Ep. 63 Is your body a soggy distorted bundle, or can you transmit force?

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast number 63, which is coming to you in the summer of 2024. I got very excited recently reading Horse and Hound, which is a weekly magazine in the UK that covers all the equestrian disciplines, veterinary information, and actually it's a really good read for anybody and everybody. And in it was an article by one of the dressage judges who had judged at one of the big three day events in the uk. It was actually Burghley, which is nearly as big and magnificent as badminton, and he was commenting about how one of the horses who scored really well in the dressage had such good positive tension. Now, this is the first time I've ever seen in the press or, or heard from somebody who would be regarded as a figure of knowledge and authority within the horse world. The first time I have heard in that context of positive tension. And I kind of did a fist pump and went, yes. Not just me crying in the wilderness. And when we talked about the myofascial lines in our series of lockdown podcasts, we talked of them like guitar strings. And as I'm sure you'll remember if you listen to those podcasts, the deal is that a soggy guitar string will not play a note. This could be your soggy guitar strings or the horse's soggy guitar strings, but with soggy guitar strings, you're just doomed to kind of go around the planet going blur, blur, blur, blur. To not have any bounce or ping or essentially any force transmission which within your body, because force transmission happens within the fascial net, but it requires a fascial net under tension. That's positive tension. Now, the horse, well, thinks about force absorption as something that needs to happen within the rider's body. And without force absorption, you can literally bump up and down on the saddle in a way that you can hear yourself bumping, which is not much fun. Force absorption has its place in that vertical, up, down plane. But what we need to be thinking much more about is force transmission within the body of both horse and rider. Both your lines, your major lines need to be capable of playing a note. And it's this that really allows you to defy gravity to some extent. And it's the basis of what's called the biotensegrity. I have some wonderful tensegrity models. They're made with wooden dowels and rubber bands. And the tension in the rubber bands kind of almost suspends the wooden dowels so none of them touch. And looking this up on the Internet would be a great way to see some pictures and begin to understand how this all works. So in order to be quote, over the back, the horse needs to have a lined up guitar string for his superficial back line, which would go from the frogs and the plantar cushion of his hind legs up the back of the tendon to the hock, up the hamstring to the point of the buttock, over the croup, but below the big buttock muscles, because the grain of the muscle, as it were, of the glutes, goes in the wrong direction. And our myofascial lines, like strings of sausages, must all have the grain going in the same way to have integrity. So we've come up the back of the hind legs over the top of the pelvis, in the fascia that covers the pelvis, but underneath the glutes, through the long back muscles, under the panels of the saddle, between the horse's shoulder blades and in the muscles that go each side of his crest, so over the back doesn't cover the whole of the line. And thinking of the whole of that line, which actually goes to his poll between his ears and around his eyes into his masseter muscles, which are the chewing muscles that cover the jaw. So if that's a loose guitar string, he won't come up through his back, he won't show the beautiful outline of a dressage horse, and he won't be very easy to steer because he's so wibbly wobbly within those lines. I'm not sure that push is a terribly good analogy for what makes good steering happen. But think of it like you can push a stick, but you can't push on a rope because it just wibble wobbles. You have a superficial back line just like the horse does. And again, your glutes are not part of it. They're part of your lateral lines, which make for the sides of your torso box and the outside of your thigh and the outside of your calf down to the outside of your foot on the side of your torso. These lines are like shoelaces crisscrossing on your sides and lacing together your back and your front. So you can't have force transmission and you can't have accurate geometry in your body or the horse's body. If either of you are just a soggy or a distorted bundle, this won't transmit force and it'll be dead off the ground. You wouldn't run or jump well as a horse or a human. So one of the soggiest places for most women, certainly, and possibly actually men, as well, is your pelvis, your butt. And one of the images I use to firm up somebody's butt, especially if they're a bigger rider, but this can apply to smaller women as well, is the idea of tying your washing up tighter. So if you were to strip your bed and get all your dirty washing and make a bundle out of it in one of the sheets, and that bundle, metaphorically, is your pelvis, for most folks, the bundle is just too soggy. And thinking of tying your washing up tighter, like you compress it into a tighter bundle, is a really good way to firm it up. And we are actually beginning to see in the horse world the arrival of compression clothing, which actually does compress you, as it were, in a tight bodysuit. Swimmers wear very compressive swimsuits, especially when they're competing, because it makes them go through the water in a much more streamlined fashion. And apparently, if it takes you less than 15 minutes to get your swimsuit on before a competition, it's not compressive enough. Now, I can't quite see britches and tops being that compressive for riders, but the compression that makes you into a firmer bundle