Ep. 57 The story of Sarah

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis WELcoming you to podcast 57. I want to tell you about a lesson I taught with someone who just started riding again after a significant fall in which she broke fingers and she broke her left upper arm. And that was a really bad break which required surgery, a plate and a large number of screws, which I think are going to stay in there. She twisted her elbow, her wrist and her hand, and as soon as her consultant gave her permission to be back in the saddle, she was back in the saddle, which was about eight or nine weeks later. She told me, though, that the physiotherapist she was working with had measured the grip strength in her right hand. Her right arm was fine as 34 with the grip strength in her left hand of the broken arm and fingers at 10, and also had really noted that her rhomboid muscle on that left side and that lies between your shoulder blade and your spine was really very weak. And as you'll hear as we go along, I saw weakness in her whole left side, including her left leg. She absolutely must not and physically cannot pull on the left rein. And she chose to come back to riding an older, saner, more reliable horse than the younger horse she fell off, who's really quite quirky and can be quite backward thinking. And her rideability score would be very low. We've joked that when the rider made a really good correction on her, she was suddenly stopped dead, almost as if she'd gone off with her head. I can't tolerate that kind of change. So it was a wise move to not get back on that horse. And if you'll remember, we had some podcasts back through time when we talked about how looking both ways before you cross the road is a sensible thing to do. It's not a sign that you're terrified and how locking your house at night is just taking sensible precautions and again, not a sign of being terrified. So she is just taking sensible precautions right now in riding this older horse. Although this older horse, I have to say, has a body who is almost set in concrete. The horse she fell off really is quite remedial and has been tricky to ride over a number of years. And. And that horse has a very significant asymmetry which has made her difficult to ride, especially on the right rein. And I'd recommended bodywork for this horse and it's made a huge difference during Sarah's time off. Her daughter, who's in her 20s, has been riding the younger horse and doing a very good job in the face of Its trickiness. And she's shown exactly the same asymmetry as her mum, which may well be horse induced. And you may remember I told you about research which really suggests that asymmetry is horse induced, because if you stand behind a horse who's saddled, standing square, and a handler at the horse's head, moves the horse's neck to the right and moves the horse's neck to the left, the saddle will move away from the horse's spine. Well, one panel going almost across the horse's spine and the other away from the horse's spine with one of those turns of the neck, but not with the other. And my hunch is that the more their long back muscle stays in place and keeps the saddle in place when it is on the outside relative to the direction of the turn of the neck, but the less there long back muscle, the one that we have to learn to manufacture, because it's less there, the saddle easily slips to that same side when the neck is turned to the other side. So the really interesting thing about this is after eight or nine weeks of surgery, being in a cast, being in a sling, that side of her body totally inoperative, Sarah got on the older horse and it was immediately clear to me that her asymmetry had. Has completely reversed. Now, of course, it could be that this older horse naturally would fall out on the right shoulder where the younger, quirkier horse naturally fell out on the left shoulder. But I would reckon that back through time when Sarah was riding the left rein really well, she wouldn't have got disorganized by the oldest horse's asymmetry in the way that asymmetry disorganized her. Now, she would have been set up to keep her outside seat bone in place, keep turning like a brusque, bring the wither to the left and all that good stuff that works when you're in place. So when somebody's asymmetry totally reverses like this, it's very hard to take in. And I have seen this happen to other people after significant accidents. And I know a number of people who've talked about my leg and the leg. The leg was a leg that had a bad break in the femur and took a long time to heal and never got totally integrated, I suspect, into that rider's body schema. I also know people who talk about my arm and the alien arm, again, largely after an injury. And body schema is different to body image. Body image is kind of how you think you look to others, how you'd like to be seen by others and maybe how you're really falling short. And body image can become distorted, as we know, by people who are anorexic and think they look fat when the rest of the world thinks they look thin. Body schema is more how your body is mapped or onto your brain. And you might remember the homunculus as that basic level of macking in the somatosensory cortex