Mary Wanless - Ride With Your Mind

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.

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'…

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.

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!

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.

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.

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’!

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!

Some experiments with seat bones - how they do and don’t move - helps to get the clarity about your underneath that then makes it easier to diagnose and find answers for your steering issues.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

It isn’t riding in ‘mistake prevention mode’ and keeping the horse’s head down by whatever means. But it is the ‘human trump card’ in the ‘got it/lost it’ game that each rider learns (we hope) to play with her horse. This concept suggests a viable ‘it’ that the rider wants to get back to - but this is not a foregone conclusion. This involves water going through the horse’s hoses (from his hind legs over his top line) without being dissipated, deadened or deviated, and a rider who does not fall into the traps of leaning back, growing tall, lifting her chest, pushing in her stirrups and pulling on the reins - in short ‘water-skiing’ and encouraging the horse to be her ‘motor boat’.

Half halts are an emergent property of good biomechanics. The rider. needs firstly to realise that she needs to intervene to ‘lead the dance’ and not just get carried away on the horse’s ‘magical mystery tour’. This won’t happen until she has a ‘reference feeling’ and makes comparisons between that and the feeling she’s actually getting. This involves the TOTE model - Test, Operation, Test, Exit. With more skills, she makes smaller interventions more often. Also, it helps to have a horse with high ‘ridability’ who agrees that his rider can influence and, effectively, interrupt him. There are different kinds of half halt, and the first one that riders learn is to slow the speed of the horse’s legs. It takes most riders a while to realise that they may well have to do this 8 times on a circle

Let’s imagine that you and I stand opposite each other and play a game of catch with a tennis ball, allowing it to bounce once in each throw. We are doing this in a rhythm, and not trying to catch each other out. But if I (sneakily) substitute a bean bag, that would be the end of the game. Or I might (sneakily) substitute a boingy ball, and the game would speed up. This is a metaphor for rising trot, which we want to be a ‘tennis ball game’ with the rider ‘calling the shots’. This takes good biomechanics, in which she is able to to control the time she takes in each sit, and also not get deformed by the horse who has a hollow back.

I have been accused of terminal rising trot - but time invested here is so worthwhile - it’s the ‘gold dust’ skill. I offer some strategies to help your hollow back or round back, in both the rise and sit, keeping your knee in the same place and your foot back under you. Recent research has shown that it does indeed help your horse to sit with the inside hind leg, and that it’s actually his outside hind leg that works harder on a circle, not his inside one. I also offer strategies to help you not get disorganised by the ‘pingy’ or ‘stodgy’ horse.

We use a full length mirror to get really forensic about rising trot mechanism, showing you how to differentiate movement in your hip joint from movement in your mid back. This allows you to mimic the movements rising trot and gives you clarity about the movements you need to avoid. Type A and type B horses respond very differently to the rider who does the ’itsy bitsy rise’, but all horses respond the same way to the rider who elongates her front in the rise. There’s a quick fix for this problem if you’re brave enough to do it!

I suggest some metaphorical MRs to reduce the ‘sting’ of your less-than-stellar rides. Realise too that thinking ‘What if?…’ is a mental rehearsal, and if the rehearsal ends with you in a ‘black hole’ you are probably more scared of the difficult emotions it generates than you are of hitting the ground. Realise that you can take sensible precautions before you get on - perhaps by doing some ground work. This doesn’t mean that you’re scared, it simply means that you’re sensible - it’s like looking both ways before crossing a road. We return to a revision of rider biomechanics, and ask, ‘why is this so important?’

How neurons that fire together wire together, in both real and imagined practice. We do mental rehearsals of personal bests, asking ‘What’s the difference that made the difference?’. We also rehearse fixing a pattern when it goes wrong, since that’s the skill you need to speed up the phase of ‘conscious competence’. I suggest some more creative uses of MR to find ways around the blocks to your progress.

Research on mental rehearsal has encompassed dart throwing, piano playing, and many other skills, often reporting improvements in skill that surpass actual practice. Focussing in the effect of a movement works better than focussing on the movement itself, and the level of detail you can produce in your rehearsal says a lot about your actual skill level. There are a few ‘health warnings’ about ways of (perhaps inadvertantly) doing rehearsals that are not helpful.

Research on mental rehearsal has encompassed dart throwing, piano playing, and many other skills, often reporting improvements in skill that surpass actual practice. Focussing in the effect of a movement works better than focussing on the movement itself, and the level of detail you can produce in your rehearsal says a lot about your actual skill level. There are a few ‘health warnings’ about ways of (perhaps inadvertantly) doing rehearsals that are not helpful.

