Ep. 77 Stance, state, sense, signal, see, stop

Hello, I'm Mary Wandlis welcoming you to podcast number 77. During the summer of 2025, we've talked a lot in this series of podcasts about being more or less regulated in your nervous system. And if you have a horse with a lot more go than woe, the type who's always trying to accelerate out from underneath you, or a lot more woe than go, the type who takes a lot of motivating, that horse is going to be not very regulated. And often the easiest way to start with these horses is on the ground doing groundwork using what I call the Ground Zero toolkit. And a good way to think about this is uses six S's, six different words beginning with S, that define the stages, this goes through and also defines what's really important. And this actually gives you a way to understand and gauge any groundwork system you find yourself coming into contact with. There are a variety of systems with a variety of different aims, and this system, which is our way of teaching Andrew Maclean's equine Learning theory. Andrew Maclean rode internationally eventing for Australia and did a PhD when he realised that what he knew as a zoologist about animal training was really not filtering through to how he trained horses. And equine learning theory was his answer to this. And it's a very good answer, really, based around the desire to get the ridden horse to have a conscious understanding of the legs as go and the reins as woe, which can build on from there to a step underneath the body with the hind leg, that's an adduction step, a step away from the body with the front leg, that's an abduction step. Think of abduct as take away. By putting those together, you get to where you can teach the horse the lateral movements in hand. At the very basic level, very few horses really consciously understand that the legs mean go and the reins mean woe. And when I go out in the big wide world, maybe looking for a horse to buy for myself or somebody, I discover this by doing a little bit of groundwork before I get on a horse. And it shocks me every time, although it really shouldn't, sadly, such is the state of our riding culture. But you change a horse's life when you give him that conscious understanding. And through that, you also change the life of his rider. And potentially that means changing your life. So our first S is for stance. What kind of stance are you as the handler in? If you're somebody who's naturally rather flighty, you might tend to stand a bit on your toes. Kind of like you're ready to run away, you're ready to flee. You're likely to be hollow, backed, rather up, lifting your chest with not a lot of breathing. Now, that's not a great way to be, because there are many times in handling horses when you need to be able to stand your ground. And that's a literal physical idea based on your stance. You might want to do this exercise with me. You need to stand up in an on horse position, so with your knees slightly bent, your feet a bit apart, the length of your front matching the length of your back within your torso. So this is the martial arts horse stance. I expect you know that within your calf you have two bones. You have the big tibia, which goes from under your knee joint to form most of your ankle, and the smaller fibula, which begins in a bony novel on the outside of your calf, about where the top of your riding boot would be, and slopes down and in to become the outside of your ankle. And these two bones have a membrane between them. If you imagine magically being able to put your hands inside your calf and pull the two bones apart, which tensions the membrane between them and gives you a feeling of coming much more down onto the ground and down onto your feet, this makes a huge difference to your ability to stand your ground in riding. It will make your lower leg less wobbly, but it's a harder thing to learn in riding than on the ground and a great reminder to yourself to just take a moment, take a few breaths, think of pulling those bones apart, make yourself more able to stand your ground. Our next S is for your state, which is so linked to your stance. I hope you're understanding from our previous podcast that you really can't separate these two. If your breathing's really high up in your chest, that's a stance thing and a state thing. Bringing your breathing to breathe from lower down and deeper can make a really big difference in state as well. You could think of all of us being somewhere between 100 watt light bulb and a 30 watt light bulb. That's the kind of measurement of energy which I think we can all intuitively understand. So if you're naturally a hundred watt light bulb, you may need to really calm yourself down to bring yourself down to about 60 watts. If you need to bring down the energy of a flighty horse. If you're naturally more of a 30 watt light bulb, you need to find a way to bring your energy more up so you could motivate a rather low wattage horse. Otherwise, the pair of you could kind of drag each other down and you could find yourself thinking, oh, he's so lazy, we'll never get this. And once you join him in that state, you're kind