Ep. 78 How change happens

Hello, I'm Mary Wandlis welcoming you to podcast number 78 for the summer of 2025. I want to tell you the stories of various horses and riders and changes that happened within their learning at different times. It might give you an overview, I think, of how change happens and hopefully an insight or two to take away for your own riding. And I want to start by talking about a teacher training course. Now, coaching coaches is one of my favourite things to do and obviously it's a big part of my legacy. And we found a format for these courses that works very well. And each day after a theory session we go into the arena and the session that follows is mostly for all the coaches that are watching to help them develop their I so they learn to distinguish causes from symptoms, to know what you might go for as a coach, what might be a bite sized chunk to work with that person on in a session. And people come out of that really having developed their eye. Well, we have normally three or four horses involved in these morning sessions, depending on the numbers on the course. And each horse is ridden each day by two people. So over three days we see each horse ridden by six different people. And this is always very illuminating. So one of the horses that we used on a recent teacher training course, and he's been on teacher training courses before, the people that host the course bred him and in fact, I think I was probably there when his mum was inseminated with him and there's a guy at this place who was there when this horse was born and has been his rider. I'm not sure he backed him, but he's been his rider for a number of years because this horse is now in his later teens, I think they became a bit like brothers and actually within that, rather like sparring partners. This guy is someone I'm very fond of and have known for quite a long while. He's a good rider and, and a good coach. But it didn't start easily between us. The first clinic of mine that he rode on, I didn't get to critical mass in convincing him. And it can be not easy to convince a guy with so much more strength, who's reliant on that strength to find another way. And I think he left the clinic going, yeah, this is for middle aged, nervous women, not real riders. I think after that clinic I rode one of his horses and I've ridden his horses at times over the years and to begin with, all I could do on one of his horses was walk, halt, transitions, because otherwise I was just going to get toed around the school on a very strong contact. So I would do walk halt until I had a chance of riding trot without getting dragged about. And I don't really think that this guy understood what was going on as I was doing that. A big turning point came for him when Heather Blitz came and stayed with them one summer. And she is an impressive rider with fabulous biomechanical skills. In fact, I think she's the best living example of the skills that I teach and has become a fabulous trainer building her training skills on top of her biomechanics skills. This guy found himself thinking I could take her down in a dark alley one night. How come she's able to get a better tune out of the horses than I can? And then he started having some lessons with her and then came back to having some lessons with me. And a whole world gradually opened up to him about feel, awareness, skill, lightness that he hadn't even known was there. The process of that learning took him from sitting on the back of his butt in a rather round backed way and leaning back with rather long dangly legs and forward feet to being as much more stacked up and organised rider supporting his body weight a whole load better. And he's always had a bit of a drama with one thigh where apparently his hip socket is not really properly formed. And that thigh, you know, has good reason for being problematic. The horse, now in his late teens, has a rather soggy middle third because his rider never got good at getting into slingshot as he's got progressively better. Things have changed. And I think the soggy middle third would have been that horse's default anyway. But the riders and the horse's defaults added together to keep him soggy in the middle for a long time. And when a horse is a real powerhouse as this one is, that makes it very difficult to control the forces that are coming from the back end somehow getting jiggled and wiggled and mashed about in the middle before they get to the front end. So we all watch as this horse got ridden by actually five different riders because his normal rider rode him at the beginning and at the end some changes to his right thigh. Recent discovery that I'd made was a very good fix to keep that thigh in the hip socket and keep it more where it could slingshot rather than being dangly. That was a good start. The next person that rode him did a pretty good job. She's the kind of rider who wouldn't rock the boat too much. She kept it calm. She was able to get the forces a little more organised in. It was good enough. The next person that rode him, this was the next day, revved him up. She's someone I don't know as well. Her skills are not as developed and it was a little bit borderline. This guy revs up easily and it's not a place you want to go. The next rider who rode him revved him down. She is not riding at the moment because she has a lame horse. She would be fairly careful, I think, and again not rock the boat in a big way. But she got more correctness out of him and actually defused his energy more than I have ever seen. The last rider, the last new rider really changed him. Now she's someone I've taught in a clinic a couple of weeks before this. She's actually the most up to date of these riders or on the deeper layers of the onion. And she did such a good job and got his middle third much more organised. Now, those of you who know my work will have realised, yes, I get how that middle third needs to be elongated through slingshot and she could do that. But she added another element to this and I want to explain it. It's similar. It builds on our image of the bell that hangs around the