Ep. 8 On stirrup length and posture stools

Hello, I'm Mary Wandlis WELcoming you to podcast eight in our series. I think we should start by figuring out another version of weird. So, so far you've learned the weirdness of bear down and balloon breathing and the weirdness of making the length of your front match the length of your back where your seat bones point down. And most of you pretty certainly began from a hollow back place with your chest two up your front too long. What we haven't talked about so far is the length of your stirrups. And to assess this, you're going to need someone able to take a photograph or a set of mirrors or something so you can get some objective external feedback. And you need someone to take a photograph of you from the side directly, 90 degrees on, and then you're looking at that photograph going, how vertical or horizontal is my thigh bone? We want to get your stirrups organized so your thigh bone is at 45 degrees, which is halfway between horizontal and vertical. So imagine your thigh bone rather like the bone in a leg of lamb. And if you're not a meat eater, I apologize for that. On many pairs of britches, the seam line of the britches is lined up with your thigh bone. But. But it's not always. The manufacturers of britches, I think, have got more creative on where they put the seams in recent years. What you also need to know about your thigh bone is it starts from under your kneecap and it goes to a bony nobble on your panty line where the outside of your thigh becomes your pelvis. Now, you want to be able to find this novel, and you could do this if you stand up for a moment now while you're listening to this and put your hands on where you think. I'm talking about realising that this is not the top of your pelvis. At the level of the point of your hip, you have to go down to where your thigh comes into your torso at your panty line. Put your fingers on your side there on each side, and the bony knobble may be very obvious to you already. If it's not, lean your torso to one side and you should feel how the bone becomes clear under your fingers on that side. Now, this nobble is actually the greater trochanter of the femur. We talk about it as the trochanter. It's really one of the very few anatomical names you need to know. And at that point, your thigh bone makes a change of angle and turns inwards to get into your hip socket. So we're really looking at the line from under your kneecap to that bony nobble. And you need to assess the Is that more horizontal than 45 degrees or is it more vertical than 45 degrees? Now, if you're an eventing or jumping rider, you probably tend to have it more horizontal, and indeed, if you really are jumping, it needs to be more horizontal than that. If you're a dressage rider, or if you spent your life trying to stretch your leg down and push your heels down, you probably have your stirrups where your thigh bone is more vertical than that. You've probably seen the woodcuts that date back to, I'm not sure which century, but they would have some guy with a pointy hat point at the front and a point at the back, and he's very often holding a stick, holding that stick up in one hand and he's got very big spurs on, and his horse has a very severe bit with a long shank. And that rider would have his legs virtually vertical with barely a bend in his knee. And that's because at that point in time, they couldn't make the armour so your knee could bend. And once people stopped wearing armour, that literally straight leg went out of fashion. But a lot of riders ride nowadays as if that's what they think they should be doing. When your thigh bone's at 45 degrees, we want the angle behind your knee to be around 90 degrees so that your heel is ends up under your hip. Now, what this really means is the nobble in your ankle, and I'm sure you know what I mean by that. There's a very obvious nobble on the inside and the outside of your ankle. The nobble in your ankle is then directly underneath the nobble you just found on the outside of your thigh and your pantomime. And what that means is that your thigh and your calf between them make what I call an arrowhead shape with your knee as the point of the arrow. Now, this 45 degree thigh is actually really important, and you could maybe understand it a little bit if you stand up and put yourself in a martial arts position. Now, that means your torso is vertical, your front is the same length as your back, you've got a bend in your knee, your heel is under your hip and you stand there for a while. And if you do, it probably won't take long before your thighs start hurting, and they'll start to hurt in your quads, which are the muscles at the front of your thigh. That's because your thigh is working really hard to hold your torso in place in a way, it wouldn't work hard if you just stood up with your thigh and your whole leg vertical as well as your torso. It's the same thing on the saddle. If you get to sit in the right kind of place and way with your thigh at this 45 degree angle in a way that makes your inside underside thigh part of the sitting surface, then you might well end up knowing that you're doing it. So let's imagine your thigh more horizontal than that 45 degrees. Very often the rider that does this is round backed. She's in an armchair seat. Her heel might be down and forward. It's not likely to be nobble to knobble in the lineup. And that rider has most of her weight on her butt, maybe pushing into her heels as well. But it's the butt and the heels that take most of her weight. And the weight that's on her butt is centered down the hollow of the horse's back. Because where you're sitting, where your seat bones are and a bit behind your seat bones is where the horse would really tend to hollow his back. And with your weight down that hollow, you're going to create or perpetuate that hollow. Even though you are relatively light and the horse weighs so much more than you do. If you were to get yourself neutral, your seat bones pointing down, your nobbles lined up your shoulder shoulder seam at the top over the novel of the trochanter, over the ankle nobble, and you're sitting with your thigh in this arrowhead shape, your weight gets to be spread down your thigh and not concentrated down in the hollow of the horse's back. The other way it could get concentrated in that hollow is if your thigh is vertical. Either way you're going to create or perpetuate that hollow. And when the weight is spread down through your thigh as part of the sitting surface, then