of making a self fulfilling prophecy. And if you're someone who needs to increase your energy levels, you need to do it without becoming emotional in the way of. Many people try to find more energy and they get hassled. They try to find more energy, they get frantic. And that's the wrong kind of energy to be presenting to your horse. It's got to be something much more. Come on. Rather than something desperate. Our next S stands for sense sensing into your horse as a whole. Is he more a 40 watt horse or, or 100 watt horse? And if you know him well, how is he today compared to his baseline? Now, the horses that can be the trickiest to work with, especially if you're a small woman, are the ones who've got themselves really wound up into a high energy state. And I think this work reaches horses emotionally to change their state so well. So I worked with a friend's horse in California, a young horse, he's been slow to mature. She bought him, I think, as either a yearling or a 2 year old and brought him home in the hope that she could have him lead a very normal and easygoing life. Until he got old enough to be backed and things went wrong. And at one point he actually got attacked by a mountain lion. I know that sounds bizarre, but they're near the mountains in California and with fires and things like that, wildlife comes down from the mountain and this horse got his hock not quite shredded by a mountain lion. So that involved a lot of veterinary intervention. At some stage he had an allergic reaction to a vaccination, more trouble. So he got really freaked out, I would say more by the mountain lion incident than anything else. And as a young horse, being backed turned out to be not very well regulated, not very neutral. Working with him just in the way of, first of all, stroking with the whip to give him a sense of his own body and his own body boundaries. Because freaked out people and freaked out horses are really not good at knowing where they end and where air begins. We all become a bit nebulous when our stance and state go wrong. Stroking with the whip is a friendly gesture that just shows him where his edges are. Other than that, it has no meaning. Head lowering as well begins to really reduce his adrenaline and bring him more down to earth. And working with that horse was quite challenging. And for him, I think really Important. I remember when Millie Dove was 12 and the first time she came and spent some of her summer holiday at my riding centre with her pony. And I said, right, here we go, tack up for your lesson. And when we were about ready for the lesson, I saw the stable door open, the pony charge out with child, who at that point was a very tiny stick insect in in tow. And I went, wait a minute, this is not good. We put the pony back in the stable. I worked with the pony on the ground in the stable, establishing calmness, stroking with the whip, head lowering and an appropriate response to whoa and go. From there I could work with the pony in the arena and from there begin to teach Milly to work with the pony until we had a few days later a a pony that walked out of the stable and could be led safely by a 12 year old. I could tell you lots of other stories too, mostly of the horses that were hyper as well as the horse who's hyper. You've also got the low energy horse and how you are with him and how you give your signal, which is our next square, becomes very important. So let's just step away a minute and just say that within this system, what we call the training position is facing your horse. We do it normally in a bridle and there's a way of holding the reins that allows you to be really close to him with your hand close to the bit rings and move back. So the rein is just held in the webbing between your thumb and your first finger, so you can easily move towards him and away from him within it too. Because we want the horse to consciously understand woe and go. When you give your signal, he has to move in a go before you do. Otherwise maybe he just went because he followed your feet, which is what normally happens with riders and horses and is very instinctive. So this version of he goes before you go, so. So we know he went from your aid can be tricky to learn initially and then in the stop, he has to stop before you stop. So again, we know that he wasn't just following your feet, but understood the little aid you gave with the rein to create stop. Now doing this, there's a fair bit of walking backwards and you as the handler have to get good at walking backwards. Some people struggle to make large steps going backwards. They're kind of stuck in short, slow steps. You also have to be able to step sideways. So when you introduce the horse to the abduction step of the front legs, he's going to move first again. But you too are going to step sideways and in one direction. If you carry an awful lot of weight on that leg, you might struggle to pick it up. That would be true, of course, of your horse. So there's a certain amount of learning for you in terms of how you use your own body. And this goes beyond the way we talked about stance at the beginning. So when you give your