights would point up. If you became hollow backed, those flashlights would point down. Can you have them point forward? Imagine that if your pelvis was a bowl, which this time we're going to think of as filled with sand rather than filled with water, the sand would pour out and land on the floor just between the sticky out bones on the insides of your ankles. Think of an hourglass and the sand falling out of the top half of an hourglass. Then think about the flashlights on the points of your hips and whether they would both point forward. And you might find that one would tend to point slightly in and across your body. If you don't sense that, then try advancing one and notice how that makes it point in and across your body. Then try advancing the other one and notice it's not quite as fluid as advancing the first one. So the point of hip that might tend to point across your body, make it point forwards and push it back a little. Keep it horizontal, but just push it back a little and that might make you feel like you've got a big butt cheek sticking out behind you. Then sit and notice that if you advance that point of hip and push it across your body, sitting, you get to lift that seat bone and push in that foot. So, so the effects are slightly different. But getting that point of hip to come back is really important because this is really significant in your rotation. It's after all the opposite side of the coin advancing itself to the other side that rounds your back and plops back. So we're going to do an exercise now that involves bringing back that side that would tend to advance and. And of course it's not just your point of hip that's affected, it's the whole pelvis and thigh. So this works best on a hard chair. And you want to sit with your thighs at 45 degrees to the front of the chair and both seat bones are on the chair. And we're working with the seat bone and thigh that are closest to to the edge of the chair. Put your opposite hand a bit in front of your kneecap and reach your knee to touch your fingers. That means your point of hip is going forward and maybe a little across your body, but definitely forward. Keep your hand where it is and then back your knee away from Your fingers reach your knee to touch your fingers. Back your knee away from your fingers. Now, when you back your knee away from your fingers, what you want is that your seat bone slides forward or back over the layer of flesh in your butt between your seat bone and the chair. And you don't want your seat bone to either point forward, which means you're rounding your back, or point back, which means you're hollowing your back. Can you get your seat bone to just slide over your flesh? And let's make this a little more rigorous by putting the hand of the same side of the seat bone under your seat bone. And you keep reaching your knee to touch your fingers, backing your knee away from your fingers. And I hope you can really feel your seat bone sliding over your fur, your flesh, and sliding over the fingers of that hand. And repeat this, making slow, steady movements. Make it as smooth a glide as you can. Repeat it a number of times. And notice, how many fingers does your seat bone slide over now? It should certainly be two, and it's likely to be three. If it's only two, then you may be a little bit restricted in this movement compared to what I'd expect. And then next time your knee touches your fingers, we're going to get to the punchline. Keep your knee touching your fingers, and at the same time, push your seat bone back over your flesh. Now, we call this exercise slingshot, or you could say catapult, because your knee is going one way and your seat bones going the other way, as if your thigh were the elastic in a slingshot. Your pelvis is the stone. Your knees are attached to the wooden V shape of the slingshot, and you've elongated your thigh as the elastic. And if you've really got this and you're doing it well and you're sitting here with that elongation, you might be really starting to feel a burn and your quads. And if you can, that's a really good sign. And if you haven't found a burn in your quads, then really and truly we're searching for a burn in your quads. Okay, let's let that go and have you change your position to 45 degrees the opposite way in your chair. So now we're working with the other thigh and the other seat bone. Put your opposite hand in front of your knee and reach your knee to touch your fingers and back your knee away from your fingers, and you may immediately discover that it feels a bit different. You may have more or less range. Sometimes it can feel a bit glitchy. And clunky and scrunchy. You hope, though, it feels pretty smooth. And reach to touch your fingers and back away from your fingers a few times. And then put the fingers of the other hand under your seat bone so you can really feel your seat bone rolling forward and back over your fingers. And you can double check that it stays pointing down, rather than you're rounding your back and you're hollowing your back to make it point forward or back. So keep repeating this movement and then keep your knee touching your fingers and back your seat bone away from your fingers and see if you can maintain that pulling out of your thighs like the elastic in the slingshot, and get to the point where you can feel it in your quads as burn the side where you advanced your point of hip before we did this part of the exercise is the critical side. And when you're riding, you might want to put your fingers on the point of that hip, push it back and do slingshot at the same time. So that doesn't help you make the rotation. You're going, hey, seat bone, stay back, stay in place. Don't you rotate out of this. And slingshot is a useful technique that we do for a number of things, and one of them is discovering which thigh does it best and teaching the other thigh to catch up with it and the other side to catch up with it. So you can keep your