Ep. 65 Breakfast buffets, bananas, flying buttresses and amoebas - an unlikely set of ideas?

Hello, I'm Mary Wandlis welcoming you to podcast number 65. I want to start by telling you the story of somebody I think I must have known for the best part of 30 years and have coached on and off during that time. She had to travel a fair way to get to clinics and couldn't always make it. And I'm thinking that that and funds and availability of a horse probably cramped her style much more than she would have wished. But she's a very good client who's put her heart and soul into this, even at times arriving at a clinic riding one of the horses her husband uses for logging. They live in a very rural and hilly area, so you can imagine that these logging horses could be very good souls, but certainly not what you'd consider a dressage horse. So at the end of a recent clinic, she said to me, I however, am I going to remember all of this when I'm riding? Well, I think a lot of people think that after just one lesson and also after a clinic, so probably any period of time spent with me results in three or four factors that are differences that make a difference that I want the rider to take away with them. And that could happen after one lesson. And actually after three or four lessons in a clinic, it probably boils down to three or four more refined and effective pieces that somebody's going to take away. At the beginning of any lesson, I like to ask somebody, what sticks in your mind the most from yesterday, or maybe it's from last week or last month or your last clinic or the last time you had a coach of this method working with you? And I always hope I'm going to get a fairly detailed answer that really implies some memory of this. And sometimes people do say, well, yes, we did some trotting and cantering, and whenever that happens, I have to resist the temptation to put my head in my hands, or as one of my colleagues would say, to break out the G and T and go sit in a corner and drink it. Clearly, if that's the case, my seed fell on rather stony ground. And I really do encourage people to write some notes, to put it in their own words, to draw a diagram, to annotate it, to give themselves a left brain memory jog that through the drawing might link with their right brain feel, but anyway gives them more than just their memory of the lesson and the feelings it made to go from now. At this point, I have to confess that when I've been away coaching, and this could be anything from four weeks to maybe even eight Weeks I get back on my horses and I think to myself, now where was I? And I pretty much end up racking my brains to think of this. And of course, I'm not quite the same me because I'm not as riding fit and my horses aren't quite the same horses because they haven't been working for a few weeks. And I may have had one or two rides while I've been away on a horse not known to me beforehand and gleaned some really useful insights from that ride. Or I would have learnt stuff from being in the middle and watching and discussing and observing and coming up with ideas and figuring out more how everything fits together. So there I am, racking my brains to figure out this new reality and also getting on my horses with a beginner's mind, which can be a fabulous plus. So you could certainly say that my memory of my previous rides is not perfect, given that most clinics boil down to three or four good takeaways. The reality is that some stuff will be easily assimilated as upgrades on what the riders already know. If we go back to our quilt image, it might be that they're a piece that very easily attaches to a piece in that quilt that they already have in place. Some pieces will get forgotten, some pieces will get struggled with and maybe distorted a bit or maybe lost. Some will get upgraded by the rider on her own if she's someone able to make her own discoveries, which my student I'm telling you about was. And most of us will probably lose the recipe somewhat. And of course, the recipe itself may need to evolve and hopefully we're able to get enough feedback from our horses to. To know that we're on the right track or we're losing it a little bit and to be able to make adjustments. But there could be a fair bit indeed to remember. So, in contrast, one of my colleagues told me recently about a very talented rider that she coaches. And in a lesson, she asked this rider how she thought about Half Pass, and the rider said, and I think this is a quote, well, I just take my banana across the diagonal. Now, I have to confess, when I heard this, I cracked up laughing, whereas years ago I probably would have been green with envy that somebody could just think of it that way and find it that simple. The banana, of course, refers to the bend in the horse's body in the direction of motion, and the banana just stays parallel to the long side, but with that bend as it goes across the diagonal. And it's wonderful for this rider that it comes to her so easily and probably means that she has more brain space for other things, of course. But let's hope she never tries to coach anybody, because that will not be a bite sized chunk for 99.9% of the riding population. So let's come back to my student. What she hadn't realised was at this stage she'd reached in her learning. It wasn't that she had to do everything all at once. Now, in the early stages, that's the deal with first lessons and footlight. Weight in your thigh, keep kneeling, support your own body weight, thighs on the saddle, all the kind of pieces, bear down, breathe, be a box that flunks people, much as learning to drive a car. Flummoxed me with changing gear. Take your foot off the accelerator on the clutch, move the lever, keep hold of the steering