Episodes
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We do two more exercises, as I encourage you to realise the immense value of the off-horse exercises that are part of my approach to learning and coaching. We then revisit some more of the common traps in learning, before focussing in on ‘flow’. This experience/brain state more than doubles your rate of learning, and makes it so much more fun. That fun is based on brain chemistry of small wins, and that in turn is based on noticing. I finish by quoting T. S. Eliot: ‘We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and to know the place for the first time.’ This is my wish for you.
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I was right all of those years ago when I thought there was something my teachers weren’t telling me! But this is innate in the human condition, where we pass through conscious competence before we become unconscious of our incompetence, and no longer have words to describe our skill. My aim is to stay conscious enough to remember feelings and words, and to leave a trail for others to follow. This podcast contains my main tips for enhancing your learning, beginning with ‘seek out good information’…
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Episodes manquant?
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We have talked about asymmetry patterns being rotational, but it can be more helpful - and with some riders more accurate - to think of one third of the body being sheared forward, whilst the other is sheared back. This distinction suggests some new pushes and pulls on the saddle (or furniture) which help to mitigate it. It also leads us to think about how we transition from ‘turning like a bus’ to ‘bend’. A lot is presupposed in the concept of ‘bend’, which is so often misrepresented like a simple skill rather, than the sophisticated strategy it really is.
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One of my pupils broke her upper arm in a fall, and damaged her wrist and elbow. After surgery and recuperation she returned to riding, and found herself with a total reversal in her asymmetry! This very rarely happens, and the story of how we worked with it is illuminating. It also provides a good review of the basic principles of how an asymmetrical human interacts (for good or ill) with an asymmetrical horse!
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Many riders spend their life stuck in ‘one side on/one side off’. Others ‘ping-pong’ between right on/left off and left on/right off. Few people discover how to get ‘both sides on’ consistently. Once they have this, they can learn how to make a wider, higher, more supportive long back muscle on the side where the horse would only have a ‘sloping roof’. We do an exercises to show you how this profound level of influence works, and another to get you clearer about the anatomy of your underneath, and the part of it that sits across those long back muscles.
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Most people have a strength differential between their two boards, and don’t address this well - so as the weaker one becomes stronger, the stronger one gets in on the act and also gets stronger! But ‘bad sides’ do eventually become ‘good sides’, leaving the rider very confused. Ideally any asymmetry fix would involve both sides of the body, but the rider’s limited ‘brain space’ might make this impossible for a long time.
The horse has two boards and three thirds just like the rider. If he were symmetrical, sitting on him would be like sitting on an oil drum, but he may have one long back muscle that’s like a flat roof whilst the other is like a sloping roof. The issues of steering are not yours alone - the sloping roof temps your seat bone on that side to slide away from the midline. -
I love the analogy of ‘both boards on’ being like two people both fighting to sit on the same bar stool, but neither one must push the other one off!
The top, middle or bottom of both or either board can be weak, and we have exercises to help with each possibility. But you can expect to be discovering more and more about your boards, and refining how they work, as the years go by. My discovery and understanding of the ‘narrow/wide paradox’ took a while, but it shows us so much about how human beings can maximise their ability to influence horses for the better. -
On a circle, an ice skater pushes off one foot and glides on the other as her body makes a dancer’s arabesque. She faces her torso to the outside, and if she were to allow it to rotate in, she would spiral out on the turn and fall over. In a fencing lunge, the fencer is in a similar position, and with both feet on the ground she is perhaps more like the rider. ‘Fencing lung position’ puts the rider’s outside seat bone back, though conventional theory just talks about the outside leg being back. If you imagine sitting on a clock face with 12 as the horse’s head and 6 as his tail, your outside seat bone needs to be at 7o’clock on a right circle, and 5 o’clock on a left circle. The ‘boards exercise’ teaches you a lot about your asymmetry goes right into your core - and shows you how to fix this.
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Hopefully the stretch from last time leaves you feeling that you can fill out your concave side and rotate it forward, making it more sturdy. We add to this effect, and explore wether one side of your pelvis rotates back more easily than the other, and wether one point of hip aims more in towards your midline. These explorations can lead to discoveries that suggest viable solutions to the asymmetry and steering issues that all riders face. The golden rule, as ever, is ‘get to know your starting point’!
