Ep. 66 How I misdiagnosed two riders, and learnt the folly of my ways from a set of toe separators!

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast number 66. I was really struck by the story of teaching somebody recently when I was in the usa. A young woman who I know well and have taught since she was about 10, when her mother bought her a pony that turned out to be really quite a tricky pony for a very tiny child. It was not very steerable and had thoughts in its brain about maybe just leaving the arena. So this child learnt by hook or by crook, basically, and has become really quite a skilled young rider, having grown up with this pony and grown up with my work. Her mother, too has been a student of mine for a long time and bless her for investing so much in her childhood. So Meredith actually appeared for the clinic on this pony because the horse she'd hoped to bring was lane. So at 24, she's used to teach some children and now apparently will sometimes decide to leave, but in walk rather than the faster speed. That made catching her on the way out an art form in those early lessons. So looking at this rider on the pony, it was very clear that her left side was stacked up, organised, aligned, flat, functional, and her right side rather more wobbly. And the pattern, I think, was clearer than I've seen it, perhaps on some more difficult horses that really required an awful lot of horse organization, which at 24, this pony doesn't so much now. So, setting about figuring out what was going on with her right side compared to her left, and seeing the pattern more clearly than I think I'd seen it for a while, we did the boards exercise, thinking of the boards as blades going top to bottom, as we did in podcast 64, joining the Edge of your abdominals with the edge of your long back muscles, going all the way down from shoulder, past your bosom, past your waist, into your pelvis and down to the seat bone, which is the back of the sled runner, the bony ridge that joins your seat bone to your pubic bone. So for my young friend here, you can probably imagine left side just went straight down, no problem. Right side began, okay, got a bit iffy by the ribs, got lower down and sort of fizzled out and went to the outside. And I think you might find, as you do this yourself, that you have a side that does that too. Now, it took a bit of doing for my student to achieve this on her right side, but it made a considerable difference to the look she had. And I think it wasn't in her lesson. I think it was later in the day in the workshop, where with a rather more Novice rider, we started talking about toes and the tendons around your ankle. So you might reach down with one hand and. And put your fingers around your ankle, with your fingers meeting in front of your ankle, where you can feel the five tendons that goes to your toes and your thumbs meeting on your Achilles tendon. And as you stick out the tendons, both at the front and at the back, you're going to find that your toes go up. It's often clearer and stronger on one foot than the other. And I would recommend that you test out both of them. So the tendons stick out the front ones to your toes, the back Achilles tendon, and your toes tend to lift and spread, and you want your toes to be lifted and spread within your boots basically all the time. Now, a lot of people struggle with this and some people curl their toes. I joke about this. Some people curl their toes when they look at a horse. Some people curl their toes when they get on a horse. Some people curl their toes when they're walking. Some people don't curl their toes till they trot, Some people don't curl their toes till they canter. Some people don't curl their toes until they're cantering and they're in front of a jump and they realise things are not going to work well. But many people have one foot, if not two, where under a certain amount of stress, their toes curl almost like the toes are trying to grasp hold of the stirrup and create more security. But the bottom line is that doesn't happen and the effect will go up through your calf, into your thigh and into your pelvic floor. So when we did this exercise, my rider, where we'd done the exercise of both boards as blades coming down, went, oh, my toes curl a lot on the side of the board that wouldn't go down. And actually, I'm really struggling to uncurl them. And it began to come clear that in her body, her toes curling really led to her knee coming up and led to her seat bone coming up. Now, this is an unusual pattern. What normally happens on the side that the knee comes up is that the seat bone gets heavier and the angle between the thigh and the torso is closed more in a bum down, knee up and often heel down and forward way. But this clearly was not the pattern for this rider. So there was another rider in the clinic who said, I've got some toe separators. She was a runner and I think she used to run with toe separators. She said, I'll bring my toe separators in tomorrow and you can try them. So the toe separators are made of silicon. They're very inexpensive on the Internet. If you do a search on Amazon, they fit around your toe and go a little bit further up your toe than the first joint of the toe. And they separate all the toes and straighten them, doing exactly as we say in the uk, what it says on the tin. And in the workshop, my young friend took her shoe off on the toe, the foot with the toes that curled, put on the toe separators, took the other shoe off. So she was barefoot, walked around the room a bit and said, I hate this. I can't walk like this. Feels like the most horrible contortion. Well, of course, what always happens is what you do normally doesn't feel like a contortion. It feels normal. That doesn't mean it is in contortion, it just means it's home. We take the contortion away, and the reality is the more uncontorted state feels to the person whose body it is more contorted. So she's walking around the room feeling horribly contorted, going, I couldn't wear these. It's just terrible. They feel awful. I couldn't wear them. But by good fortune, her lesson didn't happen until the afternoon after this workshop. And she bravely kept the toe separators on, on that one foot to wear in her lesson. And what happened was little short of a miracle. As soon as she put her butt in the saddle almost, she was there going, oh, my goodness, I can really feel how different my toes are. I can feel this difference coming up through my calf. I can feel it coming up through my thigh. I can feel it coming up into my underneath. And I can suddenly get my board down with way less effort than it was yesterday. And she really looked like her body changed massively in terms of her ability to line it up, to get a resilient kind of strength, and to get way, way closer to matching her left side. Now, my rider was amazed and thrilled by this, as you can imagine, and scratching her head over whether she was going to be able to wear toe separators while walking and how she was going to deal with this, because it came very clear in the riding that the contortion the toe separators created was a really good and helpful contortion that she needed to work towards, not just in riding, but in life. And it'll be interesting when I see her again to see how well she's done that. And so I have not yet Played with, but just bought some toe separators, which will go in my bag of tricks that I carry around the world with me when