Mary Wanless - Ride With Your Mind

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I tell the story of a rider with phenomenal talent in another area of life, and ask, how did this affect her riding, and how would it be if we taught riding as if it were a martial art? 

I discuss what it means for riding that ‘form follows function’, and how this relates to the challenges inherent in riding well, and also to the ‘chicken and egg’ nature of the ways that riders and horses affect each other.  A lot of answers are to be found in the geometry (whether sacred or not) that we have delineated and expounded on through our various exercises. They can have such a good effect our combined fascial net. Please practice them!

The issue of social license has recently come more to the fore, and I talk about the truism that "where skill ends, violence begins" by considering the hierarchy of: environment, behaviour, skills and capabilities, beliefs and values, identity, purpose and spirituality. If we fail to acknowledge the layers that lie between behaviour and identity, we will not find answers to the evolving ethics of keeping, breeding, and riding horses. We need those answers not just for the instances that hit the press, but also for smaller transgressions, that can be individual and/or cultural, and that we and the wider world are now questioning.

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The rider with rebars that connect diagonally through her can use these to pattern her horse in shoulder in, suggesting to him how he could transmit force through his body from his inside hind leg to his outside foreleg. This can make riders feel much more effective! 

I continue with an exercise that involves resting your back against the back of a chair, whilst moving your skin, muscles and fascia sideways over the underlying bones. This develops the idea of two ‘long narrow triangles’ in your back. Becoming able to find, clarify, and ultimately equalise these triangles is incredibly helpful - though the differences between them, and what it takes to make (and keep) them more equal, may shock you! 

The distortions in your rib cage are a big factor in your asymmetry, and as you will discover, the distortion of your ribcage remains constant even though your asymmetry may morph from a C curve to an S shape. But you now have a powerful tool to help with this.

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‘Rebars’ are the dull red metal uprights you see sticking up within the frames used on building sites when pouring concrete pillars. Rebars also have smaller horizontal pieces of metal wrapping around them. 

Our seated exercise helps you find ‘rebars’ in your own torso-box, defining its corners. They make a huge difference to your stability, and with practice they become really tangible, helping to give you clearer body boundaries. You can connect the rebars on diagonals inside your torso-box, thinking particularly of your underneath, your diaphgram, and the diagonal connecting your back and front armpit tendons. These connections help you find ‘fencing lunge’, which helps you ride turns without pulling on the inside rein.

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Most riders can organize their body much better from the top down, or from the pelvis out, than they can from the bottom up. 

Thinking of your core like the core of an apple means that it goes from top to toe, (and toe to top). We do an exercise whilst standing, that ‘centres’ you, and talks about the connection between your various diaphragms. (You have more of these than you realise!) 

We gradually build the connection from the soles of your feet, through your calves and inner thighs, to your pelvic floor, psoas muscles, breathing diaphragm, trachea, throat and mouth. You are learning how to create ‘positive tension’ in your Deep Front Line - your core. We add the ‘bottle brush muscles’ each side of your spine, which I suggest provide the most helpful interpretation of the instruction ‘grow tall’. 

Becoming able connect through your DFL and ‘grow tall’, whilst riding could take some doing, but this exercise prepares you well, especially if you actually practice it. No one standing in the supermarket queue will ever notice!

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I did the ‘boards as blades’ exercise with a young rider I know well, and discovered that it was difficult for her to get her right board to go down. 

Later, when the group did a dismounted exercise, she realised that she curled her toes under her foot on that side, which in turn led to her knee coming up, and also her board coming up. This is a very unusual pattern - usually the knee that comes up goes with a seat bone that goes down - and I had misdiagnosed her, falling short of my own principles! 

When my young friend tried on a set of toe separators the next day, she felt so contorted she could barely walk. But when she rode in them, the change was almost instant, with her knee, seat bone, and her entire right third coming into place with ‘stuffing’ and stability. 

Toe curling is a big deal - take it very seriously, it’s an exceptionally debilitating pattern, which many riders experience in canter.

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I contrast the story of a very unassuming rider, who has been a long term and dedicated learner within the RYWM system, with a more naturally talented rider who does not have to think about so many ‘pieces’.

The first rider had not really appreciated that, whereas the early stages of her learning required her to grapple with doing many ‘pieces’ at once, she could now pick and choose the most appropriate ones to address the issues her horse was presenting. 

I then use several exercises to help firm up the Lateral (Myofascial) Lines, which form the sides of the torso and the outside of each thigh and calf - and I add ‘stay out of the cat sick’ to the ideas in this title!

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Most people are, in effect, falling off one side of the horse, whilst pushing their torso towards his midline on the other side. 

My most dramatic story about this concerns a Grand Prix rider, whose horse’s apparent problem with piaffe turned out to be her problem. 

There are 3 particularly important points on the boards, and thinking about these can help you transmit force more effectively from your back to your front, as you link them together with an imaginary series of bolts. These also change how your arms connect to your core, how your diaphragm might or might not be 'level', and how your pelvis can have more or less lightness and narrowness. 

I also explore how you can imagine your boards from top to bottom, using this to clarify and strengthen them.

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The idea of ‘positive tension’ is very new in the horse world, but I am no longer the lone voice crying in the wilderness! 

As well as force absorption, we need force transmission, which enables the most important ‘myofascial lines’ in the body to ‘play a note’ in the same way that only a well-tensioned guitar string can play a note. This puts more ‘ping’ into each step, taking away the trudging heaviness of a 'soggy' net. 

I offer some images to help you discover how to firm up your soggy places, and tell a story of how a soggy ‘unstuffed’ horse can lead to a soggy unstuffed rider, and how change in one of them changes the other. 

We then review the ‘boards exercise’, which shows you how to increase the tone and stability in your torso.

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One of the biggest over-views of the work I do would be to consider it the re-discovery and re-creation of the ideal shapes our bodies would make. 

We can think of both human and horse torsos as rectangles that have become distorted into’C’ curves, or parallelograms, and that have, in addition, become twisted. 

I compare the learning process to making a quilt, where different pieces get sown together, progressively making a larger whole in which various patterns become clear. 

This leads me to talk about our ‘inner quilt’, the fascial net, which is a three dimensional spider's web of connective tissue, permeating our muscles, tendons and ligaments, our organs (along with the slings, bags and straps that hold them in place) and even our bones. The pulls within this can lead to restrictions in movement, and chronic pain. But the fascial net is also the source of our feel sense, and as we unravel it, the changes we create can benefit us in life as well as riding.

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I'm back after a long break from podcasts! 

I'm sharing the stories of three riders who were all very different types of learners, using strategies that worked more or less well for creating change. 

One of the stories introduces the idea of 'un-believing' things you have previously been told and have taken for granted - simply assuming that you must be doing the right thing because you are attempting to embody words you’ve been told. 

Each of the stories has a moral, and I’ll let you decide what that moral is, and how relevant it is to your own learning! The stories also beg the question of how much coaches and trainers expect riders to learn and improve in lessons, and how much they ‘go through the motions’ without expecting much change to happen.