Ep. 9 On how you cannot not influence, and maps.

Hello, it's Mary Wanlis here welcoming you to podcast number nine. In our previous one, I invited you to adjust your stirrup length so your thigh was at 45 degrees, which is halfway between horizontal and vertical. And I'm wondering how you got on with that change. And even a change of just one hole, if your stirrups go up, can leave you feeling like a jockey. And if your stirrups go down, can leave you feel like you're floundering with no stable base of support. But I want to tell you a story about stirrup length, which I think is brilliantly illustrative. And it's about a clinic I taught a number of years ago at a big riding centre in America. The owner was a Grand Prix rider of some renown. Her head girl also rode Grand Prix. There was then several more senior coaches below her and some more junior coaches and then some of the boarders or livery owners, as we'd say here in the uk. And all of these layers were part of the clinic. Now, the renowned rider, her stirrups were the right length and elite riders can get an extra 5 degrees towards vertical, so they might have a 50 degrees from horizontal and 40 degrees from vertical and they can still make their biomechanics work well. But she was certainly within that 40, 45 degree range. Her head girl had her stirrups up a bit longer and her stirrups went up one hole. The group of more senior instructors, their stirrups went up two holes. The group of more junior instructors, their stirrups went up three holes. The group who were the boarders and the riders taking lessons there, their stirrups went up four holes. Now, there was one exception to this, who was a young woman who had just left school and joined the team there. The coaching team, who had been riding there since she was younger and who had been on some of the young riders interstate competitions. So you can imagine she'd had both a lot of tuition and was in her own right, pretty talented. Her stirrups were the right length. Now that's interesting, isn't it? So somewhere in her looking right, nobody had tried to make her more right by lengthening her stirrups. But the further away you got from the elite rider with really good biomechanics, the more people had said, you need your stirrups longer. Stretch your leg down, you need to stretch your leg down more. Stretch it down even more, stretch it down even more until we get to that four hole difference. Now, this really says something about the instructors there trying to fix A problem in the wrong way and not looking at the elite rider going, okay, she looks like so and so. So we need to make everybody look like that now. In other sports, there's often a huge amount of attention paid to angles within the body. After the London Olympics, I remember reading an article about Hussain Bolt and how was it that he could sprint so fast when actually he was a lot taller than most sprinters. And the conclusion of the article, which looked at various angles, was that he lent his upper body forward more. But in riding, anything goes. It's like you can lean back, you can be vertical, you can have your stirrups longer, you can have your stirrups shorter. There are all these possibilities that you're allowed, and yet the laws of physics are not that forgiving. And my experience is that horses respond with such immediacy and accuracy and delicacy to how you're organized on them, that it really, really matters to them and the quality of their movement, their posture, their carriage, how we organize ourselves. And yet we choose to blink and miss this much of the time and give ourselves a leeway that actually we don't deserv deserve. I'm going to suggest to you that the rider cannot not influence whatever else we think we're teaching our horse and whatever agenda we might have in our conscious mind, we cannot not influence through how effectively or not we support our body weight. Are you a sack of potatoes? Or are you a rider who wants to be picked up? Or are you a rider who's been picked up and is. So you're just perching? Is your center of gravity over the horse's center of gravity? Is it ahead of it? Is it behind it? Is the horse effectively having to drag you along? And are you using the reins as support for the fact that you're not matching, matching, matching, matching the forces of his movement in every stride? How effectively can you match those forces? How stable are you? Are you a wiggly, jiggly rider, a wibbly, wobbly one? Or. Or are you one who's more shovey and un in the way you do things? Then how about your asymmetry? The horse cannot not notice that. And most versions of the horse not turning in one direction come down to the rider. So if you begin to appreciate that you cannot not influence just through how you're sat on the saddle, you begin to have a level of responsibility which most riders, I think, really and tr. Truly don't want to have. They just rather negate that whole influence and cut themselves a whole load of slack. So let's ask a question here. We're looking at a horse and rider and we're looking at, let's say, some pretty good work. If we do percentages, to what percentage do you think the rider is responsible for for this rather good outcome and to what percentage do you think it's a factor of the horse? Give me the first two numbers that come into your head, off the top of your head. They're going to be the most accurate. A lot of people, well, 50, 50 maybe. I'm going to tell you that it's down to 80 rider, 20 horse, and that's giving the rider a huge amount of influence. And you may have had the experience within a lesson of your teacher saying, okay, get off, let me get on, and she gets on, and within a few minutes has transformed your horse from a bit of an ugly duckling and maybe a rather stroppy character into much more of a swan. And you're there with your mouth open. It is of course possible that your instructor gets on and goes, ooh, yeah, this is not actually so easy. And it takes her a little while longer to make a difference. And I always wonder which is the good news and which is the bad news that