Ep. 64 Shoring up your structure in all dimensions - clarifying the boards from back to front, and top to bottom.

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast number 64. In the last podcast, I talked you through the boards exercise, and I've been working with this concept for somewhere around 30 years. It's been a major part of my quest for more stability, more symmetry, and more influence, because it has the potential to connect your core with. With the horse's core. And if you develop influence that way, you do it whilst appearing to do nothing. But one board on, one board off is the existential state of 99% of riders. And I like to explain this through this analogy. If you were to use one piece of wood, one board, to attempt to pick up autumn leaves in your garden, you could chase and kind of scoop the leaves from one side of the garden to the other, and then if you put the board in the other hand, you could scoot them back again, but you can't pick the leaves up. That requires two boards moving in towards each other. And literally, when this works in your body, you can begin to pick the horse up between those boards. Unless, within our image of two people fighting to sit on the same bar stool, unless they can find some kind of equilibrium, one of them pushes the other one off. Now, if this is your boards within your body in your riding, you are at best riding one side of the horse and basically falling off the other side of the horse. Or if both people were falling away from each other or the bar stool, the width between them and in your body, the width available for the area of the horse's spine is so wide that he can be really wiggly and unsteerable. His spine can kind of act like a rope, as we said the other time. But if you can find equilibrium within both boards on, you can contain that rope, become much more narrow, and make it behave like a stick, and that in turn is steerable. Let me tell you about one of my most bizarre and remarkable experiences when teaching boards. And this happened with a rider on a Grand prix horse. And she arrived at this clinic saying that her presenting problem was really that in Piafre, her horse would drift to the right. So we did early work on the planes of up, down and back front, and got her pretty well in balance. And I probably did the boards exercise with her sooner than I would with most riders. So we did this, and she had a much stronger left board than right board, but she was getting the hang of both boards on. And when I had her in this state, I said, okay, so let's take piaffe. And she put her horse into piare rather Easily, but almost the instant she did, it shot sideways, straight towards me, and I literally had to run for it. Now, when you're a coach in a riding arena, you hope you don't have to run for it very often, but once every few years, something will happen and you have to run for it. And when she and I had both recovered our equilibrium, she looked at me and she said, oh, so now I know what my problem is, don't I? In the evolution of the board's idea, I started off by discovering some important points, and these are key points on the boards which I want to just talk you through. There's one in the upper chest, one around the lower ribs diaphragm area, and one in your pelvis. And the ones in the upper chest, if you're into acupuncture, are kidney 27. And if you were to put your thumb and your first finger between two ribs, it's actually between your first and second rib each side of your sternum, you would find a gap between your ribs where your fingers would fit in pretty easily each side of your sternum. And you might find that the points you're touching are sore. If they are, massage them a bit because there are lymph nodes under there and it's not good for you for those lymph nodes to be bunged up and you can clear them by massaging. So these points are where your deep front arm line connect to your core. So if you put one hand out in front of you in a riding position and you were to trace from your thumbnail, so hopefully you have your thumb on top and you actually want to make your thumb the shape of a roof so that the middle joint of your thumb is sticks up and the two bones in your thumb are at an angle to each other. So you have your fist out in front of you and trace the line for the length of your thumb along the top of your lower arm, along your upper arm to your shoulder, and then diagonally down to that point. And this is the deep front arm line. And this is the point where your arm connects to your core. And the lateral lines are involved with this. They come into this point, too. So let's do an experiment with a finger on the point in your pecs kidney 27. Press your thumb harder on your first finger and I think you'll feel that a muscle under your fingers bulks out. Now try the same thing, but put your foot down, put your thumb flat on your finger and press it down. And I think you might find the bulking out is not as obvious. Try your thumb in the air and just closing your fingers. Virtually nothing might happen there. Try turning your hands over so the back of your hand is up. And try there and reorganise yourself again to the official riding position with your thumb on the top. And I'm going to add your thumb, making a roof shape with the joint of your thumb up. Press again with your thumb and I think you'll feel that muscle bulk out in that shape, really giving you a lived experience of how your arms connect to your core in those points. There's an important point too, on your back, under your shoulder blade, behind the point in your pecs. And you could think of the point on the back of you and the point on the front of you connected together. So we can start to get your arm to connect into your back as well as your front. So if you're listening to this, driving your car, this is an experiment you can actually do, I think, quite safely as you're