wheel, know where you're going, get the revs right as you take your foot off the clutch. It's a lot to assimilate into one smooth movement, but we do it over time. And I always feel that Americans that don't learn to drive a stick shift are actually cheating. It's a very valuable learning experience. So early on, the rider's juggling balls and really struggling to keep all of those balls in place. She thinks about this body part and loses that body part and then something else and loses something else. And around and around she goes as it gradually all gets easier. But over time here, the rider needs a difference that makes a difference to her and her horse on each day, in each moment, and with each different horse that she rides. And through the learning process, potentially those differences become more profound because you climb the mountain of building skills, get closer to the top of it, if there is such a thing, and have skills that are more far reaching, they affect more of the horse, they're closer to the bullseye, or if you like, to the core, to the core of the issue and probably the core of your body and the core of your horse's body. An example might be that she might need the tools that relate to bringing your centre of gravity a little further back. Some of you will know that that involves what we call slingshot. Or she may need the tools of keeping herself a little bit more kept up with the horse and being more up at the front of the saddle with a horse that would like to accelerate from out from underneath her. But she has a series of tools that I think of sometimes like a buffet, perhaps a breakfast buffet in a hotel. And you choose the tool that you want according to how things are Now. And that gives you more choices, you're more versatile, you have more options, and with that, you have more influence, more effectiveness and more power. With all the best will in the world, riders are likely to forget some things, perhaps, as something else comes along that feels more powerful and more central to the issue they're facing. And I had an experience relatively recently of figuring something out in my riding and then realizing, although it took me a while, that this was something I'd done before, albeit in a slightly different way, and that I'd come around full circle to this realization, which probably goes back 15 years. And the original idea I called flying buttresses. Now, Americans are going to go, what? When they hear that term. But I'm thinking that most Europeans and folks in the UK would recognise flying buttresses as a structure you often see on the outside of the walls of a cathedral. If you think of the long walls of a cathedral, there would be a structure kind of coming out from that wall, sloping a little bit down and then changing its angle to slope down to the ground, not quite vertically, but out a little bit in a way that reinforces and strengthens those walls. So you would have rows of flying buttresses, probably a number of meters apart, going along this wall of this cathedral. And my flying buttresses, when I originally discovered them, began on my sides, low down on my ribs, about on the side seam of a T shirt, and went to about two thirds of the way down the thigh. And thinking of as if it were a piece of dowling were wedged in on the side between my ribs and between that place in my thigh, really helped me get some side side stability and strength. And I can remember teaching this to a guy. And on the whole, guys are more incredulous than women and don't take new information in as EAs. And this idea was really working for him. It affected his asymmetry, affected his horse really well. And he was going around going, I just don't get this. This is crazy. How come this can work? I'm not even thinking about my body, I'm thinking about the outside of my body and the air between my ribcage and my thighs. But it's changing my horse. And I could offer a kind of, you know, reasonable explanation about stability and the sides of his body, but nothing as detailed as I could. When I suddenly had this idea again very recently, only my new version came from higher up in the ribcage, just a couple of ribs under the armpit, out to about a third of the way up my calves on the Outside above my ankle nobble. So you could imagine these as being parallel to my original descriptions of those piece of downing. But from higher up to lower down, if you have the chance, stand up and give this a go in an on horse position with your feet a little bit apart, your knees bent, your spine neutral. Can you get a sense of this on either or both sides? And with the higher up to lower down, more recent version, or the low ribs to partway down your thighs, original version. Now, I can understand much more about these because both places on the ribs are important places on the lateral lines. And the place two thirds of the way down the thigh and about a third of the way up the calf are significant points too, where muscles insert. So the lateral lines are like shoelaces that lace the front line of muscle to the back line of the muscle, making a crisscross pattern. And those two points under the ribs are two of the important crosses that gives them their significance. So understanding of the anatomy of this always really helps me. And maybe I just have a very nosy, conscious mind that has to understand things. And I appreciate that other people are not like me in that regard. But now that I really understand the anatomy of these, I think I'm much more able to ingrain them as part of my everyday skill set. And I double check on myself to go, how straight and organized am I in my two outer edges? When you do this standing, you have to think about pushing your outer thigh out