Ep. 55 Good sides and bad sides

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis WELcoming you to podcast55. We've been talking about the idea of your boards and I hope you've really been able to make sense of this and work with it. And there's almost certain to be a strength differential between them. It's very rare that somebody is really naturally very equal between the two. And I'll often do a little hand modelling for people to have them understand some things about this. So I put my hands out in front of me at the time. Let's say we figured out that one board hangs out at a 7 and the other hangs out at a 3. So I put one hand significantly lower than the other and I say to them, so your three board goes up to a four and guess what happens? Your seven one goes up to an eight and your four board goes up to a five and so on. So they're both getting stronger, but the differential between them stays the same. You really don't want this, but it is what will happen very commonly and very easily, and it happens to people too, in everyday life. I think I told you this story a long time ago of a time when there was a phone call and the person on the other end of the phone didn't tell me her name, but just went, oh, Mary, you won't believe what I've discovered. And I'm going, hello, I think I know who this is. And it was indeed who I thought it was. And she was driving back home from being at the gym and whilst there she'd been doing the exercise for your adductors where you move them in against a resistance, moving your legs in and out with the in part against a resistance. And she said, I suddenly realized while I was doing this that my right thigh was doing 80% of the work and my left thigh was just dragging along behind. So she spent the last however many years just training her stronger side and actually increasing, in that case, the differential between the two of them. I can tell you though of my friend Sandy Howard in America, who died a number of years ago, who was a very well known judge, trainer and rider and in her day was part of the US team squad. And I was coaching her when she realized one day that every message intended for the right side of her body went to the right side of her body via the left side of her body. And so the left was always getting in on the act and always getting stronger with the right side lagging behind. Now, I think it might be a little harder to get to the Olympics now with standards. However, many years on than it was then, and I'm not sure if that would work now, but. But it did get her to the Olympics, and when she really realized what was going on, she was shaken. So at some stage in your learning, you really have to get good at getting the strong side to let go as well as getting the weaker side to come on. And nobody likes to do that. It's like that strong side of the body goes, me, me, me. You need me, I do the riding. You can't do this without me. And you have to kind of tone it down and think of the idea that it may you need to get less as the other one begins to get more. At some stage in your learning, too, you discover that the side of your body or the direction of riding, which has always seemed to be good, also has issues. In the early days, compared to the bad side, it was just light relief and it was just good. But as the bad side quote gets less bad, you get that stronger microscope lens that might enable you to see the issues that have always existed in the good side. I hand model this for people, too. So put my hands out in front of me at different levels with my palms horizontal, and I say, so here's your good side at an 8, and here's your bad side at a 3. And the bad side actually has, at this point, succeeded in doing 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. And suddenly you have a new bad side. And people at this point in time are normally utterly confused and almost rudderless because the problem they thought they were solving has now morphed into. Into a different problem. Confusion tends to set in. And this can happen through the process as it goes from there. So the first time that the bad side becomes good and the good side becomes bad is an existential crisis. And then there'll be changes of which way is easier as you go through and learn from there. And so this should be. One of my friends in the US put it beautifully when at the beginning of a clinic during our first lesson, I pointed out to her what was happening, and it took her a while to really get it. And sometimes if I'm questioning people about what's going on, they tell me the answer, as the answer has always been. And I end up going, no, you need to really check in with your body here. Just really notice. Is that still true? And eventually this person said to me, mmm, I guess I've been focusing so much on my left side and its leftishness that I haven't thought about my right side and its rightishness for a very long time. And yes, I get what you're saying. That is the new problem. And of course the problem that operates here on the bottom line is that human failing lack of brain space. And brain space can be the really big issue in working with your asymmetries and be that issue for a very long time. Because if you can only think and focus on and make fixes on one side of your body, sooner or later you will wake up with a problem on the other side. But at the beginning, most people can only just focus on one thing, especially when it comes to their asymmetry. I've lost my seat bone. The seat bone's gone. I can't keep it in that 7 o' clock or 5 o' clock position on the clock face. How can I get it back? And there's no brain space for anything else. So the gaining of brain space is a big deal. And as the, you know, one side becomes the better side and the other side becomes the better side, at least