How To Influence Your Horse's Back

Hello there. I'm Mary Wanlis, founder of the Rider Biomechanics movement, author of the Ride with your mind books, and most recently the Rider biomechanics book. My aim in life is to show riders how to ride with more awareness, feel and skill so they have more fun with their horses, they learn more, they know they're learning and improving and, and they build their skills in an ethical, enjoyable way. We're about to be offering a new webinar series here on collection and impulsion and I want to make it clear to you that this is for everybody. Collection really just starts with being able to ride a good walk, halt, transition, to control the speed of your horse's legs in walk and in trot. And it builds from there, of course, all the way potentially to piafre massage with many stages along the way. So within this series we're hoping to elucidate some of those stages in bite sized chunks in a way that really helps you build your skill, really gets maybe your whizzy on the forehand horse more cooperative and rideable and begins to show you what is possible for normal, ordinary people when they learn in this way. I think of the rider's skill as having components rather like puzzle pieces. And one of the trickiest puzzle pieces to learn, do and explain is what we call suction. This little demo that I'm going to do, I recommend you do alongside me because in many ways it says it better than loads of words. So if you put your hand like this and we're going to imagine this hand is the horse, here's his spinal processes, the other hand goes on top, here's you, the rider. So if the top hand pushes down heavily on the bottom hand, like I'm doing at the moment, it's going to be clear that its effect on the bottom hand is not going to be very good. The horse is going to tend to hollow, things will go wrong. Just resting the top hand on the bottom hand is one stage better. You could, as the rider who's the top hand, be thinking, I must stretch my legs down, I must stretch them down and almost be going down and out and down and out and down and out and down and out in a way that's virtually the opposite of suction. So with the one hand on the other, you can do the opposite of that. And can you use the skin on your top hand to pick up the skin on your bottom hand? Now obviously your hands and your skin know how to do this in a way that your thighs and your backside and underneath don't quite know, but they can learn. So realize this can work. Now, if one thigh was on and one thigh was off, you could do it with one side of the horse and not other. If neither thigh was on, then you couldn't begin to do it at all. And it's really also not about just getting your knees and doing that and grabbing with your knees. It's a drawing up that goes from your knee in the top of your boot, in the underside of your thigh to the underside of your butt that can have the most incredible effect. And it starts obviously by learning to support your own body weight. But there's the quality in the muscles once you get to happen, that's even more than that. Our first live webinar is the 22nd of June. We'd love to see you there. We're doing three live webinars and two that we're going to pre record. They run from June through September monthly. We'd love to see you there. So we're going to be covering basics from how do you get the horse on the bit and what does that mean anyway? Can you draw his back up? Can you get his head and neck to reach in the rain? Can you control the speed of his step steps? Can you ride viable up and down transitions between the gates and also transitions within the gate? What is a half halt and how do you learn to do one? There's a real big one for you and these meaty topics and others. We're looking forward to covering and making really accessible for you in the webinars and I'll look forward to seeing you then.