Ep. 73 Deep dive into hollow backs

Hello, I'm Mary Wandlis welcoming you to podcast number 73 for our series in 2025. I want to come back to Rider biomechanics. And the vast majority of women are hollow backed with their front longer than their back, making them a forward bulging banana if you like, whereas most men are round backed. Now, that's not written in stone. You do get hollow back men and round back women, but it is a valid generalisation. And there are different ways and places that people hollow their back. So most people would hollow in the middle, between their ribs and their hips, in that place of their mid back, or to name it more officially, their lumbar spine. And when a horse hollows in that place, it's pretty much under the rider's seat bones. Some people hollow lower down where their lumbar spine meets the top of the pelvis, so their torso stays pretty lined up until their pelvis and their butt stick out at the back. Now you see that in horses as well. And when that happens, from the top of the croup down to the back of the saddle will be a really steep slope. And then some women hollow higher up, so they would be the ones who've really tried to grow tall and stick their chest out. So if you were to put the side of your arm across your front at bra level and the side of the other arm across your back at bra level, if you hollowed that way, the front would be lifted relative to the back. And if that's you, can you drop the front down to match the back so your front and back arm are level with each other. So I think of the torso sometimes like a Rubik's Cube with three layers that can certainly rotate on each other. And the junctions of the Rubik's Cube are tricky. So here the top layer of the rubric cube is tilted up on the under layer and in our low down hollow, the bottom layer is tilted down on the middle layer. So the junctions of the Rubik's Cube are tricky. And then some people have an extra long hollow that involves almost the whole length of the Rubik's Cube rather than where we started, which was more just the middle part of it. Now, now, if you think of a horse peeing with his hind legs out behind him and his front legs out in front of him, that would be a very long hollow in the horse. And it's affected those junctions in him essentially, as the back legs go out the back and the front legs go out the front. Or he might hollow in that way of having the Steep slope from the croup to the back of the saddle, which really suggests that his hind legs are out the back more than his front legs are out the front. And that puts the hollow that the rider experiences more to the back of the bum, back of the saddle and behind the saddle. And then you'll get the horse. And these are the rarer horses, and often they're sticky horses where the hollow is in front of the rider, like its front legs are too much out in front of it, but not necessarily its hind legs so much behind it. So the hollows behind the shoulder blades, the behind the wither towards the front of the saddle, the pommel, and the rider's pubic bone. And you do get the occasional horse who's too round backed, almost like he's trying to pop you off the top of the middle of him, but that's fairly unusual. So the phrases we use to help riders with hollow backs, you've probably heard these before if you've listened to these podcasts. Bring your belly button back, bring your waistband back, drop your sternum, drop your chest, make a crease just below your sternum. So there we're addressing a higher up hollow. Think of your pelvis as a bowl. If there was a liquid in the bowl, would it be spilling out of the bowl? And if you're hollow backed, it could well be spilling out above your pubic bone. And can you lift your pubic bone to keep the liquid in the bowl? And can you keep your pubic bone out in front of you so you don't let yourself bury it back between your legs? Now, all of these phrases work and they help people and different people respond to different ways of saying it according to where their hollow is and just what really gels with them and resonates in their brain. And then sometime around Christmas, and I think it was seeing Christmas bells on Christmas cards and all that kind of thing, I had another image which has helped a lot of people since. And if you think of a church bell, but the kind that's obviously curvy at the top and the sides come down vertically or they go a little bit outwards, but not the kind of one that would really flare out towards the bottom of the bell and that bell's hung around your neck and it and you move together. So when you hollow your back, the front of the bell lifts and the back of the bell drops down. And when you round your back, the front drops and the back lifts and comes potentially more away from your back. So the aim here is to Level out the bell, so you're dropping the front of the bell to get the front and the back at the same level. And as you think this, you're able to think about the front and the back of your body at the same time, which is one of its pluses. But this image might also make you realise that in a hollow, your ribs at the back, especially the lower down ribs, are pulled forward. And you're not likely to be aware of just how pulled forward they are and how stuck they are in that