Ep. 68 Reinforcing bars!

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast number 68. We're going to do another big exercise in this podcast, not about the core of the body like last time, but about the edges of your box. And this is an exercise to define what I call rebars. That's short for reinforcing bars, and they're the bars that you'll see sticking out if somebody's about to pour a column of concrete. And there'll be a wooden container within which the concrete's poured, and these pieces of metal sticking out at each corner, bound together by smaller horizontal pieces of metal. And usually there's four of these upright rebars, and sometimes you get a more complex structure with six. So you have your torso box and these rebars you want to think of as defining the vertical corners of the box. And it's not that they're fixed onto the outside of you, it's that they're fixed within your ribs, within your skin, coming down from the front and the back of your armpit on each side, in the front, past the side of your bosom, going down to around your points of hip. But think of inside your pelvis and down inside you to what would be the front outside of the sitting surface of the underneath of the box. And the back ones go down similarly from your back armpit, tendons. So we're really defining these vertical corners. Now, this exercise is best done in a carver dining chair, in other words, a pretty firm, pretty upright chair with arms. One of the plastic garden chairs that you probably know. First thing that comes to mind when you think of one of those with arms and usually slats for the back will work equally well. And a kitchen type chair, wooden chair with slats at the back will be good. If it has arms, though, it works one stage better. And on something a bit buckety, like the garden chairs, you're going to need to sit towards the front of the chair. And on a fairly wide chair, you may have to shift yourself a little bit to the right or to the left, closer or further away to one arm of the chair. This exercise won't really work driving your car, but hopefully you can get the gist of it and you might be able to do it when you get home without the recording. So you're going to sit yourself on this chair and we are going to first of all find each rebar and then stuff into the rebar and that corner of the box. And when you do this, you. You put the same side arm of the rebar, you Want to firm up either diagonally to the front or the back of the chair diagonally opposite the rebar you wish to firm up. So I hope that was clear. That means that we're looking for the left back one. We're going to take the left hand across the front of the body in the diagonal position opposite to the left back. If we were looking for the left front one, we take the left hand diagonally across the back of the body. So when you're in a chair, you can put your arm at the same height as the arm of the chair, which is somewhere around your waist. We will transfer this to doing it in a saddle at the end, which is a little trickier because your arm is going to be at the level of your. But if you don't have a chair with an arm, you can use your own arm to substitute for the chair arm by resting the little finger side of your arm on its same side thigh and anchoring it there. So when you bring your hand across your body, you can use that arm as a resistance pulling on it and it stays stable while you do so. So we're going to start doing this with your left hand going diagonally across the front of your body to put it either over the arm of the chair or with your fingers over your own arm. And you're going to pull on that arm. And as you pull with your fingers on the arm, you are wanting to clarify the left back vertical corner of your box, your left back rebar. And you want to give yourself a few moments with this. And it may be very clear to you immediately, or it may be rather fuzzy. And if you're having a huh, what's she talking about? Moment, then hang in there because sooner or later you'll probably find one that feels much more clear. So having given you time to firm it up, see if you can get your knuckles and push against your arm, the inside of your arm or the inside of the arm of the chair to to see can you stuff into the part of the box that contains the rebar. The chances are you'll get the most value from pull, which basically finds it for you. But if you have it fairly well, you may get the most value from push which firms into it. So we've just put your left hand diagonally across the front of your body to the right and firmed up your left back rebar. So now we're going to take that same arm across your back. And if you're in a chair with an arm, you can scoot over close enough to the arm that you can reach your fingers around the arm of the chair. If you have to use your own arm, move it back a bit so your elbow's a little behind your waist and you can wrap your fingers around your arm just above your elbow. And as you do that, you're pulling on the arm and your aim is to clarify the left front rebar as your hand is diagonally opposite at the right back. And you pull on your arm as you attempt to clarify this, and then you push on your arm to stuff into it. You might find that rotating your body a little more or a little less to the right makes it clearer to you. So as you take your arm away, hopefully you still have something of the left back rebar. So as you sit there, notice how the left side of your box feels compared to the right side of your box. This is one of the very interesting things about this exercise. So I'm hoping you will sense your left side as a stronger boundary with more defined corners at the front and back of your box, and that your right side, by comparison, is maybe a curve rather than a clear box shape, and is fuzzy. So learning to feel where part of your body is fuzzy versus where it's really firm and distinct teaches you a lot. And the fuzzy areas are always areas that you want to be able to clarify. Interestingly, what happens is that I as a coach can see where the body boundaries are really firm or are really fuzzy. And I'm very sure I teach other coaches to do this. We really focus on this in teacher training. And one way I talk about it is if you thought of drawing a line with charcoal on paper, you could draw a very fine, distinct line with your charcoal or, or with a bigger piece of charcoal, or putting the charcoal another way, you could draw a fuzzy, wider line. And here, as you sense your body, can you sense the fuzzier line and the more clear, distinct fine line that makes the boundary. Now, I'm hoping you can hold your left side together reasonably well while we firm up the rebars on the right. So this is going to involve your right arm going diagonally across your body. So if you little finger side of your left arm on your left thigh, that gives you an arm. If you don't have an arm of a chair, you might have to scoot across your chair. If you're fairly small in a fairly big chair to be able to reach the arm with your right hand, which goes across your body, your fingers go around the arm of the chair or your own arm, and you're going to pull. And we're defining the rebar in the diagonally opposite place to your hand, which is the right back. And as you pull, how much clarity can you get, a sense of firmness and fairness to this imaginary metal piece inside the corner of the box defining the vertical corner. And when that's clear to you, take a couple of knuckles and push on your own arm or the arm of the chair. And as you do that, can you stuff into fill into that area of the rebar? Okay, so we've