your instructor got on and within a very short time has transferred, transformed your horse into something wonderful. This means you're really seeing his potential, but also being forced to, within our 80, 20 idea, go, oh, maybe I was 80% responsible for the not good work in the same way that she's 80% responsible for this now remarkably good work. And if your teacher gets on and goes, ooh, this is really quite tricky and can't change what's happening in your horse's body so easily. Is this the good news or. Or the bad news? In a way, your struggles have been validated, but at the same time, you know the changes that you need to make are going to be harder than they would have been if your horse was basically more up for it. And within that, maybe less physically challenged because his uncomfortableness with what the more skilled rider is doing and what might be his, if you like, rideability score could well be factored by issues within his tissues. And that can take a little bit of undoing and often requires skilled bodywork. So who is responsible? And when you begin to put your hand up and go, okay, I get it. My wiggless, my shoviness, my asymmetry, my not caught up to the balance point. This is a huge amount of what's going on here. I honour this, I accept this. This is Day one of attempting to change it. The level of responsibility you're doing then is huge. And if you're taking this on board, I applaud you for it. So our culture is not always making it terribly easy to make the kind of changes you need to make. Sometimes I think within the way riding is popularly described, it's almost as if somebody's there in New York, but they've been given a map of Chicago and they're trying to find their way around and stuff just doesn't add up and they can't figure out why it doesn't add up. And sooner or later they're either exasperated, frustrated and angry, or they're kind of lost and a bit depressed and giving up. The more accurate the map you get to follow, the more you can find where you need to be and get where you want to go and pinpoint, as we've said so many times, your starting point is as you begin your journey. But if you're given a wrong map, it can make you feel really stupid, even though the reality is that you're not stupid. And I often think that our typical map of riding things like stretch your heels down, push your heels down, stretch your legs down, grow tall, really is like being given such a reduced map, almost as if the riders are stupid. We have to make it so simple for them, so they'll get it. So let's reduce it down to these few elements. But actually those few elements have so many emissions and so many inaccuracies, they're like the wrong map and they make intelligent people who'd really like to go for it look stupid. Do you get what I mean? The aim of helping out the stupid people makes ordinary and intelligent and well meaning and really keen people begin to look stupid because the information they're being given is so reduced and scrambled. Now, let's look at this from another standpoint. This is one of my favourite ways of talking to coaches about the way things that go wrong in coaching can be rejigged in a way that has them go right. Let's suppose a really good rider has a really good ride one day and discovers something that he or she would like to teach to their favourite working student. That was a right brain experience. So the right brain hemisphere specialises more in rhythm, feeling, making a body state that is maybe not so easy to describe in words, but the teacher has to put it into words in order to talk to her student about it. So we have a translation from the right brain the to the left brain word. The student hears the Left brain words and from those words has to make a right brain feeling. Now the question is what are the probabilities that she is going to end up making a feeling that's not so far off the feeling that the teacher wanted to convey? And within that schema of from the right brain of the teacher to her left brain to the left brain of the student to her right brain, where do we have the possibility of slippage? So first of all, between the feeling and the words used to describe the feeling, there are massive possibilities of slippage. Come back to our ABCs and our XYZs. Whereabouts in the Alphabet does that feeling come from? And whereabouts in the Alphabet does the student need to be? How big is that difference? Is a student who needs A, B, C being told to do X? Within that, within that presupposition, the teacher is effectively teaching someone that she imagines is just like her. And if there's a man to woman difference here we might have a guy with 35% higher muscle tone than women who just imagines that everybody's body has the solidity and the huh that he does. And most women are much more loosey, bloopy, bloopy, bloopy. And those wiggles and jiggles are a huge factor in having things go wrong. That presupposition that it's the same kind of body as his kind of body really cannot be made. So the rider might be saying do X. The rider might be saying do what I do effectively. And the rider might be just saying do nothing, just sit. I just sit there. I do nothing. Now we've said this before, but let's explain it a rather different way. If you go into a room and that room has a smell in it, nice or nasty, you'll smell it strongly at first. After you've been in the room for a little while, you'll stop smelling that smell and you have to go out of the room, breathe some fresh air before you go back into the room and smell it again. That's the same kind of thing with feelings. The person who no, I'm just sitting, I'm doing nothing, just sit here is basically telling you, I don't smell this anymore. It's a nothing. So if you're there trying to think, do nothing, do nothing. Especially in a body that's more wibbly wobbly than the very solid guy who thinks his nothing is in fact Nothing when it's 35% more than your nothing. For stability. If you're just do nothing, do nothing, you're going up a gum tree. And every time anybody ever says to just sit, do nothing, just think to