position and how much that affects your breathing. So you want to think of pushing back into them almost. You could make each side round back, further back than your spine, so that would make your back almost peach shaped, like a gully in the middle. You might imagine looking at a rather overweight horse from the back and seeing his two butt cheeks higher up than the gully of his spine. You could imagine the clapper of the bell lining up vertically with the front of your spine, probably at a waistband level the front of your spine. And if you imagine that clapper was longer and went down as low as the horse's tummy, you can understand that if your horse were to suddenly hollow and whizz off, he'd take the bottom of the clapper with him and you as the top of the clapper, and the top of the bell, would end up leaning back and lifting the front of the bell. So you want a bell that's come down and back at the front and levelled up and filled out in that rather peach shape at the back. Now, here we're addressing both the superficial front line in your torso from your collarbone to your pubic bone, the superficial back line in your torso from the nape of your neck to your tailbone. And those of you who've heard me talk about myofascial lines will understand that those lines are part of longer chains that go from top to toe, which are made up of muscles and connective tissue. And your connective tissue is way more than the tendons and ligaments that you might think of it as. It involves different fascial sheets in your back. It involves the casing around muscles. So you could almost think of a string of sausages where individual muscles are encased in a sausage skin, which both separates and connects the sausages. That takes a little bit of getting your brain around, but I think the sausage image says it well. So we're evening out these two lines at the front of the back of your torso. And for any issue in your body or your horse's body, it really pays to have fixes that involve more of the myofascial lines. So if you've got a number of ways to address it, you're more likely to be successful. So I was teaching somebody earlier this year who is paired up with a guy who's a pretty good rider and coach, and he'd said to her, you really want to think of your points of hips coming up. And she said to me, I really don't get that. Points of hips up. What does he mean by that? So if you just think of the hollow back and your front line and your back line, your fix is likely to have you think of your points of hips coming back as your waistband fills out, your tailbone's more down, your pubic bones more up. But his idea of points of hips up involves some different lines. And if you put your middle finger on each side, on the point of each hip, and reach your thumbs upwards to be vertically above them in an indentation between a couple of ribs, and then if you drew your thumb and finger together on each side, you'd be bringing your ribs down and your points of hips up, compressing the distance between them. And I'm sure that was what he's onto, although he wouldn't have understood the anatomy. You're now addressing your spiral lines, which loop around the body in rather complicated ways. And the bit you need to understand for the moment is that they come from under your shoulder blades, around your ribs, in an X across your belly button going to the opposite point of hip, so you've made the X shorter on the vertical plane and stop the centre of the X, which is your belly button bulging forward. So addressing a different line gives you another way in. And for some people, this will be what clicks where the other fixes don't. We could also be talking about the deep front line, which basically is your core. Again, we think of this going top to toe in, in the way that when you cut an apple in half, you can see a stringy bit to a round bit to a stringy bit. And here we're going to be thinking about the rounded bit of the core in the middle. So when you hollow your back and the front of the bell goes up, your diaphragm goes up as your ribs lift. So we're going to add to the idea of the bell to deepen this a little bit more. If you put the first finger, side of your hand and your arm across your front by your belly button, tuck your thumb away and put that line across your front at your belly button. So the side of your hand is facing your body. And give yourself a gentle karate chop across that line, imagining it being stronger and it's going to feel like it folds you in half. And as you do that, really think of amplifying the way your ribs bulge backwards when you think of the bell with that gully for your spine, like the gully in a peach. So your diaphragm is not just like the cap of a mushroom. That's how I often explain it. And what people don't realize is your diaphragm within the mushroom cap is mostly a big tendon. And most of the muscle in your diaphragm is vertical. So it has slips coming down inside your ribs, attaching it to the bottom of your ribcage. And these will be vertical slips of muscle. So push back into those vertical slips of muscle and you may have heard of your psoas muscle, which is a big part of your core. It's inside you with your guts. And from each side of your pubic bone at the front of your body, it goes back and up in an