as if against a resistance, and that begins to firm everything up. And in a way that your lateral lines, or at least one of them, maybe you might struggle with one, but find one of them more accessible, kind of puts a tone and a positive tension into that line of tissue, which is when you can really begin to feel and use it to your advantage. That exercise may be a bit tricky when you just come into it this way. So I'd love to show you how to access your lateral lines sitting down. And you need a firm chair with four chair legs and a straight back, no arms. Ideally, you could do the first part of the exercise with arms. The second part would be harder. So if you push your feet out against the chair legs, so you want to position yourself with your ankles just inside the chair legs, so you can push out against them in the area of your heel just behind your ankle noddle. And as you push your heels especially out against the chair legs, can you feel yourself firm up in your outer calf and firm up in your outer thigh? And how far up your body does this feeling of Firming up go. Does it go beyond the bony knobble at the top of your thigh, your greater trochanter, into the side of your pelvis, the side of your waist, the side of your ribs? Or. Or does it stop somewhere in your leg to help you get it to go up your sides? Make fists out of your hands and put your hands so that the first bone of your fingers touches each other. So the back of that bone, the back of your hand or the back of your fingers touches each other. And you can push your fists against each other with them just out in front of your chest. And as you push them against each other, can you get the feeling of firmness and positive tension to go into your sides? Maybe think of being just a little bit taller. You might be able to reinforce it even more if you then instead of making fists, put one hand above the other and interlink your fingers, and then think of pulling your fingers apart. But you can't pull your fingers apart. That might make you firmer still. And at this point, you may need a reminder to breathe and you may discover that you're bearing down. And that that just came along with the increase in pressure in your insides, as of course, did the difficulty in breathing. And as you sit like that for a moment, feel the strength that can be generated in your outer edges. In fact, just like we've played with both boards on, you can get both outer edges on, and doing that will give you a lot more strength. For a variation on the theme, sit on your chair facing the back of it. Now, some chairs can feel like rather wide cobs when you do this, and this is where you want a chair without arms. So you can just sit facing the back of the chair and put the lower arm on the longer side of your body. That would be the outside of a C curve. If you were to make a C curve, put that on top of the chair, the back of the chair with your fingers facing down at a right angle on the side of the chair. And then put your other lower arm on top of that one with your fingers so they're facing downwards around the outside of your elbow. So now one arm is on the top of the other and you can put a pressure with the bottom arm on the chair with your fingers and the fingers of the top arm on your elbow. And as you do that, you can really get some strength into your sides and also help yourself elongate a little bit, the side that will be shorter and keep more compressed, the side that would be longer. All of these exercises are really good for building that strength. And there's another one I'd like you to do as well. For this you'd need to stand up. And if you're driving your car, of course you can't do any of these and. But if you remember to do this when you get in your house, it would be really good. And you get to imagine that you walk into your house and maybe you walk into your kitchen and you see something revolting on the floor, like maybe the cat threw up. And that's just to the side of you. You managed to miss treading in it and you find yourself going, ugh. And you might use your hands as a gesture to kind of as you think of keeping yourself away from whatever it is on the floor that's nasty. Now, as a single celled organism, so way, way, way back in evolution, if it sent something nasty or dangerous or noxious to one side of it, it would change its shape and away from whatever the nastiness was. So this is a response that's very built into our system from primal times. You might try the other side, there's something nasty on the other side as well, and you could away from that one. And I make a hand gesture to just help you do it. This can work really well. When you're riding, you're sitting on the horse's long back muscles and you don't want your butt to start to kind of slide off the side of the horse on the side where his long back muscle is less wide, less high, a less good surface to sit on. And you might imagine that in his ribs to the outside of his long back muscle is something nasty that you've got to go away from to help yourself not fall down. Sounds crazy, but this can be a really useful way to help you access your lateral lines. So you have the flying buttresses. Exercise the chair. Exercise with your heels on the inside of the chair when you face forward and your arms on the top of the chair when you face back. And also to cap it all the away from something nasty that, especially if you've got a history with my work, might help you organise yourself so your outer edge is over the outer edge of the horse's long back muscle on the side where that is trickier. I really hope you can make this work for you and as you do so that you have fun with your horses and really enjoy riding. And I will be back with you soon.