rider's neck and lifts at the front when she hollows, lifts at the back when she rounds, and the idea of karate chopping you in the middle. But we're now applying this to the horse and we're adding another myofascial line. That's another string of sausages in the way that muscles are both held together and kept apart by their casing, analogous to what happens with sausages. And this string of muscles is actually flattened sausages and it's the spiral line, or at least part of the spiral line. I'll talk it first of all through how it works on us from top to bottom. So if you go a bit up and back from your ears, you'll find two sticky out bits on your skull, the kind of like highest, backest places on your skull, a bit above and behind your ears. And if you went from there diagonally down in a V to the big vertebra at the bottom of your neck, and then from there the muscles go under your shoulder blade, spiralling around under your armpit, following the line of your ribs and ending up at your belly button. And from there they cross and go to your opposite hip. Now, that's not the entirety of the spiral line, which is quite complex in its whole length, but it's the Bit we need to know about. So you're going back of your head diagonally to what would be your withers if you were a horse, under your shoulder blades, around under your armpit to your belly button. And now let's think of that in the horse. But we're going to go the other way. Think from your belly button, around your ribs, under your shoulder blades to your withers. If you're a little bit clever, you might be able to run your hands along there and that would be worth doing. Belly button going forward, up and out to find your ribs around your sides, under your shoulder blades to the big vertebra of your wither. So when the horse hollows his back, the spiral line is also involved. And if it pulls in one direction, the vertebra behind the highest vertebra in front of the saddle at the withers, pull down and around towards the horse's belly button. And that's part of his hollow. It would also be part of your hollow. But if we think of them the other way round, if they pull from the belly button around the rib cage towards the withers, then we're pulling the belly button around to the withers and to continue our bell image, kind of really filling out the back of the bell and the back of the ribs. So this rider was able to take her attention to the horse's low back belly. Think of a line that will come around his ribs to pretty much the back corner of most saddle pads, under the saddle, towards her pubic bone, the pommel, the horse's wither. And to get that line, to put so much more stuffing under her butt, in front of her butt, out to the withers. And when this works well, the horse fills out under the tree, points and lifts and elongates the distance between your pubic bone and and the wither. It can be dramatic in its effect. It's almost like somebody blew up a little gym ball in front of your pubic bone and between the wither. It would be almost like somebody blew up a little gym ball that you were sitting on the back third of and that filled out in front of you under the pommel and out to the wither. Our rider had to tread a delicate line here because the horse was a little bit hyper and about being changed in this way. But she was able to find her way in there, keep herself breathing, keep him breathing and make the most wonderful difference. And then we were able to put his normal rider back on for him to feel that difference and hopefully to be able to build on it. One of the young women I told you about in a previous podcast who appears on Scrawny Thoroughbred after Scrawny Thoroughbred learnt this same same way of operating and was able in about six months to change her U necked, weak butt, rather hollow thoroughbred, into such a different horse with a butt, with a top line, with a crest reaching into the rein so much more consistently. It was a wonderful demonstration of how adding the spiral line to the idea of needing to elongate the back and shorten the tummy and also get the diaphragm more engaged, adding the spiral line can make a wonderful difference. I want to segue a little bit here to talk about some riders with injuries and how those injuries have affected their learning. So I'm thinking, first of all of one older lady. She's tiny, she'd make me look big. And she's always had a very dud looking right leg. So her right knee would go up, her right foot would go forward, her butt would slide to the left, she'd tend to pull on the right rein with her horse's nose going in as it jackknifes out through the wither. And she has a very suitable small, lightweight horse. I think she's in her 70s and we've dripped water on the rock with this right leg and made a fair amount of difference in this session. I kept asking her and I've asked her in the past, are you sure you've not had any injuries to that leg? And she kept going, no, no, I never have. One of the questions I asked her was, well, it started by thinking of a hose pipe. If you imagine that a hose pipe went down your back, got to just below the top of your pelvis and split into two hose pipes in an inverted Y. And each one went across the back, your pelvis and down the back outside thigh to the outside of your knee. And asking her how much water goes down each leg. There was a really big difference. It was, I think, a 75, 25 difference. So no wonder she was kind of falling off the 75 leg when that was on the outside and really gripping up more and more with the 25 leg. Asking her again, had there ever been an injury later in that lesson, she said, oh, you know what I've remembered? I was 13, riding bareback, cantering along the side of the fence, and there was a stallion in the next field and he careered across to the fence and reached over and bit my right thigh. Doesn't that sound horrendous? I mean, that's the kind of thing nightmares are made of. So she's had this injury for over 50 years, totally forgotten about it on one level, but her brain and her body patterning have not forgotten they've been protecting that leg. In