yourself, they don't smell it anymore. And that's all the information you're being given, literally. So between do x do nothing and the presupposition that you are just like the teacher coming from her start point as you learn, this new feeling can really mean that from her right brain feeling to her left brain words, there's a whole load of slippage. And then from her left brain words to your left brain hearing, there can be a load of slippage. I have a friend who swears to me that the beginning of the end of her marriage was the day she sat opposite the fireplace to her husband and said, my toes are really cold. And he thought she said, you're really old. I don't know if that's true or not, but she certainly had no reason to lie to me. My editor, in the process of working on the book for the Good of the Rider, where I wrote about this, she told the story of being on a London bus when a passenger asked the conductor to tell him when they got to London Bridge. And the conductor went and looked at the timetable and came back and said, we'll be there at 9:36. And the passenger said, no, no, no, please will you tell me when we get to London Bridge? And the conductor went, 9:36. And the passenger went, no, no, no, please, I'd like you to tell me when we arrive. And the conductor went, 9:36. And of course, what the passenger wanted was to be told, we're at London Bridge now. This is where you need to get off. Another story I heard a while ago, I love this one. Was a big American family. At Thanksgiving, the extended family always got together and one of the aunts made a wonderful banana pudding. And this particular year the aunt couldn't come. And three brothers and cousins in their teens decided they were going to make this banana pudding. And they were staying in a big place with more than one kitchen. So these kids get sent off to another kitchen with the ingredients. And a while afterwards of the aunt thought, perhaps we ought to check out what's going on up there. So up she went to this other kitchen and there's these three boys pouring over the recipe. And they have three bowls in front of them with one egg in each bowl. And one of the first lines of the recipe says, three eggs separated, and they're kind of stuck because they don't know what to do next. So they separated the three eggs, but had no understanding at all that within this context, it meant separate the yolks from the whites. So there are so many ways that from the hearing, from the saying to the hearing, so much can go wrong. And cell phones have largely obliterated at least some of this. So you might have thought that you were going to meet at 10 o' clock at the post office and someone else thought it was 11 o' clock outside the bank. But nowadays with cell phones, there's much less ambiguity than there used to be. So if you've heard the language, you're then left as the rider trying to make a feel out of this language. And the question is, how successful are you? And on the whole, I think the answer will be that this works maybe 20% of the time, if we're lucky. I'm going to tell you about a story that's always stuck in my mind from a day in the 1980s. Early on in this work, I was a freelance teacher teaching around the London fringes. And of course, my working premise had to be, I teach whatever the weather or I never would have earned anything. And you had the option to take a dismounted session with me, maybe on a static saddle or some sports psychology stuff, whatever you wanted to do if the weather was bad. But I didn't cancel. So here I was to teach a lesson in this place, and it was pouring with rain, and the woman definitely wanted to do a ridden lesson. And we waited as long as I could afford to wait. And then I said, we're going to do this, we have to do it now. So we go out in the rain. I'm in the middle of the arena with an umbrella. She has a big raincoat on that comes down to her knees. I really can't see much at all. I can see, you know, her head and neck out the top of the raincoat and the horse's front end and the horse's back end. But the information I really need is obscured. And we don't stop very often because, you know, when you're pouring with rain, you tend to just keep going. And instructors with an umbrella are not terribly horse friendly. So there's lessons going on. And at some point in the lesson, a big grin spread all over her face. I could see that the horse's carriage really changed. And she said to me, I feel like a meringue. And I stood in the middle of the arena thinking, like a meringue, what the heck is this? And I really didn't understand, but she'd given me the script. So in coaching, I kept going, kept make the meringue feeling. This is good. Doing it. Oops, you're losing the meringue feeling now. Be careful as you come around the corner. You've got to keep meringue around the corner. That's good. Oops, you've lost it. Can you refine meringue? And we did the whole of the rest of the lesson and at the end of the lesson, as we were both drying out in the tack room, I said to her, tell me about being a meringue. And she said to me, I used to feel like suet pudding, which is a very heavy pudding made with beef suet rather than butter or margarine or anything, and it sits in your stomach a bit like lead. So she had gone from being too down heavy to. To supporting her body weight well. But I couldn't see enough of how this happened. But it was a great example of how the brain learns. By contrast, once I understood a continuum between suet pudding at the heavy end and meringue at the light end, I had an idea of how to keep teaching her, even though I didn't understand. This hints at the way out of our problem of slippage. And in our next podcast I'm going to explain that to you more. Meanwhile, have fun with your horses. 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 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 Just Giving 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 us, 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 or large amount to our Just Giving page, we would be so grateful. Many thanks to you.