seat bones more even and more narrow and close together each side of the horse's spine with your thighs under that tension. So a way you can think of it is if you can elongate your thighs, you can elongate the horse's back underneath you, and if you can elongate his back, you can elongate his neck. But if his neck scrunches and he pushes back to you, he has to scrunch his back. And he can only scrunch his back if he can scrunch your slingshot. But if you can elongate his back, you can elongate his neck. And if you can elongate his neck and elongate the back, you're elongating your thighs. But if he soggies his neck back to you, you he sockets his back and he sockets your thighs. So it has real value in the back to front organisation of your horse and whether his back comes up and elongates and he reaches into his neck. But it also has a lot of value in terms of helping you not rotate and lose the plot in terms of your asymmetry. So let's do another Exercise, which I hope you will actually be able to do. And here and now maybe you can't, because it needs some stage management. You need a friend to help you, and you need someone who's willing to go on all fours so that you can sit on their back and also potentially to sit on your back. And if you can, and you've got someone who's a similar size and weight to you, it's so worth doing. This exercise. This illustrates the principles of how turning aids work like nothing else. And it's been an epiphany and an aha moment for almost everybody I've ever done it with. So let's imagine that you have your friend on hands and knees, willingly playing the role of horse. And when you sit on their back, you have to be very respectful and keep a lot of weight in your feet and not squish them. And normally I get someone to sit on my back and I just say to them, turn me right. And I wait to see what they do. And they always do the same thing, which is rotate their body to face right. And if we were on our feet and we were going to turn right, this is what we do, we would just rotate our body to turn right. But it's interesting to notice what happens to the horse underneath you when you do that. And what happens is you make your horse twiddle about its middle, so its shoulders go one way to the right and its butt goes the opposite way to the left. It doesn't take a step or anything like that, but your human equals horse will just twizzle about its middle. Then we could mirror image it and have you turn your friend to the left. And if you face your body to the left, the same thing will happen. Your horse will twizzle in the middle, its butt will go out to the right and its shoulders will go to the left. Normally at this stage, we swap roles and I sit on my partner's back and I will show them what they just did by rotating myself right and rotating myself left so they can feel that twizzle in their body. And then I reorganize myself and I reorganize myself. So one of my feet is a little back and the other would be underneath me. And from that back foot, back seat bone and back thigh, I will make a movement that I describe as like a fencing lunge towards the opposite front corner of my horse. So I'm going from my outside seat bone and my outside leg back as if somebody pulled on my inside knee. And normally I can easily get my horse to take a step with the front leg on that side towards, let's say, 10 o' clock if it was their left front leg, or maybe 10:30 and 1:30 if it was their right front leg. And usually the person's there going, whoa, what did you do? What happened? Because they made that step very instinctively without really understanding what they did. So to get them to understand it, we swap roles again. The person sits on my back and I help her to get one foot and seat bone slightly back and to initiate from there a force that goes through their body as if somebody pulled on the other knee. And I can reach back with my hands and I can talk to them in a way that, of course, our horses can't instruct us how to do anything other than through feedback, which. Which is a little harder to interpret than mine when I'm playing that role of the horse. And I show them how to make a fencing lunge in one direction and in the other direction. And quite often they can do it one way more easily than the other. And normally at this point they're kind of stunned, but they're understanding in a totally different way to the way they've ever before understood the turning aid. And sometimes I think of an elite rider back through time riding their horses in the morning and having to ride their book in the afternoon going, oh my goodness, what am I going to write about turning? Well, yes, I know this foot goes there and that foot goes there and this hand here and that hand there. And I'm thinking, yes, but you didn't tell us about your body, did you? And you didn't realize that your outside leg was back because your outside seat bone was back. And you're actually arranging your whole torso so your inside is slightly in advance of your outside and you're making that fencing lunge kind of movement to which your horse responds. Because one of the bottom lines in riding in both our body and the horse's body is how we do force transmission with no force transmission. We bobble about and we pull on the reins and our bodies make force transmission in one direction much easier than force transmission in the other direction because of our asymmetry. So I hope you will do these exercises and if you possibly can do the sitting on somebody's back exercise, reversing rolls, please, please do. I promise you it will be mind blowing. And I hope as well that you will have fun riding your horses. Enjoy them, have a really good time until I get to be back with you again.

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 with 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 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 stre 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.