horse a go signal, you're using a very stiff dressage whip, because whippy ones kind of go doing, oi, oi, oi, oi, oi. And that doesn't work well. It needs to be a lightweight, stiff one. And a company called Fleck make whips that work really well for this. They're shorter. Dressage whip is just perfect in the way it works. And the whip is like an extension of your arm. You might stroke the horse with the whip. And when you go to give a leg aid, you whip tap his side as you would touch him and where you would touch him with your lower leg. If the horse is already quite energised, he'll probably get this really quickly and you probably need a really light aid. If he's one of the more low energy horses, you have to be careful how you do it, because if your stance and state are kind of communicating right, horse, you need to do this. It's time to be obedient. It won't work half as well as if your mental emotional state, kind of, come on, horse, come and join the party. That's a much more kind of lightweight kind of energy, a much more encouraging kind of energy. And the moment the horse moves, you're going to back off with your whip tap. And that's the stop, which I also talk of as cease release. So when you give your signal, the people who were a bit hyper and over energized the 100 watt lightbulb people sometimes use the whip a bit as if it was a fencing foil. You know, they're making all sorts of movements with it that aren't very controlled, especially when they're getting a bit desperate. Some people are so kind of gentle in their Persona. They're a lower energy light bulb. They would whip tap a little bit like a fly is touching the horse and the horse doesn't get its meaning. So there's an art to how you give your signal within the signal itself before you get to the stop or the cease release. Sometimes we find ourselves teaching people to whip tap gait posts. I know that sounds crazy, but people wield their arm in the weirdest ways. They don't Do a good job often on their normal stance state and energetic status. People need to learn how to whip tap. Well, the whip tap, you could say, is an aversive signal. Well, our horse is discovering through trial and error how to get that signal to go away. In other words, he is training us through his responses to go away. And as soon as he finds the response that gets us to stop bugging him, he's likely to repeat that response. And he has a conscious understanding of the meaning of the aid within this. We're trying to keep our whip tap minimally aversive and really be looking for his response. So the next S is for see and really it's see and sense his response. So you can reward a basic attempt. If this is new for him, it might not be what you absolutely want, but it's a step in the right direction. Or you might be a little more intense when you want a more accurate response. But either way, the seeing and the sensing, your horse's response is really important. You need to be able to take in what's going on in his body and a part of your body that maybe you can't see that easily unless you really are setting out to do that. Now, in this school of groundwork, we don't want the horse to anticipate any more than you want the horse to anticipate the aid when you're riding. So this makes it a little different maybe from a system that's designed to lead in to work at liberty. So we don't want the horse to anticipate our signal, and we don't want the horse to do more than our signal. And if we need to delete a step we didn't mean him to take, then we just do a step backwards. So sometimes the horses end up taking random steps or overdoing what we wanted, and we'll just step them back just in a way to. No, not that. That's delete. We're seeing, sensing, and really reading our horse to find the moment to stop or cease release. The more immediate that release is in response to his correct or verging towards correct answer, the quicker the horse gets it. He is finding the response that gets us to stop bugging him. The release can be very immediate, and you might give your horse a little bit of processing time after that before you come in with the next question. And if you can get three good responses in a row to something, you kind of know he's got it, and three sets of three really tells you he's got it. So this work changes horses emotionally and it very often changes people emotionally and it's so much easier to control your body when you're on the ground than it is when you're on a horse and you've got your eyes when you're on the ground in a way you don't. You're only working on on feel really when you're on top. So it's a great introduction for so many people, so many horses and I really encourage you to follow up on it. You'll need more information to do a really good job. We have that on dressage training TV with our groundwork certification course. We'd love to help you get skilful at this. It's a fun thing to be able to do shoulder in and half pass with your horse in hand and it really spares us from having the clueless rider on the clueless horse. Enjoy your horses. Have fun riding them. Have fun too with them on the ground. I'll be back soon.