Ep. 58 - Rotation or shear? And from ‘bus’ to ‘bend’.

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis WELcoming you to podcast 58. My plan here is that this will be our last podcast on asymmetry and steering issues, and then we take the last two to round up and review what is actually more than a year. 60 seems like a good round number to me, and I'm recording this towards the end of the lockdown in the uk, and my hope is that life is going to be opening up for all of us by the time that you hear this. I'd also like to take this moment to thank all of you who've contributed to our Just Giving page for keeping our school horses during all of the lockdowns. It's really helped immeasurably. Thank you. In our last podcast, I told you the story of Sarah, who'd badly injured her left arm in a fall, resulting in a total reversal of her asymmetry. And I also talked about the people I've taught who told me about their alien leg or their alien arm. If this is you do read the book A Leg to Stand on by Oliver Sacks, who was a neurologist who got really interested in the field of brains and how brains and bodies work when he had migraines as a child and used to lose half of his visual field. He was a brilliant man who died a few years ago, who's written a number of lovely books. And A Leg to Stand on is his experience of feeling that he had an alien leg after breaking his leg in a skiing accident the opposite end of the spectrum to the person who feels so alienated from one of their limbs is the story I told you of the pupil whose horse fell on her when she was a teenager, smushing both of their left sides in an injury that she just dismissed because nothing was ever broken. And yet she had the weirdest asymmetry. And over many years I'd regularly ask her, are you sure you haven't really hurt yourself at some stage? And eventually she told me about this fall and in her asymmetry fix she had to feel like she was doing the splits the wrong way round. So so she must have healed from that injury with her thighs coming out of her hip sockets in very different ways, and with a pelvic floor that would have been pulled into a big asymmetry with one side sheared ahead of the other. She would have a big difference on each side in that exercise where you sit on the floor and roll between your seat bone and your trochanter. I hope you've done that some more because it's a really worthwhile exercise, even though it isn't always the most fun one to do. We've talked a lot about the pattern of most people's asymmetry being rotational, but with some people it's more that one side of the body lags behind the other, it's weaker, and maybe it also has a less well developed neurological connection with the brain. To model this, put your arms out in front of you with your upper arms parallel and a bit below horizontal and your lower arms and your hands vertical and a few inches apart. Your hands are modelling your right third and your left third and the gap between them is your middle third. So keep your palms facing forward and advance one arm one or two inches ahead of the other. Preferably advance the arm on your stronger side. The direction where you ride better when that side's on the inside. This is a shear. You've just sheared that side of your arm, metaphorically your body ahead of the other. If you now rotate your torso towards the side of the further back hand, that's a rotation. And there's value sometimes in thinking of the issue as being rotational and sometimes thinking of it being a shear. And in reality I think it's a mixture of both. And of course, if you try and advance the hand on the side of the sheared and or rotated back, you're just trying to fix a symptom and your fixes are doomed. You have to address the shear and the rotation. The sheared forward side doesn't slingshot back as well. The point of your hip tends to point in and of course that's rotational too. So this is a good exercise that you might be able to do when you're working or at your kitchen table. It requires a table where the top is rested on a plinth that you can get your fingers under. So if you do that, you take the hand of your rather sheared backside and put the fingers under the plinth and curl them around the plinth so you can pull. And you put your fist making knuckles in a riding position against the side of the table on the side that's too far forward in your body and you push it back. Thinking of sending that seat bone back over your flesh and slingshotting back at the same time, that can be a really good thing to do. You might even be able to do it with the steering wheel of your car at stoplights, assuming that you've got a pretty good car seat that isn't having you round your back and sort of fall back into the Bucket. The equivalent of this with the saddle would be using two fingers, not absolutely in the furthest back of part of the pommel, but slightly to the side, and use those two fingers to pull your side that lags behind forward. So you're taking two fingers of that hand and pushing them slightly to the side of the pommel, pulling yourself forward. Now, you could also make a fist, put your hand round behind you with your knuckles against the cantle and push yourself forward. So you've got pull from the front and you've got push from the back on the other side in the saddle. You'd need to reverse this. That side of your body, that third is too forward. So take two knuckles, put them just to the same side of the pommel, just where the skirt of the saddle begins, and push yourself back on that side. Thinking slingshot back, elongate your thigh back, send your seat bone back over your flesh, and