When pupils are ‘going through the motions’ of getting the horse to go, teachers tend to ‘go through the motions’ as well - or to get really impatient. Staying patient requires the coach to maintain and identity/behaviour separation for the rider, realising that she might have good skills in other fields. Ideally, the coach ‘tunes’ herself, getting centred and present, to help her tune the rider who then tunes the horse. The coach is a role model for the rider. The story of the day I heard myself say ‘Don’t panic!”, and realised that I had let the horse and rider lead me astray! On TT courses we have lots of fun role playing our most challenging pupils, and finding strategies to get them in a learning mode - learning how to learn is the biggest gift we have to give. MR: Stories of various clients, and also elite riders, and how they used/talked about MR. MRs of signing your name, and seeing/sensing a bowl of fruit. It is best to involve all of your senses. MR helps you discover how much your brain knows, and primes your brain, which cannot tell the difference between real and imagined performance.

In riding, negative expectations so often become the reality (as in ‘I hope we don’t stop at the ditch!…’). When things are going well you have to ‘make it again, make it again’ - not stop doing it - and you can’t even afford to take time out and congratulate yourself! Hoping something good will happen is very different to expecting it to happen, and when it comes to impulsion, many riders set themselves up to ensure that it won’t happen. Naive teachers feed this rider lots of energy, and end up exhausted. There are other ways to encourage someone who is probably constrained by fear to step out of her comfort (and ineffectual) zone. I describe some difficult pupils who specialise in being their own worst enemy, and invite you to consider, ‘How teachable are you?’

Most riders give repeated leg aids that actually train the horse to be dead to their leg. If you have to kick to get each step of walk, how are you ever going to ride a canter pirouette? To be an effective rider, you have to believe that you have the right to be up there, being the brains of the rider/horse partnership, and being the leader your horse really needs. This requires self believe, good technique for giving a leg aid, a lot of conscious attention, and the ‘kick, don’t, don’t’ technique described here.

Trainers will always be prejudiced against the toolkits they don’t understand, can’t be bothered with, or do so brilliantly (and easily) that they fail to recognise their brilliance. This complicates the ‘map battles’ between the proponents of the various toolkits. It pays to ‘outframe’ the zero toolkit to include saddlery, farriery, bodywork etc. - the supporting arts that help your horse to not be one of the ‘walking wounded’ who doesn’t limp, but is not physically robust. If he throws tantrums, suspect a physical problem as you ask yourself if the issue rooted in pain, in his brain, or in his training. A kick or whip tap needs to change your horse’s brain chemistry (and can do so ethically) so that he has more ‘get up and go’ chemicals. The aid needs to rebound like a slap, and not be a nudge or squeeze.

How proponents of the 3 toolkits interact like the proverbial 3 blind men with the elephant. More on the Zero toolkit, overshadowing, and the transition from ground work to riding.Being strong in one of the ‘maps’ of riding and training makes up for weaknesses in the other ‘maps’ - and also allows trainers to negate the other maps. Trainers often attribute their skill to one of the toolkits, not realising that they are also strong in a different one. Incongruent riding happens where there are conflicts between two toolkits eg the reins say ‘stop’, but the rider leans back during a halt so the laws of physics say ‘go’. Operant and classical conditioning as toolkits zero and 1. Making the transition from groundwork to riding.

On ‘the map is not the territory’, even though riders and trainers the world over act as if it is - and go so far as to ‘eat the menu’!If a rider, vet, physio, saddler and farrier were all looking at a tricky horse, each would see a different problem within their area of expertise. We all see what we are looking for, informed by the ‘maps’ or internal representations that we have developed over years, and we tend to think that the problem we perceive is the one and only problem - complete with our tailor-made one and only solution. The zero, first and second toolkits are different approaches to riding and training that do not negate each other, but are simply different maps. But few exponents of these different maps perceive that their map might not be the only map.

So much of riding is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You get run away with from the moment you decide you’re being run away with… so we review how rider ‘lose it’ through the model of polyvagal theory. All of your insecurities are likely to be triggered when you buy a new horse, who may offer challenges that are on the limit of your skills (do you remember the flow channel, where these stay in balance over time?). The pitfalls are many, and when you buy a schoolmaster, a lot depends on how well he was ‘danced’ previously. If you start pushing and he starts pulling, it will feel to him as if he doesn’t know the steps. Remember what it’s like in a couple’s dance form, when you (the woman) go from the ease and delight of dancing with a good partner (where you don’t have to know the steps) to dancing with a partner who hasn’t ‘got it’. The dissonance can feel horrible! Also, when riders buy a young horse, they often have the equivalent of ‘eyes bigger than their stomach’, and when they cannot match the forces of his movement, things again go wrong. It’s humbling to realise that very horse can only go as well as he is danced….

The patterns in the pupil’s body are part of this, and we have both the ‘foetal crouch’ and the much more common ‘Landau response’, where the rider pushes down into the stirrups, hollows her back, stretches up and stops breathing (like a horse in ‘arrest’). But in addition, is the rider’s mental/emotional state more ‘fight or flight-ish’ or ‘freeze and fold-ish’?. The latter riders, who are disengaged, and a bit floppy, are lacking authority and boundaries. Teaching authority is the hardest task: The rider has to believe that she has the right to be up there, and instead of fading into the wall paper she has to find a more ‘Me Tarzan, you horse’ way of being. ‘Come along horsey, come along horsey’ is a much more busy (and flighty) way to interact, but horses rarely believe this either. When you can be present, and able to look, listen and feel, you will learn much more easily - and a good coach teaches you how to become this more embodied version of yourself.

