Ep. 69 C curves, S shapes, and uneven seat bones

Hello, I'm Mary Wanlis welcoming you to podcast number 69. In our last podcast, I introduced you to reinforcing bars, like the bars used when concrete pillars are being poured on a construction site, and how these determine the corners of the box and create a stability that you otherwise wouldn't have. So I wanted to tell you the story of how I first came across this. And I was away teaching and on my day off got to ride a rather nice horse that had been bought, I suspect for rather a lot of money from a well known rider, or at least the stable of a well known rider in the us. And when I put this horse into shoulder in left, it was suddenly clear to me that I could feel the leading corner of my box, which would be the front right, and the furthest back corner of my box as the back left, and that it felt like the two were strong and stable and connected together through me. And this horse put me into this position in the real correctness of his shoulder in. And when I then went to shoulder in right, it wasn't as clear. That would emphasise the opposite diagonal. So the leading front rebar is then the left with a diagonal connection through the box to the most back one of the right back rebar. So that kind of relates most to the inside hind leg, where the left front one would relate the most to the outside front leg and that shoulder and that quadrant of the horse as it comes away from the wall. When I did this on the right rein, it wasn't quite as clear, but I had at least a semblance of it. And playing around between the two, it became clear to me that that feeling on the left rein that this beloved, blessed horse that I'm so grateful for had just put me into was gold dust. And from there, working on it took a little bit of a while, and coming up with the exercise to help teach it to people took quite a while. But this has helped many riders, and especially when you realise that that diagonal from the leading front rebar to the furthest back rebar basically gets to be placed parallel to the wall when your horse is in shoulder in position where you're lining up the inside hind leg with the outside foreleg. So if you can connect that diagonal inside you and place it parallel to the wall, you've done a really good beginning job in positioning your horse. I could tell you lots of stories of how this has helped people. One that was particularly interesting was a student who's an organised, good rider riding one of our nicest school horses who had Good training in shoulder in. She was in shoulder in left and going, this ought to be working. This really ought to be working. This is my clearer, stronger, diagonal, in that case, from the back left to the front right. But what was actually happening was that the bottom of her right front rebar wasn't really anchored into place. And as that floated off more to the front and the right, she had no limiter on the horse's outside shoulder as it wanted to go back to the track. So she could connect force from the back to the front diagonally through her body, but she couldn't then, as it were, collect that force and contain it. So it was rather as if she was putting flour through a sieve. And the horse responded appropriately until we found the container. And you could sense this in yourself if you put yourself in the position of shouldering left with your right front rebar diagonally connecting to the left, left back one. And if you put the webbing of your right hand between your thumb and your first finger just on the top outside of your thigh and the corner of your pelvis, you'd get a sense of how that needs to be a container and not drift off and therefore allow the movement to get more distorted. I'm going to add one more exercise to this series, and for this, you need, again, a firm chair. One of the garden chairs, plastic garden chairs would do it. A wooden chair would do it. If the chair has arms, that's one stage better. In fact, more than one stage better than a chair that doesn't have arms. And in this exercise, unlike almost every exercise you've ever done, you get to sit against the back of the chair. But before we do that, we're going to do a little bit of an introduction. If you reach one arm around behind your back, so the back of your hand is lying on your clothing and your ribs. So this would be, let's say, just below bra level. And then move your hand on your clothing in a way that creates friction. This is what we're not going to do. Can you then have your hand and your clothing and your muscle move all together over the bone of your ribs as you move your hand to right and left? So it's really important that you get this distinction between the kind of moving of your hand on your clothing that creates friction and the moving of the hand, the clothing, the skin, the muscle over the underlying bones, the which doesn't create friction. As you sit in your chair, can you not let there be any friction between the chair and your clothing, but shift your ribs to one side or the other, and I think one side will come naturally. So you've shifted your whole ribcage one way, and as the bones go, let's say, to the left, the muscles actually move, if anything, to the right. Or they may stay in the same place on the chair, but relative to the bones, the muscles move to the right, then come back to center. Do this again so that you shift your ribs to one side, feeling how your ribs move over the surface of muscle and back to center. And then let's do it again. Ribs to one side. Same