driving. First of all, notice, do your arms pull on the steering wheel or push on the steering wheel. And how are your two arms different? So you want them obviously to push on the steering wheel, but you might find as well that one arm does all of the steering, whether it's moving in a clockwise circle or an anti clockwise circle to do that. And the other arm just kind of hangs off the steering wheel. And I have to confess, I was driving for many years before I realised that that was what I was doing. And in that case, could you get the arm that would just hang down on the steering wheel to push against the steering wheel so that both arms push against the steering wheel and you think of that push beginning the point in your back, under your shoulder blade, behind the point in your pecs. This might get even clearer to you. And you don't do this when you're driving, but you can do this when you're riding with a small theraband, a loop of band around your wrist that you push out against. Because as you push out against those points in your back and the upper part of your boards can become significantly clearer to you. And this is a great strengthening exercise. The next important point, we call your diaphragm dots. And if you get your thumb, one thumb, and push it up into the inverted V of your sternum below your bosom, and then reach to the side with your first finger and find a gap between two ribs at the same horizontal level as your thumb and you'll have a point there. And then if you move your hands around and reverse them, maybe to find the point on the other side of your inverted V. You have what we call your diaphragm dots. Again, here you've got your diaphragm, you've got the muscles that come around your ribs, you've got your abs which go up, down, and it's a big meeting point of fascial lines. So those two points are really important too, and they too have equivalent points on your back, on the outer edges of your long back muscles, which get closer together when you go both boards on. And again, you could think of those back dots connected to the front dots as if there's a bolt or a connection to you. And one of the interesting things about that is you might find when you're riding that the dots on the back are lower down than the dots on the front and much more fuzzy and unclear. And if you're sitting on a horse who isn't very well organised in his back and he's mushy under the back of the saddle and he's mushy in his loins, you could find those back dots kind of like mushing down into his mush in a way that might make you a bit round backed with too much weight, back of your butt. And if you could think of levelling out the connection there between the back of you and the front of you, and trying to connect the back of you to the front of you, you're organising your box in a really good way and getting more force transmission through you from your back to your front via your diaphragm in a way that could really help with your sitting. Lastly, we have what we call your ovary points, with apologies to any guys that might be listening to this. And if you put your fingers each side of your midline on your bikini line, you'll probably go straight to them. And again, muscles that have wrapped diagonally around your sides are meeting the up down fibers and fascia of your abs. And it's another important meeting point. And these points too have partner points on your back in the slightly strange, lumpy places that are officially called the psis, the posterior superior iliac spine. You can probably find them on the back of you, quite obviously, they're a little bit higher up and wider than the ovary points in the front. And those two could get connected together as if the back of you is joined to the front of you. So I found the dots on the front of me before I found the dots on the back of me, and then I found a way to connect Them together. And especially these lower ones, I think I learned about, especially through teaching some bigger riders with rather low tone. And sometimes you will see somebody who, in rising trot, so the front of them goes up and then the back of them goes up, and then the back of them comes down and the front of them comes down. And if they can bolt the back of them to the front of them and get enough tone in the pelvic girdle, they can get themselves going much more in one piece and find themselves more in control of their body and more effective again. Those bolts are increasing force transmission at pelvis level from the back of you to the front of you. But they could have another function too. And recently I was teaching a lesson with a guy I know fairly well who tends to be a bit too down and heavy. And I had him imagine that magically somebody could put their hands into his body and pick him up from those two bolts in his pelvis. And he got immediately lighter, narrower, more hung in a harness, more supporting his body weight. And it made the most phenomenal difference to his horse. It was one of those changes that was just miraculous to watch. And miraculous, I think, for him. And of course, his horse, a horse that was rather less happy when his rider made that change, was someone I know well and have coached a lot who has a horse that has a very big asymmetry. And he broke his sternum as a very young horse. So you can imagine that that healed with some wonkiness getting written into his system. And his left side would kind of drop down and away in a way the rider was having a real struggle with. And I had her think of these bolts and if somebody could pick up the left one and draw him up with it. And when she did this, he kind of stopped dead and began to paw the ground and almost threatened to roll. So she had to back off a bit and kind of come back to the idea in a here and there, sneak it in kind of sorta way until he did begin to accept it. And it really did work out well, and it really did make a big