I'm coaching, little things that can help people, like the bands I use and Franklin balls and different things. And we will see if we can repeat this. And I need to try them myself, because my left foot, my toes curl a little bit more than my right. Not in a big bad way, but separating them and straightening them might be a really good thing. So I recently taught somebody else that I haven't seen since before lockdown. In fact, I think it could have been 2018 or 2019 since she last rode with me. And in that time, she's moved from the USA and Portugal and by pure chance ended up living near where I teach every year in Portugal. And last year, as a fairly new Portuguese arrival, she watched the clinic, and this year she rode in the clinic. And I've known her asymmetry for a very long time. It includes her right knee coming up and less stability on her right side. And you've guessed it, what became clear was that she too was curling her toes and that the pattern really went toes curling, knee up, seat bone coming up, board coming up. So where I'd seen the pattern before, going as high as the pelvic floor, I really hadn't appreciated how it can go higher up into the body. And we didn't have any toe separators there to help her, but she was able to go toes up and separated tendons round the ankle, find a way to feel her underneath really different. Having done that, to take that into more kneel into the knee. That has always been tricky. And here we had a very good fix for a problem that I have known to be there for years in somebody who's ridden Grand Prix and done well competitively. So this gave me food for thought, especially seeing a second person that I kind of misdiagnosed and I had fallen into the trap that we all fall into. And I think I fall into way, way less than most people do when they're coaching in a riding arena, which is thinking that you have a schema, thinking you have a model, thinking you understand how it works, and trying to fit people into that model without questioning enough, observing closely enough, and really finding out the what is of their baseline. And if you don't really diagnose the problem you're trying to solve, you don't come up with very good solutions. So I'd sort of fitted these people into my model of when the knee up the seat Bone's heavier. And somehow failed to hear them say, no, no, no, my knee's up and my seat bone's, and to really register that and figure out the pattern in its entirety. So I'm kind of kicking myself for that one and realizing how slow I've been, but also realizing how much this is part of human nature that we think we know. And once we think we know something, we stop exploring, we stop finding out, we stop questioning, we try and fit people into our models and we do them a disservice. And, oh, my gosh, it can take years to begin to learn this and do I want the rest of the horse world to learn it and take it more seriously? And so here I am, faced with a dose of my own medicine, needing my own medicine. Once you've got pretty good at getting both boards to go top to bottom, it can also be helpful without losing their connection at the bottom to. To think of them going back up again, you just might get a little bit more strength in the top to bottom. Keep the bottom functional bottom to top, and you can go top to bottom again if you want to. And just figure out if you learn more about yourself, I'm sure you will, than you learnt from the one on, one off, one on, one off way of doing boards. Even through making those connections from the back to the front at the different levels that we talked about in a previous podcast, you might not, when you do it top to bottom, have got them quite as organized as they could be. And to say it again, the concept of boards began in the early 90s and over 30 years. I continue to learn more about it and it continues to inform my riding and get me more organized and able to organize my horses under me. And thinking that you already know can be a killer that just stops you exploring and stops you discovering more. And as I've said so many times, this way of looking at riding, as it were, through an increasingly strong microscope lens, as you see a layer of information, and then it's like you get a stronger lens which gives you another layer of information and a stronger lens that gives you another layer of information, like we're going down from organs to cells and within the cells and within the mitochondria and all the ways of looking at things in more depth and through having more depth, having more ability to, as it were, find the bullseye and find what really works. And I just love the way that athletes who are working on mastery will spend their time going, I think I understand this now. You know, I think I'VE really got it. And then find that next microscope lens, a new horizon, and find themselves thinking, I think I may have got it now. You know, I think I'm really getting it. And a while later find themselves with yet a different horizon, a new horizon, a new microscope lens going, I think I've really got it now. You know, I think I've really got it. And what it boils down to is that when you discover a new horizon, it almost pays to know that that new horizon, wonderful and powerful as it is, and as much as you're excited and celebrating it is only a new horizon, because you cannot see the next horizon. And once you see the next horizon, it gets demoted to be a smaller piece in a bigger puzzle. And thus athletes build mastery, whatever skill it is that they're working on. So as a review here, take toe curling very seriously. When I'm working with people in canter, sometimes novice riders, it could be beginners, it could be even a more advanced rider, let's say, coming up to a jump or even contemplating a flying change, suddenly going, yikes. Working with a novice rider in Cantor, or somebody who's somewhat nervous in Cantor, breathing, bearing down and uncurling their toes are some of the first suggestions to make. And toes will try and cling on for people in canter in one foot or both feet very often. And it makes so much difference to the body. Even though you couldn't, with that novice rider, do a whole body type correction, they will be struggling to just stop curling their toes and probably they'll stop curling their toes and reflexively they'll curl again. It's the same reflex in the body that has a baby grasp onto the hand of an adult when they feel that adult's finger within their hand. It's the same reflex in the body that has a baby grasp an adult's finger. If they put their finger in the baby's hand, it's a very, very basic reflex. So it could take all of somebody's brain power to uncurl their toes in their early days of cantering, and they may not truly succeed quite a way down the line. And with riders, as we've seen, even someone who's done Grand Prix toe curling could still be an issue. So prioritise that notice. Notice in your walking, do you walk around with the toes of one foot really curled? Would a set of toe separators help you or possibly traumatise you in the short term? So in the meanwhile, have great fun riding your horses. Definitely contemplate your toes, see if you can get this connection, the boards top to bottom, the connection down to the toes to the boards. And if all you can do is one or the other, that's fine. As long as you're noticing, exploring, having fun with your horses, having fun with your riding. Enjoy. And I'll be back soon.