side, back to centre. Now go. Ribs to the other side. Now, I think you might find they barely move and that there's a really big difference between sliding your ribs one way relative to your muscles and your skin in the chair and sliding your ribs the other way. One may give you a really big range of motion and the other may give you a small range of motion. That was very much the case for me back through time when I first came up with this exercise, which was possibly two years ago, something like that, and doing it again here in a chair, and I haven't done it in a chair for a while, I'm really realising the pigs have flown. I now have more range in what was the difficult direction, with barely any range. And that just goes to show how much difference you can make over time, both through doing the exercise and through thinking about this when riding. So go again to the instinctive, easy way, come back to the centre, go to the trickier way, come back to centre, do the tricky way a couple more times, and then put yourself in the tricky way and put the arm of that side on the outside of the arm of the chair and the arm of the other side, the side your ribs are moved away from on the inside arm of the chair, and put pressure against both of those arms. And I think you'll find that you can really feel the stretch that you're creating in a part of your body that doesn't really want to stretch. And just listen a minute. Don't do it yet. In a moment when you're going to take your arms away, not yet. Just let your body do what it wants to do. And I think you'll find that you kind of bowing over towards your neutral. So let's do this again. Ribs to the tricky direction. The same arm of that side on the outside of the arm of the chair, the opposite arm on the inside of the chair, and push with both arms so you really get a little bit of force into this and sustain it for a while. And then the challenge is going to be to keep your ribcage there when you let go with your arms. And you might find it's quite tricky. Now, what this really means is that one shoulder blade, the side that's easy to move your ribs to, probably lives further away from your spine. And that side of your box is more expanded, the other side, your shoulder blades lift closer to your spine. You'd easily make a C curve on that side with your ribs a bit collapsed. And you probably don't breathe into that lung as well as you breathe into the other lung. And quite a proportion of people have a little bit of pain on the inner point of their shoulder blade as their shoulder blade is close to their spine. And sometimes that creates a diagonal line with a little bit of pain in the diagonally opposite sacroiliac joint. That used to be true for me, and I did lots of standing by a wall and rolling that shoulder blade area just between the shoulder blade and the spine on the tricky side, against a smaller ball than a tennis ball, but a fairly hard ball. And I think that probably helped, but it didn't do anything like this exercise did. And that little point of pain used to really bug me. It's now gone, and so is any sacroiliac pain I would have had on the opposite side. So let's go slide your ribs to the tricky way. Put your arm on the outside of the arm of the chair on that side, the opposite arm on the inside of the chair, and push with both of them as you keep yourself in that place. And when you choose to let go with your arms, can you keep your ribs there? Now, in this position, we can probably identify a triangle which is useful to think about. One side of the triangle is a vertical line to the same side of your spine, going from the side of your tailbone, essentially on the back of the board on that side, with both boards on, up to the level of your armpit. And we could take it higher, but up to the level of your armpit will do us. And you could think of that meeting a horizontal from your back armpit tendons to. To that vertical line we've made a right angle there. And then if you had a diagonal line, it would go from your back armpit tendons diagonally across your back to just that side of your tailbone. And you might find value at some stage by thinking of that same triangle on your front. But that triangle on your back is most useful right now. And if you let that side go, let yourself Go to neutral, you'll feel that you've shrunk that triangle. And if you move your ribs to the originally easy side, the instinctive side that you first chose, I think you'll find you have a very big, rather bulging triangle. The vertical and the horizontal may be fairly clear, but the diagonal of the triangle could be quite soggy and grounded, grounded outwards. Go to the difficult side. Again, we're wanting to get where your body kind of lives in two much more equal triangles. This is a major distortion to your box. Now, the arms on the chair are a really good help with this. If you sleep on the side of the bed, that puts the side of the smaller triangle by the side of the mattress. You could put this arm over the edge of the mat mattress. And we've done a variation on the theme of this exercise before as a lying in bed exercise. If you're driving your car, you might find you could push that hand against the steering wheel and use that to help you access that triangle. That must be done with care, of course, and obvious due care and attention to the road. When you're on the saddle, you can help yourself fill out that triangle by putting the point of the thumb on the same side, pushing it into the side of the pommel. So as your thumb