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It is a challenge to create an equally snug and symmetrical ‘A frame’ with your thighs, and it’s important to ride with your stirrups level. The only exception is if you have a difference in leg length that is structural (eg. a break that was badly set) rather than functional. Horses’s can have an uneven bulge to their rib cage, and this means that you have to have a fool-proof way of measuring your stirrup length. Hopefully suggesting an unusual and profound stretch that you can easily do in a stable (using the stable door) will encourage you to actually do it!
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Riders pull on the inside rein again and again, even though they know they shouldn’t, and often they feel helpless about doing anything else. Left to themselves, horses tend to fall in - think of horse A going at speed towards his mate horse B in a field, and it is us humans who make them fall out. In rider/horse steering issues, one can well ask, ‘Who is the chick and who is the egg?’ Horses can change their asymmetry within minutes of a new rider getting on. Experimenting with how your body side bends and rotates helps you to diagnose the issues that you bring to the partnership.
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Whilst some people seem to be blissfully ignorant of the difference between riding in each direction, others are tortured by their experience of the ‘difficult rein’. When I ask people what they have been taught bout how to turn I get a variety of ‘interesting’ answers.
You could well argue that straightness should have come before collection in these podcasts, as it does in the scales of training. But any attempt to make a non-linear subject linear will have flaws, and the elite riders I studied in my degree dissertation actually addressed straightness before anything else. We desperately need a 3D model that spirals in on the ideal, acknowledging the many iterations that lead us towards it by successive approximation.
Thinking of steering your horse along an imaginary line, so that he does not jack-knife at the withers. He then ‘turns like a bus’. This helps to wipe the slate clean, helping to you get the length of the sides of your body and his more equal. You have to ‘bus’ before you can bend! -
Some horses have long flat necks, some have much sorter and more upright (lama) necks, but in all horses the neck vertebrae make the shape, like the spout of a teapot. The curves in the spout unfold become one single curve when the horse is grazing.
In these recent podcasts, have I been saying ‘Do X?’ If so, know that there are now ‘footprints in the sand’ for you to follow. The schema I have introduced in these podcasts draws on geometry, anatomy, and the ability to ‘think your way into’ the horse’s body as well as your own. If this were well known at all levels of the sport, how much difference might that make, and what skills would have to be built along the way? Or would deletion, distortion and generalisation win the day? -
‘Kick the front of the horse up’ is a traditional idea that I have rarely seen work well in practice. Following the work of Tom Myers, I compare both the human and the horse’s core to the core of an apple, which is more than just a bulge in its middle, and it helps us understand how a horse can ‘coil its loins’. A good first introduction to accessing your horse’s core is the idea of a treadmill inside him, joining his seat bones to his lower neck. It can have glitches, and all sorts of issues that you might well be able to iron out. The idea of a small waterwheel between the tops of the horse’s shoulder blades led me to finally discover how ‘kick him up’ can actually work!
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I recently enjoyed working with a small woman who was a relatively inexperienced rider with a black belt in karate. The parallels between riding skills, and her skill as a martial artist, delighted both of us. This podcast reviews the relationship between the lines of muscle and connective tissue along the front of people (the underneath of horses) and the back of the body. It adds the novel and life-changing idea of the horse’s ‘chest plate’, which I dreamed up after doing an enlightening exercise in a class with Tom Myers. This created a powerful new way to think about collection.
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The learning process, which progressively builds a pyramid out of lots of (initially) disconnected body parts and corrections dots, is like walking in hills, where you might think you are about to reach a summit with a fabulous view - only to discover that there’s another hill! As well as half- halts that slow the tempo we have half-halts that rebalance the horse.
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The biomechanics term ‘hydraulic amplification’ describes how the muscles get ‘pumped up’ in collection. WE want a half-halt to ‘go through’, but In effect, there can be disconnects between the horse’s back third, middle third and front third. The front third, for instance can (in effect) run away from the middle third. Or the back third might not connect to the middle third. The disconnects can happen in the top part of the horse, and/or in the bottom part of the horse (his abs). These issues are all ‘feelable’ and fixable in time - but the rider has to be able to sense and influence her whole body and her horse’s whole body. The learning process to get to this stage is significant - and the rider progressively learns to influence the horse’s back underneath her (his middle third), then his front third, and finally his back third behind her, which of course she can’t see.
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