fact, I rather think that leg was barely part of her body image. So one of the things I did in a light, kind, kind of way, was take my hands and tap her all the way down her thigh and her leg on the side, on the front, on the back, really trying to say to her brain, hello, there's a leg here, in the hope that when the brain got input, increased input from that leg, it would respond with increased output. And it did. When I repositioned that leg, she was able to maintain it so much more to even out the water, to improve her steering. It was a fabulous success. When I saw her a few months later, she'd held it really well. And we added another piece because the that side that was kind of so contracted and gripping up, her whole torso on that side lagged behind her torso on the other side. I had her put a couple of fingers of the side that lagged behind into the pommel slightly on the same side of that pommel, not in the centre, and think of pulling her torso forward. And I then had her make that same hand into a fist, put it behind her butt, between the butt and the cantle and push her torso forward. And that made it easier for her to kneel down that leg to keep more water, and became a change that I think she'll really be able to build on. Well, then, here are the stories of a couple of people. One had a really badly injured right side. I'm not sure what the injury was, but it really went all the way from her shoulder and collarbone, affecting her torso and into her thigh. And she'd been working on that really hard and made a substantial difference and kind of died on shock. When we got to the clinic, where I said to her, that side's doing really well, but your other side, the side that was the good side, and therefore the ignored side, just looks like a dangly leg. It can't hold its slingshot. We've got to get more structure into that side. And she was kind of going, what? Because that side had always been good enough, but the improvements on her bad side had turned it into the good side. And behold, she got the free gift that everybody gets when they have a new good side and that's a new bad side. So she had to reorganise the bad side and also really come to terms with this as her new status quo. The same was true of somebody else I teach who had Ms. And this affected one leg. She doesn't have it that badly. She's worked incredibly hard on that leg. She can control it. She's got it controlled to the degree that you've guessed it. The good leg is now less good than the revamped bad leg. So both of these riders had solved their problem, but hadn't realized they've solved their problem. And I'm not surprised that it took an outside eye to catch them up with current reality. I told you about a rider in a previous podcast with a very big, very kind of weighty horse who throws his weight about. He had some wonderful groundwork with a very skilled practitioner who would be really skilled on all of our essays. His stance, his state, his ability to sense the horse's state, the clarity of his signals, his ability to see and sense the horse's response and to stop at just the right moment, to cease release so the horse really gets it. And the day before I taught this person on her horse, he'd had a groundwork session and my rider got on going, oh my goodness, the way he feels in his ribcage. Now, we talked about the spiral lines at the beginning of this podcast, and sometimes one of those is really loose compared to the other, and it's long and soggy in a way that gets one side of the h horse's ribcage drooping down that side, corresponded to the thigh that this rider has always struggled with to get knee up, to get the arrowhead, to keep her body on the balance point. And suddenly she got on this day going, his ribcage is even. There's so much horse under my thigh. I've never felt that before. So almost out of the blue, not just a stroke of good luck. A stroke of good luck and supreme skill showed her a reality she'd never experienced before, where the rightness in the horse helped her fix an ongoing problem much more effectively and sense how it hadn't just been her problem, it was also the horse's problem. And the way their fascial nets had fitted around each other, that too showed her a reality that she hadn't even conceived might be possible. That was the moment that made such a profound difference to an issue that we'd been kind of dripping water on the rock on for a long time and changing, but not changing to this degree. Another rider on a very big, rather unathletic horse who she rides really quite well. I had not really seen the difference between this horse on the right rein and the left until she rode a change of rein that essentially was a serpentine loop, turning into the corner at the end of the long side and putting the horse on a rather small circle. She surprised me when she did it. And afterwards she said to me, well, I often use this term because I just find it gets him together. I mean, it's a kind of a forcing him around the corner with the walls. And when I saw him after that on the left rein, the tempo was quicker. He was able to lift himself up and ping off the ground in a way that on the right rein, he did much more easily. And that got us changing her, and her suddenly realizing that her seat bone on that side tended to slip down the side of the horse. And when she could hold her seat bone up, she helped him hold the change that he could make around that corner on the long sides and in other movements, it gave her an inroad that she could cash in on really quickly. And it's not often that I miss something like that in the horse. It was a profound learning moment where it was a school movement that really gave her the new inroad of being able to sense what was going on and quickly learn how to reorganize her body. There are always thrills and spills in any learning journey, and you never quite know where the next breakthrough is going to come from and when it's going to come, but to me, that's part of the fun. And they don't call me the breakthrough wizard for nothing. Have fun with your horses. Enjoy your riding. I'll be back soon.