Imagine yourself as a mouse in a house where there is cheese available on the opposite side of the room to your mouse hole. But there is also a cat. Which is more real to you, the reward, or the risk? Your perception of one might far out way your perception of the other. Or you might not care about either, or you might be aware of both. This is the most stressful situation, and it mirrors wanting to ride, but also being nervous.Skilled, resilient riders can both generate a lot of rightness, and tolerate a lot of wrongness - they have lots of ‘brainspace’, and the sense of plenty of time. Courage is moving in the face of fear, it isn’t not feeling fear. Strategies to help nervous riders who are easily triggered.

I learnt many years ago that my observations just before a lesson were a more accurate risk assessment than some riders made before mounting. But my words of caution did not stop them getting on - and then remaining on for a very short time! The hypervigilant horse paired with a hypervigilant rider can really wind each other up, and keeping the horse’s attention can be vital. We all know about ‘rest and digest’ and ‘fight or flight’, but research has shown that there is actually a third system. This is evolutionarily the oldest, and it makes us freeze (which works well for a reptile on a rock) and ‘fold’ - going limp when we perceive that there is no possibility of escape. These responses present riders with the biggest challenge.

Many riders, epecially those with a fixed mindset struggle on alone, thinking they’re the only one who doesn’t ‘get it’, but this is not true. Dressage as ‘the passionate pursuit of perfection by the obsessively imperfect’. Many riders confuse their behaviour with their identity, so ‘I rode a bad transition’ soon becomes, ‘I’m a bad rider’ which has the implication of ‘I’m a bad person.’ This can become an emotional roller coaster, and fear compounds it, wether it’s fear of falling or fear of being judged.

Elite riders have different ways of dealing with the disconnect between the knowledge they have in language, and the skills they have as ‘feelages’. Their chosen tactic has a huge bearing on how they teach! Also, there is a massive difference between a fixed mindset (‘You’ve either got it or you haven’t) and a growth mindset (‘The harder I work the smarter I get’). The latter creates a much more supportive learning environment. A ‘culturescape’ will not change until a lot of individuals share their experience of struggle - making this mutual rather than individual knowledge. There’s power in numbers!

How we get language and feelings to connect.

The debate between ‘thighs on’ and ‘thighs off’. The coach as a tour guide who needs to be able to describe the journey her pupil is taking. My made up story about how ‘take your thighs off the saddle’ took over from ‘grip with your knees’, and became the new doctrine. How each school of thought has one half of the truth expressed very poorly in language. What really happens is so paradoxical that it’s hard to wrap your brain around it…. but it’s something your muscles can potentially do.

We deconstruct the halt to walk transition, considering the horse who really wants to hollow his back. When the rider keeps her front vertical and short, she can influence the length of the horse’s underneath.The key to this is an image: if the rider imagines a carousel pole running from her head vertically down to the horse’s belly, and refuses to let it deform and/or lean back, she can prevent the equivalent line of muscle in the horse from elongating. She then needs to maintain this in the next step, and the next step…but there are many mistakes that limit this profound degree of influence. When elite riders ride the transition from piaffe to passage they often topple back just like less experienced riders do in the halt to walk transition. Strength and skill and understanding build over time

Skilled riders appear to do so little whilst having a huge effect on the horse’s posture and movement. We add the idea of ‘suction’ to bearing down and ‘kneeling’, and describe how the rider effectively moulds the horse’s body into a form. But what she’s really moulding is his energy, and her relationship to this is a big key.

Your instincts can easily lead you astray when riding, wether that’s pushing hard into the stirrups, ‘popping up’, or growing too tall. These are all symptoms of the ‘Landau Response’, which defines many rider’s instinctive reaction to a ‘Yikes!’ moment, and also to downward transitions. This podcast offers more distinctions about feeling and controlling the movement of your seat bones, and riding walk to halt transitions without falling prey to the ‘waterski/motorboat’ syndrome.

Newton’s third law of motion (every action has an equal and opposite reaction) affects the relationship between your feet and seat bones. How to find ‘just right’ for the tone in the underneath of the box, and the appropriate clarity for your seat bones, so you neither ‘pop them up’ nor have a pair of ‘stiletto heels’. Once you find ‘just right’ you can control the speed of their movement - and this controls the speed of your horse’s legs.

What is flow and what difference does it make to elite performance.

How to get rid of the tyranny of the voice inside your head and create for yourself the best internal coach!

How easy do you find this, and how much have you been encouraged to do this during your training sessions? As you’ll hear, it’s the best answer to confusion and miscommunication! Our traditional language that has been handed down through generations has been subject to deletion, distortion and generalisation, but the potential for misrepresentation and misunderstanding gets even worse than this. It’s those As and Xs again!