will increase your force transmission. And it's in the horse world and within the clothing that you're going to find in your local saddler, it's beginning to happen. So tying your washing up tighter is like you're trying to make your own bodysuit get firmer, like someone's put a corset around your pelvis, and it's a really good image for a lot of people. So the fascial net is shared between you and the horse, especially once you've plugged in, as we talked about in the last podcast, you affect each other. So this is a relatively subtle version of this that's happened in my own riding in the last little while. So one of my horses who's quite thoroughbredy, although she's actually a Dutch warmblood, she's a little bit like a deer. She's quite sprongy. And I always find on her that my left lower leg feels soggy, and it's really hard for me to get it as stable and in control as I want to. And soggy lower legs have been a historical deal for me, but they're much less of a deal now. I largely have the answer to that, but not with my left leg on her. That would be the side of my body where the heel tends to go too back and up and the thigh be too vertical. So some of you will understand if I say that's the side where I slingshot less well. And on my other horse, I'd slingshot less well on that side too, but he's more substantial, he's more stuffed, and he doesn't make my left lower leg soggy. So the horse I'm talking about, that does make my left leg soggy, she doesn't fill out her left side very well. I have to manufacture a left long back muscle. And it's become clear she really doesn't stuff around her left shoulder very well. She really doesn't want to abduct her left front leg, which will be taken away from her midline. And I took her out for a long, relatively quiet walking, trotting just on some wonderful bridal paths near me, and I really had this as a focus. And she felt good, and I felt pretty good when I came back home. And after I'd untacked her, I realized that she was standing differently. And I asked the friend who keeps her horse with my horses if she saw a difference, and she said, yes, her pecs are wider, her weight's coming down more, as it should, down onto her front leg. She no longer has both legs coming out of the same hole. And it was very clearly different in the way she stood, and it stayed different. She had the next day off. I gone on to her two days later, and behold, we walk down the road and there's my left leg, there's her filling out on the left, there's substance in her left shoulder, and I'm there going, well, I kind of did suspect this wasn't just my problem, that my left side unstuffed wibbliness was a reflection of her left side unstuffed wibbliness. But I didn't expect it to be as massive an effect as it was. There was her left side, and there, with no effort from me, was my left lower leg feeling firm, stuffed and organised. This makes it clear, I hope, that organising our fascial net, our geometry, the structure within our box, the tension, positive tension in our guitar strings, helps the horse, and within that, we're trying to organise the horse to help us. And as an entry into this, I want to review the board's exercise. And I know I'm repeating myself here because I did this in the Lockdown podcast, but I want to develop it further than I did then. And the truth of the matter is that if anyone took this material from the last set of podcasts, did it in the podcast, practiced it on chairs, took it onto their horse and worked with it, I'll Take my hat off to them. I'd love to hear from you, actually, if you've done that. And I often find working with it that I have to teach it to people at least twice before it becomes part of how they think and how they organize themselves and the comparisons they make for what they've got and what they've lost when they're riding. It's a concept that dates from the early 90s, and I confess I still learn more about it. Even today. I had another insight based around boards and how they were helping me with my horse. So this exercise is best done sitting on a hard chair, or ideally, on a sturdy saddle horse, which you put facing a large mirror. I recommend you don't do it if you're driving, because it will require quite a bit of brain space and a bit of organizing your body, so it will take too much away from your focus. In this exercise, we're dividing you into thirds. And the thirds go from the top of a shoulder strap over your bosom, down the outer edge of the abdominal muscle to the pubic bone, where the big tendon of your inside thigh inserts into it. And that will be the same on both sides at the front and on both sides of the back. From your shoulder straps, you're going down the outer edge of your long back muscles down to where they meet your pelvis, down through your pelvis to your seat bone. And if you know enough anatomy to understand this, the bottom of the boards are the two sled runners, which are two bony ridges joining pubic bone to your seat bones, running basically on the edge of your underpants, exactly where your inside thigh becomes your pelvic floor. So doing this, we divide you into thirds. You're going to end up with a right third, a middle third, and a left third. And while some of the exercises I do divide you into half, which would be the more obvious way to think of it, just down your midline and down your spine, giving you a right half and a left half. There is a huge amount to be gained for thinking of yourself as having thirds. So put the side of your hand one above the other, in other words, one higher up, one lower down on the front of one of the boards. And think of moving that towards your midline. And as you move that towards your midline, it's going to make you face diagonally a little bit in the opposite direction. Advancing that side. You want to think of the back of the board coming in closer to your spine as well. So you don't want that the front narrows and the back widens, like