you're being a very different kind of burden. And as you showed, just by standing in that martial arts position, your thigh gets to do one heck of a lot of work. And actually it's acting as a lever. Now, you don't really need to understand the physics of this, but the weight that's acting down at your knee gets to counterbalance the weight of your upper body and you are less dead weight down the hollow. The horse can carry you so much easier. The reality is you are working harder in order to be an easier burden to carry. So you may have seen the introduction to this video that involves me sitting on a posture stool. There's a Vast difference to sitting on one of those stools that are good for your posture compared to sitting in a chair. And to think of sitting like you're on one of those stools or like you're kneeling is a really good way to think. Now, along with this, your foot needs to just rest in the stirrup and not press. So I'm away here that we could be slaying some sacred cows. Perhaps you've invested an awful lot of time, energy and money learning to grow tall. Stick your chest out, stretch your legs down and push your heels down. The way people respond to those words and the way that riding coaches and instructors say good when really they shouldn't, has kind of led you up a bit of a gum tree. I'm sorry, it's just how it is. All I'm doing here is going by physics. I have not invented a new way to ride. I am just the person, the messenger, bearing the message of how the biomechanics work and what it is elite riders are doing that they don't know they're doing, so that you too can learn to cooperate with the laws of physics and make your riding so much more horse friendly. With your weight spread down through your thigh, with your foot light, you're a different kind of burden. And let's do a little exercise here. Have your feet flat on the floor. Push down in one foot. Notice when you push down in your foot, what happens to the seat bone on that same side? You will almost certainly find that that seat bone goes up. Now, this is Newton's third law of motion, which says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. You make a push down with your foot, you experience a push up which lifts your seat bone. Try, just for interest, pushing down in the other foot. Now, you may find when you do this again, that the seat bone on that side lifts, but that it doesn't feel as familiar. Isn't it interesting that you knew within your body mind exactly which foot to push down in in order to activate your asymmetry? Because the chances are you push a little harder in that stirrup and you do lift your seat bone a little bit on that side and probably lean in the opposite direction. As soon as you push down in the other foot, you kind of go, oh, that's weird. So here you are, a new version of weird. But I'm just illustrating the point with this, really, that when you push down with your heels, you tend to go up with your seat bones and you want your foot to just rest and not press. We could Say that riders tend to brace into their feet and horses tend to brace into the bit. We don't want this to happen from either party. When you just rest and you don't press in the stirrup, you change a lot of how the biomechanics work. And over the years, I've met a number of riders. I remember one who confessed to me that she would wake up in the middle of the night with pains in her feet, and during the first clinic she did with me, and she stopped pushing down in her stirrups. Those pains diminished and very soon went away entirely. Your feet and your ankles should not hurt when you're riding, but it's not unlikely that your thighs will hurt. Your inside thighs and your quads are working hard. Your back should not hurt. And actually, a lot of the riders who are growing too tall and lifting their chest are hollowing in their back in a way that scrunches the back of the discs and can ultimately lead to back pain. Your back may respond a little bit and feel a bit strange when you start changing yourself from your starting point to the length of your front matches the length of your back. But you shouldn't have any enduring back pain when you ride. If you're biomechanically in a good place. I'm sure you know enough, both through your experience as a rider and from these podcasts and me talking about weird and losing fillings and how everything feels bigger than they look, that when you alter your stirrups, it's going to feel dramatic. If you take them up, you're going to end up feeling like a jockey. Maybe only if it's one hole and lower above that's less than half an inch or less than a centimetre, but it feels huge. If you've had to take your stirrups down, you're going to feel like your leg is really long and wobbly and you're going to feel unstable and realise that your knee has to go lower down on the saddle for your foot to at least be flat on the stirrup as it rests there reasonably securely. You can get away without heel down, but you don't want to be on tiptoe and you have to drop your knee to get that to happen. So you now have this very different leg. And I want to tell you a story which you may even struggle to believe. And this concerns Sandy Howard, who was a rider in the American teams back in the 80s. I met her in the 90s and she told me the story of how, after her first lesson, when we Took her stirrups up four holes sometime after that. She was riding horses one day and her old working student, who'd been her groom in the time that she was on the team came to visit and they kind of said hello to each other. And this woman sat down by the side of the arena and watched Sandy riding. And at the end of working this horse when she got to free walk on a long rein, just cooling the horse off, her old groom said to her, and this is a gosh Sandy, I've never seen your leg look so long. Now the reality is that Sandy stirrups are, were four holes shorter. But the look was very different from a rather lewdly long, wavy on her toe reaching, flappy, loose kind of lower leg. She had a lower leg that held its angles in that kind of martial arts type posture. And that was more as it were stuffed, stable and still. And it was the stuffing, really, the extra stuffing as opposed to the noodliness that made the leg firmer and made her old groom believe from this that it must be longer. Whereas the reality was her stirrups were four holes shorter. It's also great to remember a quote now this was said by Lars Seederholm who was a Swedish rider who came to live in the uk. He