pushes towards the midline, your triangle expands away from the midline into your armpit tendons, helping your shoulder blade get a little bit wider from your spine. You might also find, if you're carrying a stick, that you can put your thumb against the side of the stick and push on the stick to give you that extra way of an inward push, helping you create your outward expansion. This exercise is so very helpful. It will get you clarifying the board more, clarifying that distance between your armpit tendons and your spine, clarifying the diagonals and helping you equalise them. And I can remember the horse, a very dear horse to me, who unfortunately was put down last year, who was so diabolically asymmetrical. She was a very inexpensive buy as a riding school horse at Overdale, and I worked with her a lot when she proved quite tricky, and when I could fill out my right side like that, I could fill out her right side in a way that nothing else would do. And I could begin to make sure my seat bone was really close to the spine and that I could manufacture a wide, flat shelf to sit on to the right of my right seat bone. And it was a major part of changing her. And I'm actually extremely grateful to this horse for this Exercise and other skills that I developed in dealing with her really pretty, hollow, crazy asymmetrical body. But she had a great mind. In the end, many people grew to love her. This exercise also makes sense of the various ways that people's asymmetries can manifest. So I want to repeat an exercise we've done before with a variation on the theme. If you cross your arms across your chest, side bend to one direction and side bend to the other direction, I think you'll find that one direction is an easier side bend, where you get creases between your ribs and your hips. And as you side bend to that easier side, notice the triangles. You've got one very small and scrunched one and rather big expanded one on the other side. So as you're doing this, most people would have the seat bone of that small triangle as the heavy one, and that's the side they're side bending to. So make that seat bone heavier, even if it wasn't a moment ago. I call this pattern number one. It's the most common pattern for people. But you might find if you really think of lifting that seat bone and drawing the bottom of the board up, that you get pattern number two, where the outside seat bone is heavier. This was happening to my friend in the Story of the Toe Separators, a couple of podcasts. And then if you think of moving your ribcage even more to the side of the heavy seat bone, you don't so much have what I would call a C curve as what I would call break dance. Like your ribcage has really moved laterally to the opposite side compared to where it started from and has moved laterally compared to your pelvis. So let's have you come out of that and sit in what you think is neutral with two equal seat bones, your arms still folded across your chest, side bend to the easy side, make that seat bone heavier. I call this variation number one. Lift that seat bone, shift your body a little bit to make the opposite seat bone heavier. I call that variation number two. And now shift. So it's no longer a C curve, but it's a break dance with your ribcage really moving over the opposite seat bone. That's variation number three. And what is the same about these three variations is the skimpy side to your ribcage and the rather over filled out, overstuffed and over not well bounded side come back to neutral again. Now my asymmetry has morphed from variation one with a big side lean and bend and a heavy seat bone on that side to variation three, I didn't spend much time, I would say, in variation two, but variation three, I could find my ribcage over to the side of the heavier seat bone in a breakdance way. And the opposite seat bone being heavy to the one that was heavy a few years ago. And for the majority of my riding life, and getting my cleavage over the horse's cleavage, four rebars, two triangles, really has made a massive difference. And this exercise. And the thumb on the side of the pommel helps you fill out an area of the body that is very constricted. The fascia there would be very dried up, not very fluid or malleable. Everything kind of pulling in on itself with your shoulder blade coming towards its spine. And a lack of expansion in the ribs, a lack of breathing, and the creases between your ribs and your hips on this side. It's really valuable to do this exercise in a chair. It's valuable to use your fingers or the side of your hand. You possibly can't get your thumb so easily on the steering wheel. And when you're riding your thumb on the side of the pommel or your thumb on your stick, it will take a while to change this, because actually, I think this is one of the fundamental patterns and a very, very good inroad into that pattern. And you may notice, let's say in shoulder, in or a circle. Oh, my ribcage is gone. And the thumb on the side of the pommel will really help you make a fix. So all our exercises here are a lot to integrate, a lot to practice, but I really hope you will keep cluing into the four rebars. Discover how thinking of the two triangles helps you find the four rebars and how filling in those triangles help can really help you keep your cleavage over the horse's cleavage. And a really good way to keep yourself more straight, more organized, so you can organise your horse. Have fun in your riding, have fun with your horses. Enjoy doing this, and I'll be back with you soon.