opening a door. You want the whole door to be moved to be closer to your spine and parallel to the front back plane. And as you do this, think of pushing all the stuffing in the third to the outside of the board against the board, as if you could make it stronger, and also as if you have an infinite amount of. Of stuffing. Because the danger here is that you make creases in your waist, which we absolutely don't want. So you're increasing the stuffing in that outer third to push it against the board, to clarify the board. And you're likely to feel that the thigh on that side advances a little bit with you reaching into your knee. And then let that go. And you'll feel that it undoes the rotation and drops back a bit and just gets a bit more generally soggy. Now we're going to do the other side. Put the side of your hand, the thumb side of your hand, against the front of the board from below your bosom down to the edge of your pubic bone. And think of that coming closer towards your midline, with the back of the board getting closer as well. That faces you slightly in diagonally the opposite direction, and it advances this side a little bit. Think of pushing the inner contents of that outer third against the board as if you had an infinite amount of stuffing to push against it. No creasing at your waist. You'll almost certainly feel that the thigh on that side gets a bit longer and stronger reaching into your knee. If it doesn't, it's possible that you might find that it's always one thigh that wants to lengthen. In which case, when we repeat this, you're trying to get the thigh on the same side as the board we're working with to lengthen. Then let that go. Now, it's probably clear to you by now that one side is easier and one side is trickier. Let's go to the easy side again. The chances are that you naturally put your hands on the side that was going to be easier. Even though you had no clue what was coming, some part of you knew. So you take that side, put your hands on the front of the board. Think of that ball getting closer to your spine. It faces you slightly diagonally in the opposite direction. It advances that side a little bit. You're pushing a load of stuffing against that board from the outer third. You make careful not to make creases in it, and you reach into that knee and breathe a little bit in that position and then let it go. And now you're going to repeat the other side, putting your hands on the front of the board there, moving it slightly towards the midline, making sure you think of the back of the board moving towards your midline and your spine as well. You're thinking of loads of stuffing pushing against the board and really filling out that outer third. It's a slight facing in the diagonally opposite direction. You want your thigh to elongate a little bit in a way that pushes your knee away from you and you might even feel it in your quads and then let that go. Now we're going to get to the punchline and you start by going put on the more difficult side. So whichever side that is, put your hands along the board. Can you move it towards the midline? And then when you've done that, can you do the same on the other side? So my favourite description of this comes from the person who once said, this is like two people both sitting on the same bar stool, or rather fighting to sit on the same bar stool, but neither one must push the other one off. You might feel that you're bearing down, pulling your tummy in to make the wall, pushing your guts against the wall as you do. When you clear your throat and go, you might feel this is quite stressful. You've made these guitar strings going from the top to the bottom of your torso, within you, in your insides as well as just on your front and your back. You've made them come closer together, get a little bit longer, get more clarity and hopefully you have more clarity as well in each outer third. It's also analogous to using two pieces of wood to pick up leaves in your garden. So by narrowing them into each other, you can get hold the leaves and pick them up. And actually this can have a function of getting hold of your horse. Like you'd pick your horse up, let it go for a minute. Now it really works to do this on your horse in walk on a long rein, it can be on a hack, it can be when you first get on and you're about to start your warm up and to play the game of putting one side on and one side off and then changing it, going one side on and one side off. There may well be some interesting steering as a result of that. And don't let that put you off, you're expecting some weird steering and you may well find, oh, yes, this side is really easy and that side doesn't want to come on at all. And when you try to get the tricky side to come on you might find the other side that you want to let go just doesn't want to let go, that it goes, me, me, me. I do the riding here. You can't do this without me. And actually, it's really important to get that side to let go. If you were to give ratings for the one on, one off, the ideal rating would be 10 for the side that's on and 0 for the side that's off. But you might have a 5 and a 3. The numbers don't have to add up to 10, but you want to keep doing this until you can get closer to going 10 0. 10, 0. You might not make that score, but let's say 8, 2. You definitely want to be on the upside of 7, 3. And you may find when you go both boards on that it's really important to not let the strong side push the weak side off. And you may also find that the patterns in your body are very different in different directions. So we're getting to the end of our time here. I'd really love you to practise this on a hard chair on your horse. We're going to build on it and show how far reaching this geometry can be and how much it can help you and your horse to become a whole system of guitar strings that play a note. And in the meanwhile, have fun with your horses, enjoy your riding and I'll be back again soon.