was a very good event rider and a very well known trainer. And he once said the rider's roll is to be a framework around the horse and not a load on the top of the horse. And when you get this 45 degree thigh, the thigh weight bearing the foot back under you, the foot light, your torso in neutral supporting your own body weight, you get to be that framework rather than being weight down the hollow of the horse's back. For this to work really well, you may well need to rotate your thighs in more. Especially if your beginning point is a round backed rider and you can reach one hand underneath the back of your thigh, grab your britches close to the saddle, pull your britches in your thigh a little bit away from the saddle as you rotate your thigh in. And that kind of makes it feel like the front of the thigh bone comes more into the saddle. Because for you to be this framework and not just to load on top of the horse, you, your thigh has to be weight bearing in that way of sitting like kneeling. So many of you will have started out as hollow backed and it's interesting to think about riders who do that. And let's have you grow tall as you sit watching this a minute. Grow tall. Grow really tall. Grow really, really, really tall. You're Lifting your chest, lifting your ribs, lifting your chin. And at this point in time, you can probably realise you're not breathing, you've overdone up. And it's an interesting thing to think about that when babies start to sit in a sitting posture, their center of gravity is close to where their heart is, just near their sternum in their ribcage. When they get to be toddlers standing, their center of gravity needs to move down and their center of strength and organization and control needs to move down to the pelvic area. But not all of us accomplish this as well as we could. And if you end up with your chest two up and your center of gravity two up, you don't have that martial arts kind of stability and organization that you really need. There's more to this than just dropping your chest, dropping your ribs, becoming a box. And an image that explains it really well has the idea of your torso being like a French press or cafetiere coffee maker. You may have one of these, or you've probably seen the round glass jug in a metal holder. You put in your coffee grounds, you pour in your water, you put the lid on and the lid has a vertical sticking up handle to a plunger. And once your coffee has brewed, you push that plunger down so the coffee grounds go down to the bottom of the jug and you can drink the coffee. If you think of your torso like that coffee jug and imagine you have a plunger inside you, many women especially, and especially if you're an upper chest breather who struggled with balloon breathing, the fix involves pushing down the plunger. So you imagine this plunger inside you on every in breath, you want to draw it down on every out breath, you want to hold it down, you want to think of getting your plunger down to bikini line level as if the coffee grounds were down in your pelvis. Below that, you're still hung in a harness, but your center of gravity is lower. There's an interesting thing that I'm fascinated by as well, which is tennis players. The strongest tennis players who hit the ball hardest are the biggest grunters. And the guys normally grunt really well. A lot of the women don't grunt, they screech. I would love to work as a coach with some of those women to get their plunger down, get their center of gravity down, get their pelvis to be their centre of power, energy, control. And if they got that, they would get a much lower huh, rather than a of a screech. And I'm absolutely sure that hitting would be More solid as a result. So, to recap, we're trying to get you to be a box. You're breathing down your plunger, down your chest, down. Remember, it gets to aim to somewhere near the horse's ears or brow band or eyes. Even though you've got this low centre of gravity, you're hung in a harness. Your thighs and your calves make the arrowhead shape. Your feet rest lightly. That means your chest and your knees are closer together than you're used to. Paradox is you've shrunk everything towards your middle. Your chest is lower, your knees are more out in front of you. If you started with your stirrups too long, yet you're still hung in a harness, along with your low centre of gravity and the tennis equivalent of a huh, which goes with your bear down. This will give you the kind of stability that a talented, confident woman would have and many men would naturally have. So I invite you to play with these ideas, to take a photograph of yourself before and after from the sides, and realise too, that if you join our Rider Biomechanics series coming on Dressage Training tv, you can send us those photographs for our feedback and we can get you deadlined up in the place where you need to be. But when you look at those photographs for yourself, ask yourself, if the horse were taken out from underneath me by magic, would I land on the riding arena on my feet and stay there? Would I topple back? Would I topple forward? If you can answer that question and also double check your torso's a box, you'll be making a great start. Have fun with this. I hope you'll experiment with it, I hope you'll do the photographs and I'll be back with you soon. These podcasts are linked to two other Internet sites. One is dressagetraining tv, which hosts a whole variety of webinars taught by myself, Mary Wanlis and my colleague Ali Wakelin, where we're working live with a variety of horses and riders, showing them the basics of biomechanics and helping them build their skill and train their horses, and explaining to the audience as we do this. There's also a groundwork certification course on that site based on the work of Dr. Andrew MacLean and Equine Learning Theory. And this too gives you a step by step guide to building your skills. We'd also love you to take a look@justgiving.com and then to search Overdale to find the Justgiving page for Overdale Equestrian Centre, which is my UK home base here in this time of lockdown in 2020. We have 10 school horses eating, of course, and pooping and doing all the things that horses do, and no income to support those horses. And whilst they're having a wonderful time for this is something of a stress. And if you've enjoyed these webinars or enjoyed these podcasts and benefited from them and you're willing to give any small or large amount to our Just Giving page, we would be so grateful. Many thanks to you.