got one more to go now. And now you're taking your right arm diagonally across the back of you. If you're using your own arm, you've got to move it back so your elbow is a little bit behind your side and you can reach your fingers around your elbow. And you're going to pull on your arm going, can you really define the right front rebar? You're doing that with your arm diagonally in the left back place to pull. Remember that just rotating your body a little bit more left or right might clarify it for you. And when you've got a reasonably clear sense of this change to doing push, you have to resist your push with your own arm. If you're using your own arm and in the push you want to stuff into, fill into the area around the rebar. So as you let go here, you're going to have a semblance at least of four rebars. And just notice how fuzzy or clear does your right side feel now compared to your left side. If you think about that charcoal line and the squareness of the box and the thereness of the corners. And just notice if you're bearing down, you might even find your toes have come up. My toes have come up as well. I'm bearing down and breathe. So you've put a lot of tone and structure into your box. Bearing down has come along for the ride. And breathing may well be tricky because it's demanding to breathe that well in such a toned structure. So don't do this yet, but in a moment we're going to let this go. And can you let it go very gradually so you can really feel sort of back to your normal self and feel how box like you are, or are you more of an oval when you're like this? How fuzzy are your edges? How much clarity have you kept or lost? So some of those will have been clearer and easier to you than the others. I just hope it wasn't all. Huh, where's this thing? Can't find it. I hope at least one of them got clear to you. So now you're going to do this in your own way. Can you find the clearest of the four? And remember, firming up a left side one requires your left arm. Firming up a right side one requires your right arm. And you put your arm in the diagonally opposite place in your body. So can you firm up the easiest, clearest one? And can you then push into the arm of the chair or your own arm to, as it were, stuff into that part? Sit like that? Feel how much clarity you've brought to that vertical corner of your box. And now let's go for the next clearest one. So it could be the front one, you know, the one on the same side. It could be diagonal. It could be any of the four. So can you figure out where you need to put your hand and your arm? And maybe you need to scoot across your chair to get the second most clear one. And you always start with pull, and then you go to push. So now you have two, and you probably have a bearing down and breathing challenge already. So now you're going to go for number three. You use the hand on the same side, you put it to the diagonally opposite corner to find an arm. You pull for several breaths, and then you push. And when you're ready, you have one more to go, which is going to be the trickiest of the four, the hardest one for you to clarify. Again, pull and also push. And when you bring your arms back to your lap or somewhere in the front of you, notice the clarity of the four and how easy or difficult it's been to find those four and how big the differences are between the easy one or ones and the tricky one or ones. And as you sit like that, feel yourself bearing down, feel yourself breathing. So when I teach this to riders, we have to do the hand across the back of the saddle to grab the cantle on the diagonally opposite side. When you want to firm up the front rebars, and it's a little bit trickier. It doesn't work as well as grabbing a chair at waist height, but it can still be done. And when you want to get the back ones, which involves your hand at the front, then it really pays to have a bucking strap. You have a bucking strap, you've got something you can really hold and pull on. It's a little trickier to find a place on the saddle to put two knuckles and push. It definitely needs to be on the opposite side of the pommel. As a diagonal thing. And you can transfer this from the chair to the saddle, hopefully without too much difficulty. But it is a little better done on the chair. And it's something you can practice. You could practice in meetings when nobody knows what you're doing. And it's rather boring. There's all sorts of things like this. I get kids to practice in boring lessons at school. Somewhat subversive of me, maybe. But you can get these four stationary, which is what we do in a lesson. And when you move, I'd probably have you go for a little bit and see how you do. And then. Okay, so let go of them all. And can you find the easiest one? And then can you find the next easiest one? And add that. And can you find the next easiest one? And can you find the trickiest one? And we would play with these. Now, within this, we have the possibility of making connections within the box on diagonals. So you could think of a diagonal, a piece of material, let's say a cross section of your box, like your diaphragm is a cross section of your box. You're underneath this time, not just your official pelvic floor, but the whole rectangular underneath of the box is like a surface. And we could try and connect a back rebar to its diagonally opposite front rebar. And this would really help with the fencing lunge position for turning. And not only that, it really comes into its own riding, the lateral movements. So let's imagine you wanted to leg yield to the left. You would want your right back rebar. Can you find that? And your left front rebar in the direction of motion. So your right back rebar goes with that seat bone being back as you move the horse away from that leg, which is a little back. And it's like you're trying to stretch a piece of material inside you. And we're going to do this at three levels. The easiest place to start is in your armpits. So could you connect your back right armpit tendon diagonally through you to your left front armpit tendon? And when you can, and as it were, stretch that piece of material so you're turning your box into a parallelogram? If you can do that, realise you've created a line of force transmission in your body, because force transmission happens when fascia under tension rather than soggy. Now, can you make that same diagonal connection from the right back corner of your sitting surface to the left front corner of your sitting surface? That's going to be somewhere around the front underneath of your thigh on the saddle, so you want to feel like you're stretching the fabric on that level, too. And lastly, in the way, that's possibly the trickiest but the most powerful. Can you make that same stretch in your diaphragm area? It might really pay to put your fingers on yourself here, from the right back corner to the left front corner. Think of stretching a piece of material between the two. The piece of material is contained in really clear boundaries, but has that diagonal stretch. Now, when we come back to this in our next podcast, I'm going to start by telling you the story of the horse who taught me about these, literally, and how impressive that was to me and how it led to this whole idea. But in the meanwhile, do experiment with this. Now, you can do it. You know possibly how to make those diagonals inside you while you're driving your car, or just to shore up your four corners or try and shore up the weakest of them. So do experiment with this. Take it into your riding if you can. Enjoy your horses, and I'll be back with you soon.