where you would have a very big head and very big lips and a very big tongue because they have so many nerve endings and very big thumbs and big hands and big fingers and pretty big feet and of course a very small pelvis because that doesn't involve so much cortical real estate, as it were. Not so many messages getting sent backwards and forwards between that area in the brain. And you can well imagine from the initial shock of the injury where pain isn't really felt to the point of surgery and a lot of pain and a lot of painkillers and pain and immobility over a significant period of time that the brain goes, let's turn down the dimmer switch so we don't get so much feedback from that part of the body. It really isn't fun to be feeling this. And that part of the body has less neurological messages going to and from and just isn't mapped that clearly anymore. And physically, of course, has really lost strength. So I did with Sarah, the exercise I will do with someone who really needs to have clarity about what's going on. So I had her halt and said to her, let's pretend that you're Mary looking at Sarah and you're looking at Sarah as you were before your fall and she's riding around you on the right rein. And I would put my body about 10 metres away from this rider in halt, as if I'm riding on the right rein and would model with my body what would happen. So if you're Mary looking at Sarah, you would have seen her falling back onto the heel of her fake foot on that side, her torso falling behind the balance point in a somewhat round backed way with her heel going down and forward and her knee coming up and her whole leg looking rather soggy. And as her body has fallen back behind the other side, that that hand would be back with a tendency to pull on that rein. And actually that shoulder is back with the body rotated in. The outside shoulder is forward, the outside hand is forward, the outside hand gives away to give the horse room to fall out through that outside shoulder as the inside hand pulls and restricts the inside shoulder. And I might show the rider as well how she looks from the back with a side bend and a lean, making creases on the inside. And then I change my direction and go. So we're pretending now that you're Mary, looking at Sarah as she rides around you on the left rein and in this direction, you'd see her body in profile with a really good shoulder, hip, heel line, a really good kneel down her left thigh with her foot back underneath her, her left hand lined up with her right hand and her body in profile. And I'll often put my arms out rather like I had a milkmaid's yoke on my shoulders. And so I'm pointing my hand directly towards my rider in the middle of the circle. I'm pretending to ride, saying, as I stick my arms out like this, that's a gauge that I'm in profile. And as you look, as you see me in profile, you only see one of my bosom because I'm not rotated in. And if you look at me from the back, I'd look like a good box. Now, I added one more distinction in my description, which I'm not sure we've talked about before. So I also said if I had a skewer sticking out of my front and back in the middle of my pelvis, a bit below my belly button on my midline, and I had a skewer sticking out my front and my back between the bottom of my sternum and my belly button, and a third skewer about in the middle of my cleavage, between the bottom of my sternum and my collarbone. So here we're acknowledging that your torso is almost like a Rubik's Cube with three layers which can twist on each other. And I will check in with the rider as to where those skewers point. And as I'm there demonstrating Sarah's very competently ridden left rein, on her younger horse, her skewers would be pointing straight on, so they're always on the tangent of the circle with my arms sticking out as the milkmaid's yoke on a radius, radius of the circle. Whereas on the rein where she didn't steer so easily, in this case it was the right rein. Her skewers would point into the circle with that side bend and rotation on that right rein too. Sally had not much of a rise in rising trot, her right side and its down and back and heaviness maybe did about half a windscreen wiper wipe. And her right thigh could even get really stuck and interestingly, that happened too, with her daughter riding her horse. And I think that horse had a very conservative push of his right hind leg, and it conned both of these riders into doing an itsy bitsy rise to match the horse's itsy bitsy thrust. And the rider, in changing, that horse had to make a much more dynamic thrust in a realigned way, right side, to persuade the horse that it really could begin to move. And a big deal with that horse was keeping enough stuffing in front of the right shoulder blade and also keeping the treadmill functioning. Because somewhere in that treadmill, it didn't start at the back on the right and it didn't get to the front on the right. Whereas on the left, the treadmill, which would be at about the level of the horse's seat bone going through it on right and left, just a little bit into the root of the neck, was very, very different on the two sides and really quite compromised on the right. And changing that made a very big.