you could take your hand so your fingers go round behind the cantle and pull yourself back. Now, often one of these is more effective than the other. People like the pull better than the push or the push better than the pull, just depending on. But it's worth doing both, certainly, to experiment. And another possibility that you have with the table exercise is that you can push on the back of your chair or pull on the back of your chair. And actually, if you're doing that at the level of your mid back, it's more effective than when you have your hand on the saddle lower down. But that's the best we can do. Now, if you want to get a bit clever here, you could try the diagonal version of this. And if one hand needs two fingers in the pommel to pull that side forward, the opposite hand would need to go behind the cantle to pull that side back. So you're stretching the diagonal between those sides. And if you were to do the opposite diagonal, your hand would be pushing against that side of the pommel on the skirt of the saddle with a couple of knuckles, because that side is too forward. And you'd be pushing on the cantle because that side too needs to come more forward and you'd be making that diagonal shorter. So one diagonal needs to be made longer and one diagonal needs to be made shorter, which implies, of course, that your torso is really not a box. And maybe it's a parallelogram, and you're trying to parallelogramify it the other way by doing this exercise. And maybe it's not even a parallelogram, maybe it's some kind of weird Wedge shape and it is, whatever it is, but doing these exercises will make it much more stable and organised. So remember, we're not just rebalancing you here and stabilising you on the balance point. That's just side to side. We're working as well with front back balance and up down balance. This is not just about a balance point and it's not just about turning your horse, it's about manufacturing in yourself and him a viable right third, middle third and left third with two clear boards that separate them. In this process, you're making him begin to have two long back muscles which are much more there, much more equal. And I think his lack of equal long back muscles is one of the major problems he presents you with, related to his hollowness, related to the way he doesn't transmit force so well through his body as he pushes less with one hind leg than the other. The problem could be pronounced enough to lead to saddle slip, but even if the saddle doesn't slip, it'll probably lead to rider slip, or on the side where you're most vulnerable and you're making the best of a bad job until such time as you can anchor each seat bone on the inner edge of his long back muscle, climbing it up over your flesh to get to that point, doing the exercises with your fingers in the gullet or your fist across the pommel. I had an email from a friend and colleague in the US a few days ago going, well, I've been riding in pain and I've been using a massage gun on myself and it's helped for maybe the next couple of horses. And then I've been in pain again. And then I looked in your rider biomechanics book to look up a solution for someone I was teaching with their horse and a problem they were facing. And I found myself looking at both boards on. And I got on my horse the other day thinking, right, two boards, two seat bones, did a really good fix on myself and went, oh, my pain has gone. So there could be a bigger deal on this than just being able to steer. It could get you out of pain as you learn to not have one side of your body trying to do the work of both sides. The next step from this, when I say it, you'll probably go, oh, yeah, that figures, because it does, very obviously, is that if you think of the outer edges of your box, from your armpits, down your ribs on each side, down past your waist to your pelvis and your panty line where your thigh comes out of your pelvis. And you think of those as the outer edges of your box. They should lie over the outer edge of the horse's long back muscles, along with that lesser trochanter, the little outer nobble, which you might or might not be able to find clearly when you're on the saddle. And both you and your horse could have one or two very mushy edges, but you're not likely to have really clear edges. But let's just do this exercise quickly, which will help you firm up your edges. Link your fingers together, put your arms across in front of you, link your fingers around each other. So you can go where you pull your fingers apart, except you can't. So you're linking your fingers together, your hands are in front of your bosom in front of you, and you're trying to pull your fingers apart, but you can't. And feel the edges of your body, and you should feel them start to turn on and get firmer. And you can think of them narrowing in together and firming up as you try and pull your hands apart. And then try another version where you still have your hands in front of your bosom, but you put your knuckles together and the first bone of your fingers, and then you try and push them together again, feeling your edges firm up. And you could imagine as you do this, as there's a bolt through you at about bra level between your right side and your left side, and it has a wing nut, and somebody's tightening up the nut to bolt your two sides in together and breathe and notice how firmly you're bearing down. So it's very easy to have one rather there edge and one not there edge. Just like it's easy to have one board on and one board less on, and getting the two to function and to really begin to go, Can I feel the outer edges of