Mary Wanless - Ride With Your Mind

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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.

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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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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.

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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!

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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?

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 ‘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!