Difference to that horse.

So for my second little demonstration, I said to Sarah, so here you are now on this older horse, and when I look at you on the right rein, or let's say she's pretending to be Mary looking at Sarah, Sarah's riding around her on a right rein, and the body is really lined up with a good shoulder, hip, heel. There's no falling back in the way there was before. The body's in profile. The skewers would be on the tangent of the circle. If I stuck my arms out as I demonstrate, they'd be on the radius of the circle. She would be seeing me in profile. The rider's hands are level and the steering's going really well. I then reverse direction to demonstrate what Sarah looks like riding on the left rein. And here, her skewers would be rotated in. Her body is falling back. Her left seat bone looks really back and down and heavy. She's rolled back towards the heel, that fake foot. The knee is up, the heel is forward, and the whole leg looks really unstuffed. The lack of muscle and power and maybe neurological messaging to her brain has gone right into her leg. It's not just her arm, not just her shoulder, and not just her torso. Her left hand would tend to be back behind her right hand. She's desperately not pulling, and she knows she mustn't do that on pain of re injury. But she's rotating, dropping back, giving away the right hand, not anchoring her right seat bone well, not bringing the horse around like a bus in a total mirror image. Now with this different horse, the horse may be setting the pattern, as we said, but she would have been able to mitigate that pattern, I'm really sure. And of course, we never really know who's the chicken and who's the egg, but we made a really significant difference in this lesson. And I started by suggesting that we did an exercise naively, not realizing that of course I was going to challenge this arm, which had not much range of motion. And I had her do the exercise we've done with you of putting the back of your hand just above your pelvis on your shorter, crumpled side and dragging the tissue around with you as you bring your hand up around your side to under your bosom. This is where you think of the pop up garden bag that has a spiral metal wire in it and you're filling yourself out and elongating yourself as you make that movement and drag the tissue around. So it took her a little while to be able to even get our arm in position and be able to do that, but she was able to do it after a few tries. And we also added something else we haven't done in the podcast, which with her opposite arm, we, we had her trace the same line in the opposite direction. And you might do this on yourself now. So on your shorter, soggier side, you have the back of your hand just above the top of your pelvis, and on your longer, more filled outside that rotates forward, you put your knuckles and your fingers just under your bosom because you're going to rotate that down and around towards the back of your pelvis. And each hand gets to drag the tissue with it. And each hand is doing the same spiral on your short side from the back bottom to the top front, and on your longer side from the top front to the back bottom. Now, this was good physiotherapy for her arm in her own right, but it really changed the look of her body and enabled her on the left rein to stack herself in shoulder hip heel to look less compromised in terms of her strength. And at the same time as we did this with her left side, we really tried to get her thinking about turning like a bus, keeping the horse's right side short, keeping the outside seat bone, the outside shoulder, the outside elbow, the outside hand so that hand didn't give forward. And the spiraling hand exercise can actually really help people almost get their shoulder blade on that side in a different position so their shoulder blade isn't pulling away from their spine as their whole side rotates forward and their elbow goes forward forward. The more she thought about limiting the outside and turning like a bus and having the horse step to the left with the left front leg, the more her right side was initiating the turn, helping her left side stay in place. And it was very interesting how as the horse begin to change its straightness and step to the left, it, it began to change its carriage. And this is a 27 year old warmblood who's still being ridden. And I looked up 27 in horse ages is 78 in human age. So the horse is not likely to be a very good athlete and it's very close to looking like its body is set in concrete. But as the withers came around to the left, the horse began to reach into the rein. She showing that its asymmetry was having a really big effect on keeping the top line hollow and the tummy line just saggy and hanging down as it did a giraffe imitation, which I think it's practiced for many, many years, but which became so much less. In fact, the horse began to look on the up, down and back front cranes like it was really finding the seeking reflexes of up through its back, widening its ribcage, reaching into the but it was very dependent on the steering coming right now. In many ways, this lesson was physiotherapy for Sarah, it was physiotherapy for her arm in making that spiral movement. And it was physical therapy in the way it changed the lineup of her left side and began to put what looked like so much more strength and power into gave her a really good exercise to practise off horse and a real sense of what she needed to be doing on horse. And I'm pretty sure that she will practice this diligently and learn a huge amount from it. And it's going to be very interesting to see how it pans out when she gets back on her younger, trickier horse who has improved in the time she hasn't ridden her. And her daughter's riding and bodywork has helped with that enormously. But her left side as an inside will be challenged on that horse where that's been the easy direction. And maybe her right side as an inside will be challenged because that's the original pattern and the pattern the horse would tend to put her into. So the juror is out to how that will pan out once she's back.

On that horse again.

I hope this has given you a really good overview to understand the pattern as a whole and that you will keep noticing when you lose the weight on one seat bone when you start to rotate in. And the idea of the skewers might be one to really bring to noticing and diagnosing yourself as you're riding and adding that opposite hand to how you think of your torso like the pop up garden bag may really help you keep yourself organised. And so you don't rotate in and realise if Your skewers are 10 degrees into the circle pointing in that direction when you ride on your difficult rein, the fix is not going to make you feel like they point on the tangent, it's going to make you feel like they point at least 10 degrees out and they might point 20 degrees in and need to feel like they're pointing 20 degrees out. And this is one of the changes that really makes people go, whoa, this is so weird. I'm not sure I can handle this. And of course it takes a mirror or better still a video to really convince them that this is how different and exaggerated it has to feel for them to make the change they really need to make. So I hope you can set about this with an attitude of noticing, experimenting, playing, being willing to be weird and working this out as you have fun with your horses and enjoy your riding.

And I will 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.