my horse's long back muscles? Is it mushy? Is it underneath me? Or is it narrower than I am? Am I wider than it is, or am I narrower than it is? Is it sort of drooping down towards my knee? And getting the pair of you really lined up over each other and organized is a really big deal. Let me tell you about the exercise that proved invaluable to my friend who'd had the fall that she dismissed because all it ever did was soft tissue injuries. And I recommend this as an exercise to do for anybody. You need to get a pair of Franklin balls, and if you look them up on Amazon, you'll find them. And you want the ones which are green and they have little round indentations in the surface. They're designed for older people to be able to grip them well, but they're just the right size for you to be able to put one of those balls. And they need to be partly inflated, not fully inflated, one of those balls under each seat bone or to be more real under each sled runner. And you've got to find how forward or back they have to go for you to balance on them. And it's probably further forward than you think, because you want a length of the ball under a length of the sled runner. And you ride just in walk, if you want it to, just be in walk on those two balls in each direction and you'll find yourself more or less wobbly. Maybe you're wobbly on both sides, maybe you're wobbly on one side, but finding out how to balance on those balls is a very interesting exercise, which gives you feedback in a rather different way, often in a way that's hard to explain in words. And when you take the balls away, you'll find your underneath feels really different because it has effectively been tenderized by the experience of being on the balls. And you will learn something about how to stabilise yourself better. So my friend, having done that, and she both did some sitting trot on the balls and I think maybe some canter as well. Of course, what you can't do is rising training, and if you only walk, it'll have value, but if you feel brave enough to do the other gaits, then it'll have more value. She got off and went, oh, my goodness, my left side has expanded. There are places I didn't even know were there. It's just wider and it feels so different. And rushed off to the Internet to buy herself a pair of these balls. So the fall had kind of like squeezed water out of the sponge of the tissues of her left side. And despite the inflammation and the bruising that must have happened, they'd ended up dried out, globbed together, really stuck together. And suddenly the challenge of balancing on the balls brought new fluid and new life into those tissues. And if you have one very prominent seat bone and you're really struggling to find the other one, sit on one ball and you put it under the prominent seat bone, because you then create a space for the other side of the pelvis and the other seat bone to drop down. And when you take that one ball away again, your underneath could feel very different. And I would recommend, after you've done that a few times, that you ride with both balls and you only need to do this for five or 10 minutes. And what I find remarkable and hope to understand one day is, is that when people do this, even though they've lifted their bum by an inch or more, they never lose their stirrups. Their legs just reach down into the knee and the stirrup in actually a really good way. So something happens really well around the hip joint and the muscles around the hip joint that might grab and want the knee to come up. I just want to finish briefly by talking about the notion of how you progress from bus to bend. And we're really going to do this in theory more than anything else. If you think of your horse like a pontoon boat, the pontoon boat, like a catamaran, has two sides joined together, and yet this pontoon boat can bend. So the horse's outside third, as the outside of the pontoon boat has to reach around past the inside. And to do this, clearly, the rider needs a really good outside long back muscle that she can span right out to its edge and define that edge. And she needs to be able to draw on the horse's back, behind the saddle, on that side, it's his hindquarter and his hind leg, because it has to push off more and almost accelerate the outside of the body around the inside of the body. We're presupposing huge skills here, the inside of your body, you might have guessed it, has more to draw back on the front inside quadrant of the horse here, his trapezius muscle muscles in his neck, maybe even his lats, have to be towards you as that becomes the shorter inside. So the skill that's being presupposed when somebody tells you to bend your horse to the inside is massive.

And that's why most of the attempts.

To do that become a jackknife. And you need to fencing, lunge. Find your boards, find your edges, wipe the slate clean. Learn how to draw on different parts of the body before bend becomes an option. And potentially an easy thing to do because you've worked your throat through the Alphabet until you get to this point. So do practice the exercise with your edges. Think about maybe how much your pattern is rotational or how much it's a shear. Do the pull and push exercise with tables, chairs, steering wheels, and on the saddle, see how much that can really help you shear yourself the opposite way to the way your body would like to do. This can be very powerful. So, as ever, in a spirit of play and experimentation, of putting two and two together through discovery, Enjoy riding your horses, enjoy their company, have fun. I'll be back 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.