inverted V and you're pushing back into your psoas as it inserts into your spine by your bottom rib. And then there's another big core muscle behind your ribs. It's the deepest of the muscles behind your ribs, and it connects your bottom rib to the top of your pelvis and also has slips on the side connecting into the vertebra between them. So it connects on the top of the bottom and close to your spine. And that too you can push back into, as you think of being karate chopped at your belly button. So you're making a very specific crease in that place. So we're affecting your muscles and your fascia, but it's more than that, because where your crease is at the back of you is the location of your celiac plexus, also known as the solar plexus, because the nerves there go in so many different directions. And this plexus has both the dorsal and the ventral vagus nerve as part of it. Now, we're going to come back to the vagus nerve later. That's a really important nerve in terms of how flighty you are or how, how phlegmatic you are. And if you think of hollowing, especially if you hollow with the kind of sharp in breath, then we might go where you had a little bit of a fright. You're affecting that plexus. You're kind of pulling up and forward and you want to be able to settle it back and down in that karate chop. In addition to the idea of the bell. Now we could get a little more esoteric here because this is the area of your third chakra. And when this is working well, it's associated with self esteem, personal power, the ability to manifest your desires. And it can be described as the body's energy powerhouse. It's linked to the element fire. And your solar plexus chakra is thought to influence your digestive system. The nerves go to your digestive organs, your willpower, your ability to take action. If your go energy is over the top, you could well be fighty or flighty and it could get a little bit disorganized. And it also could be that when that chakra is not working so well, you could be one of those round backed people and it's almost like life has punched you in the gut. And then that chakra is more related to repressed anger, fear, anxiety, panic, overwhelm. And those are the kind of things that could manifest as stomach pains and indigestion. And maybe you meet life with a right, I'm going to do it, or you've kind of lost your get up and go and this may not fit for you, or it may, but you know, don't try and force it down your throat if it feels like it doesn't. One of my favourite bodywork systems is Hannah Somatics. I've been able to have sessions in this over the last three years or so, but I originally read Thomas Hannah's book which was published in the 1980s, and he talks about the green light reflex as your get up and go. And people stuck in green light reflex tend to be hollow. And he talks about the red light reflex as a kind of stop within the system. And those folks would tend to be round backed. So you reduce your flightiness and maybe your fightiness with the front of the bell more down karate chopping yourself at the crease of your belly button, your bell leveling out and your ribs filling out at the back and really trying to think of breathing into those ribs as they fill out at the back. And when you get your horse to change in this kind of way, you affect his physiology and his emotionality in much the same way as it might affect yours. And he is highly likely to become less flighty. So we talked about this in our recent podcast, talking about choice points, and we haven't in this series referred so much to your baseline way of sitting and how if you treat the horse like a mower mobile armchair, you're squashing his back down and the ways of not squashing his back down can really begin to draw his back up underneath you. So many of you will know the idea of kneeling weight down through your thigh to help you keep out of that hollow that makes your thigh work as a lever for the horse with a really long hollow you may need to slingshot. Some of you will know that term. We've described it in previous series as well, because you really need to elongate the middle third of his body so that he doesn't just collapse into that peeing position as it were. Your bear down makes a push forward stronger than his push back. And maybe you can also look back on some of the podcasts and figure out more about suction. I really recommend that you put yourself ideally on a saddle, on a sturdy saddle stand, but otherwise on a chair and do this to yourself sideways onto a big mirror. Remember, when you look in the mirror you should only turn your head. If you rotate your body, you'll start distorting yourself and adding other variables because when you've really lost your hollow back, you'll think you've overdone it. It needs to feel really round backed for many, many women for them to be significantly less hollow. And if you have mirrors in your arena or you can get someone with a camera halt parallel to your mirrors, again, just turn your head and can you think of levelling the bell, karate chopping your middle? You could be shocked at how round backed you have to feel to get your front and your back to be the same length. No more bananas. So have fun with this in your riding. Enjoy your horses and I'll be back again soon.