things are changing. You're not just stuck in a pattern. And your asymmetry is morphing but not going away. And in its morphing probably getting less profound, but still enough to really annoy you. And the truth of the matter is that since both sides of your body are opposite sides of the same coin, no really good asymmetry fix can only fix focus on one side. But brain space may limit it in that way for quite a long time. And all there ever is in your riding is losing balance and refinding it, losing balance and refinding it. And here we're talking about balance on the side side plane, there's nothing that's going to go. Got it. Now, as you ride off into the sunset, having ascended into heaven, there will always be you lose it and you fix it. You lose it and you fix it. The question is, do you realize that you've lost it or did you never have it? Are you riding along in sublime ignorance, where ignorance is bliss? Or if you've realized that you have a problem and you're in the process of fixing it, how sophisticated are you fixing and how quick are you at doing them? And in the early days, you may well feel, as I did, that you're scrabbling around in a fog, dealing with disorientation, perhaps struggling to find your fixes. And it's inevitable that it's going to be like that at first. But there will be a stage where you become much clearer about what's really going on, even way through this process, you might feel like you have some seemingly intractable issues. And unless you or your horse have had significant injuries and have some big knots in your fascia net, which you may understand that term or may not, depending on how well you know my work. But without those major injuries, I would contend that there are answers to to those seemingly attractable issues, and they will involve got it, lost it, got it, lost it, got it, lost it. And even a long way through this process, you may find that you can't sense where the next aha moment, the next realization, the next breakthrough is going to come from. And personally, I rather like that that is the case. But it took me a long time to realize it will always be that way in my own body. I almost certainly go, fix my left side, fix my right side. I have more strength and neurology in my left side than my right. Maybe I can change that at some point to going, fix the right, fix the left. But however this happens, realise that you're in it for the long haul. Working with your asymmetry is a long haul and it's never a done deal. But it gets easier and more doable. And you might or might not along the way, feel like you've found a quick fix and a wonderful answer, and it will be probably a highly significant fix. But you at that stage, can't see the next step on the journey and where that journey will go. And your very significant fix is but one step on a very long journey. And of course, the bottom line is enjoying that journey, not just longing to arrive the boards. Exercise has been showing you the value of dividing yourself into thirds rather than halves. You have a right third, a left third and a middle third. The middle third being your spine, your windpipe, that few inches each side of your midline, which is stacked up over the horse's vertebra and his middle third. Because he too has the same possibilities, a middle third and two outer thirds. He can have two boards. He might have one very soggy one and one functional one, and guess what? I'd be pretty sure they'll mirror yours. So your aim is to use your boards and maybe even think of them going down through the saddle and down into him a little bit to really get a sense of the inner edges of his long back muscles and how much are they stable each side of his spine? If they're soggy, he could feel like a wiggly worm when you're trying to steer him. You need some substance alignment to those lines and you want to think of them extending up Each side of his crest and each side of his neck vertebra and extending back each side of his croup. So you're really trying to figure out if you can use your boards to give him two more even boards. And to each side of his boards, we want him to. To have two even long back muscles. So we're going to do a little hand modelling. Again. If you put your arms in front of you, where your lower arms are vertical, and then you put your palms horizontal facing the ground with a little gap between your fingertips, and we've got with your hands, the idea of your horse's two long back muscles under the panels of the saddle. And what you've modelled with your hands is that they will be equally wide and horizontal. But I doubt if they are. And if they are, congratulations, because your skills probably made them that way. So take one of your hands and put it at an angle so you drop your wrist down several inches. And now you've got one horizontal side and one sloping side. And very often the horse's back is like this, almost as if one long back muscle is a flat roof and one long back muscle is a sloping roof. Now, the seat bone on the side of the sloping roof is very easily going to slide away from the midline and probably end up with less weight on it. For the people where it ends up with more weight, the that only happens if that person rolls onto the outer edge of the seat bone, rather in the same way that you might roll on the outer edge of your ankle and go over on your ankle. And it's happened quite a few times when people have been in that scenario where they've managed to get more weight on the outside seat bone that's actually falling off and sliding down the sloping roof. And they've gone, gosh, I've gone over on that ankle so often, I've really hurt myself like that. And I suspect that those ankle injuries actually bear a relation to this pattern within their pelvis. The majority of people, though, that seat