difference. But it wasn't originally an idea he thought he could buy into. What I want to do here is to do the board's exercise in another way that emphasizes the top to bottom connection more than the left right narrowing in, picking up the autumn leaves kind of connection. And you may know enough history to know that at some point in time, I'm not sure how many centuries ago in France, there used to behead people using the guillotine. And we're going to imagine, as it were, a guillotine blade to going down each of your boards from top to bottom. No need to think of blood or anything nasty, but just a connection that would start over your shoulder strap, go over your bosom and down the back of you, through the edges of your abdominal muscles and your long back muscles, down on that same line through your pelvis, so that the seat bone and the sled runner are the bottom of the board and where you want the blade to go down to on each side. So imagine that maybe close your eyes, so don't do that while you're driving. But if you're sitting in a chair, ideally a hard chair, close your eyes and think this. And I think you might find that on one side it. Oh, yeah, I can do that. Top to bottom, no problem. And on the other side, it might. Oh, wait a minute, there might be a missing bit, or it might just not go all the way down, or it might at some stage go off in a weird direction, probably towards the outer edge of your body on the side. But just notice the difference between the two. And with the tricky one, can you find a way to maybe push it down through the tissue so it gets all the way from your shoulder strap right down to the sled runner? The difficulty might suggest a rotation back and a sort of sogginess into a round back on that side. Maybe think of rotating that side of your body forward a little, and once you can get both of them to come down, just sit and breathe and notice how much more tone you have and how much stronger you feel and probably how much more symmetrical you feel. Let's play with the idea a little bit more and have you push down into one seat bone just to press it down into the chair. Now, I'd be pretty sure that you did that on the side where your board connected top to bottom more easily. So now press down on the other seat bone and see if you can increase the top to bottom connection as you do that. And notice if you go back to the easy side, press down on that seat bone. Notice how the other side of your body is soggier top to bottom and has creases in it. So that shows how soggy one side can come relative to the other. Push down in the other seat bone. Can you make the side that had felt soggy feel really strong? You might help yourself, actually. If you can put your hand on the outside of your thigh and push against it towards the midline, that might give you a bit more strength in that board and see if you can do it to the degree that you can feel your other side is shorter and creased and fuzzy and soggy compared to normal. This could give you quite a surprise because it can be a dramatic difference. And you might get it even better if on the side that you're making stronger, that would want to be soggy if you think of your seat bone kind of going back and towards the midline. So you might be taking it somewhat towards, as it were, southwest if it's your right seat bone, or southeast if it's your left seat bone. And feel how that firms you up. And if there's something you can put your hand in front of you and pull on, then pull on it a little bit and then push on it a little bit and feel how much strength you. You've created in that weaker side. Now, at this point in time, you really might be starting to feel like you're not you, because you really possibly have actually reversed a very big factor within your asymmetry. And I really recommend doing this. And when you've practised it a bit, you can do it driving your car. Just think of the board coming on top to bottom on the side that tends to be soggier. Push your seat bone a little bit into the car seat. Take it a little bit to southeast or southwest. Push a little bit on the steering wheel, pull a little bit if you need to first before you push, and then you're going to be building strength within that weaker side. Another thing you can do is lie on your back in bed and reach into one leg, then reach into the other leg. You probably reached first into the leg where that feels normal, easy, natural. And when you reach into the other leg, it probably doesn't. And that will pretty certainly be the leg that belongs to the soggier side. Can you reach into that length, strengthen that board? If that side is towards the edge of the bed, put your arm over the side of the mattress against the mattress's vertical edge and push on the vertical edge to help you strengthen the side where you'd otherwise be soggy and have creases. I love these kind of exercises that you can do in bed or driving your car, just in daily life, no gym required. And they're exercises where really what you're doing is putting much more strength and much more stuffing, much more hydraulic amplification, if you remember that previous podcasts, into the side of your body that will be soggy, wimpy and really not have much pressure in it. The hydraulic amplification is the muscles pushing out against the skin, the fascia around them, and the fascia pushing out against the muscle. Like a balloon with a lot of air in. The air pushes against the balloon, the balloon pushes against the air. Whereas in a soggy balloon, there's no push out and there's no push in from the surrounding fabric. So have fun practicing these. I hope it's given you some insight into how your body might be a little bit wonky. And we're all a little bit wonky because we're alive on planet Earth, and it goes with the territory. Meanwhile, have fun with these exercises, have fun with your horses, enjoy your riding, and I'll be back again soon.