bone on the sloping side gets to have less weight on it. And this is a chicken and egg thing. And if you imagine now, so you can move your hands out of that position now, if you imagine your horse falling out in a jackknife, so things have gone wrong. You're pulling on the inside rein, his nose and neck are going to the inside, his withers are going to the outside. The outside seat bone has kind of drifted off and you can't anchor your shoulder, your elbow, your hand to keep the outside rein Your horse is falling out through the gap that you've made for him. Whilst you've constricted his inside so much he can't step to the inside with his inside front leg. That outer long back muscle will be the sloping roof. It almost gets too long, too low and too narrow, giving you very little to sit on. Sometimes I think of somebody taking their chewing gum and making a string out of it, that long, narrow string. So of course your seat bone slides off very easily. I used to think of if one side felt like a flat roof and the other side felt like the edge of a cliff, like there was virtually nothing there. If you can't do anything else, you want to keep your seat bone on the cliff edge and not let it fall off. And that's not easy to do. But it's the only thing that's going to begin to. To change the pattern. Remember, the horse has no interest in changing the pattern. You are the only one that has an interest in doing this. So it has to begin with you. What's interesting though, and it's true that I don't ride as many horses as I used to, but it's a very long time since I've sat on a horse which felt like that. Although when I get on a horse, the two long back muscles normally do feel somewhat uneven. And I'm there from the very first few moments I'm on there searching for more evenness and trying to make that happen. And I think that's because the underneath I present to the horse, the surface I present to the horse, has already begun to change that horse's pattern. So I haven't felt such extreme versions of wrongness as I used to when I, as a rider, got on presenting the horse with a more extreme pattern of wrongness. So we're trying to create something out of nothing where you have that disappearing long back muscle. And realize that this means that the turning issues you're experiencing are not, as it were, all your fault. We don't know which of you is the chicken and which of you is the egg in your relationship with your horse. But we do know that it's not that he's all perfect and you're all terrible between the pair of you, you created this problem, or perhaps you inherited this problem, but of course the onus is on you to fix it. So step one, you have to be able to keep that seat bone at 5 o' clock or 7 o' clock and rescue it when it starts falling down the slope. You have to get your horse to Turn like a bus so he can't over elongate that outside seat bone and disappear it. You really know you're doing well when you've turned that nothing into something and the horse is keeping a width in that long back muscle with his outside short enough, high enough and wide enough as his shoulders come around. Now, this takes some doing and it's going to need a little bit more explanation from me, which needs to come in our next podcast. But maybe you can ride your horse and get yourself to where your seat bones are in a good place. And in doing that, remember the idea of putting two fingers in the gullet and pulling towards the side, the hand and the seat bone. You're working on really trying to get that 5 o' clock or 7 o' clock position to be more robust, to realize what you lose when you lose it, and to get better at doing the fixes. But from that position, if you're in a really good place, really notice the surface under you. If you were sitting on an oil drum, you would have the same amount of horse under your right seat bone, right butt cheek and right thigh as you would have under your left seat bone, left butt cheek and left thigh. But your horse is not an oil drum, so you probably don't have the same shape. And very often people can tell whether they've got a wider, flatter shelf on one side, like a flat roof and a sloping roof, or even a cliff edge on the other side. If you really attempt to not slide down the slippery slope or fall off the edge of the cliff, and it may help you to think of trying to be on the inside edge of your seat bone, not rolling over onto the outside edge on that side. If you can begin to realise the pattern that the horse has brought to your interaction, it, it becomes very empowering. Especially just knowing it's not all you is really empowering. And I promise you that you can learn to influence that long back muscle. Even if you get this realization that your horse is not like an oil drum and you go, oh my goodness me, so many people have learnt to do this even when they thought they wouldn't be able to. I promise you it's possible. And in our next podcast, we'll bite that one off. In the meanwhile, enjoy your horses. Have fun riding them. Keep doing that stretch I showed you a while ago with the stable door. Keep putting your fist on your side and really trying to expand your soggy side. Can you improve your ability to get the missing seat bone to come into place and the pushes and pulls on the saddle, of which there are a number on, are immensely helpful in this. It's all about noticing, it's all about discovering, it's all an exploration and then it's all about practicing the fixes and you will get it, lose it, get it, lose it, get it, lose it because that's the name of the game.

As you do this.

Have fun and I'll be back soon.

These podcasts are linked to two other Internet sites. One is dressagetraining.com 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 in 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.