Mary Wanless - Ride With Your Mind

Send us your feedback! 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.

Send us your feedback! 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. FREE Webinar for Mary Wanless Podcast Listeners 20th August 2024, 19:30 BST Click the banner on https://www.dressagetraining.tv “Let’s get together…for a good discussion on my philosophy of learning and riding, and how this philosophy might have influenced your own riding, learning, and training. I will be delighted to hear your feedback, answer your questions, and explain. I hope you’ll join me!” Mary

Send us your feedback! ‘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. FREE Webinar for Mary Wanless Podcast Listeners 20th August 2024, 19:30 BST Click the banner on https://www.dressagetraining.tv “Let’s get together…for a good discussion on my philosophy of learning and riding, and how this philosophy might have influenced your own riding, learning, and training. I will be delighted to hear your feedback, answer your questions, and explain. I hope you’ll join me!” Mary

Send us your feedback! 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! FREE Webinar for Mary Wanless Podcast Listeners 20th August 2024, 19:30 BST Click the banner on https://www.dressagetraining.tv “Let’s get together…for a good discussion on my philosophy of learning and riding, and how this philosophy might have influenced your own riding, learning, and training. I will be delighted to hear your feedback, answer your questions, and explain. I hope you’ll join me!” Mary

Send us your feedback! 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. FREE Webinar for Mary Wanless Podcast Listeners 20th August 2024, 19:30 BST Click the banner on https://www.dressagetraining.tv “Let’s get together…for a good discussion on my philosophy of learning and riding, and how this philosophy might have influenced your own riding, learning, and training. I will be delighted to hear your feedback, answer your questions, and explain. I hope you’ll join me!” Mary

Send us your feedback! 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! FREE Webinar for Mary Wanless Podcast Listeners 20th August 2024, 19:30 BST Click the banner on https://www.dressagetraining.tv “Let’s get together…for a good discussion on my philosophy of learning and riding, and how this philosophy might have influenced your own riding, learning, and training. I will be delighted to hear your feedback, answer your questions, and explain. I hope you’ll join me!” Mary

Send us your feedback! 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. FREE Webinar for Mary Wanless Podcast Listeners 20th August 2024, 19:30 BST Click the banner on https://www.dressagetraining.tv “Let’s get together…for a good discussion on my philosophy of learning and riding, and how this philosophy might have influenced your own riding, learning, and training. I will be delighted to hear your feedback, answer your questions, and explain. I hope you’ll join me!” Mary

Send us your feedback! 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. FREE Webinar for Mary Wanless Podcast Listeners 20th August 2024, 19:30 BST Click the banner on https://www.dressagetraining.tv “Let’s get together…for a good discussion on my philosophy of learning and riding, and how this philosophy might have influenced your own riding, learning, and training. I will be delighted to hear your feedback, answer your questions, and explain. I hope you’ll join me!” Mary

Send us your feedback! 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. FREE Webinar for Mary Wanless Podcast Listeners 20th August 2024, 19:30 BST Click the banner on https://www.dressagetraining.tv “Let’s get together…for a good discussion on my philosophy of learning and riding, and how this philosophy might have influenced your own riding, learning, and training. I will be delighted to hear your feedback, answer your questions, and explain. I hope you’ll join me!” Mary

Send us your feedback! 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. FREE Webinar for Mary Wanless Podcast Listeners 20th August 2024, 19:30 BST Click the banner on https://www.dressagetraining.tv “Let’s get together…for a good discussion on my philosophy of learning and riding, and how this philosophy might have influenced your own riding, learning, and training. I will be delighted to hear your feedback, answer your questions, and explain. I hope you’ll join me!” Mary

Send us your feedback! 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. FREE Webinar for Mary Wanless Podcast Listeners 20th August 2024, 19:30 BST Click the banner on https://www.dressagetraining.tv “Let’s get together…for a good discussion on my philosophy of learning and riding, and how this philosophy might have influenced your own riding, learning, and training. I will be delighted to hear your feedback, answer your questions, and explain. I hope you’ll join me!” Mary

Send us your feedback! 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’… FREE Webinar for Mary Wanless Podcast Listeners 20th August 2024, 19:30 BST Click the banner on https://www.dressagetraining.tv “Let’s get together…for a good discussion on my philosophy of learning and riding, and how this philosophy might have influenced your own riding, learning, and training. I will be delighted to hear your feedback, answer your questions, and explain. I hope you’ll join me!” Mary

Send us your feedback! 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. FREE Webinar for Mary Wanless Podcast Listeners 20th August 2024, 19:30 BST Click the banner on https://www.dressagetraining.tv “Let’s get together…for a good discussion on my philosophy of learning and riding, and how this philosophy might have influenced your own riding, learning, and training. I will be delighted to hear your feedback, answer your questions, and explain. I hope you’ll join me!” Mary

Send us your feedback! 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! FREE Webinar for Mary Wanless Podcast Listeners 20th August 2024, 19:30 BST Click the banner on https://www.dressagetraining.tv “Let’s get together…for a good discussion on my philosophy of learning and riding, and how this philosophy might have influenced your own riding, learning, and training. I will be delighted to hear your feedback, answer your questions, and explain. I hope you’ll join me!” Mary

Send us your feedback! 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. FREE Webinar for Mary Wanless Podcast Listeners 20th August 2024, 19:30 BST Click the banner on https://www.dressagetraining.tv “Let’s get together…for a good discussion on my philosophy of learning and riding, and how this philosophy might have influenced your own riding, learning, and training. I will be delighted to hear your feedback, answer your questions, and explain. I hope you’ll join me!” Mary

Send us your feedback! 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. FREE Webinar for Mary Wanless Podcast Listeners 20th August 2024, 19:30 BST Click the banner on https://www.dressagetraining.tv “Let’s get together…for a good discussion on my philosophy of learning and riding, and how this philosophy might have influenced your own riding, learning, and training. I will be delighted to hear your feedback, answer your questions, and explain. I hope you’ll join me!” Mary

Send us your feedback! 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. FREE Webinar for Mary Wanless Podcast Listeners 20th August 2024, 19:30 BST Click the banner on https://www.dressagetraining.tv “Let’s get together…for a good discussion on my philosophy of learning and riding, and how this philosophy might have influenced your own riding, learning, and training. I will be delighted to hear your feedback, answer your questions, and explain. I hope you’ll join me!” Mary

Send us your feedback! 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. FREE Webinar for Mary Wanless Podcast Listeners 20th August 2024, 19:30 BST Click the banner on https://www.dressagetraining.tv “Let’s get together…for a good discussion on my philosophy of learning and riding, and how this philosophy might have influenced your own riding, learning, and training. I will be delighted to hear your feedback, answer your questions, and explain. I hope you’ll join me!” Mary

Send us your feedback! FREE Webinar for Mary Wanless Podcast Listeners 20th August 2024, 19:30 BST Click the banner on https://www.dressagetraining.tv “Let’s get together…for a good discussion on my philosophy of learning and riding, and how this philosophy might have influenced your own riding, learning, and training. I will be delighted to hear your feedback, answer your questions, and explain. I hope you’ll join me!” Mary

Send us your feedback! 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’! FREE Webinar for Mary Wanless Podcast Listeners 20th August 2024, 19:30 BST Click the banner on https://www.dressagetraining.tv “Let’s get together…for a good discussion on my philosophy of learning and riding, and how this philosophy might have influenced your own riding, learning, and training. I will be delighted to hear your feedback, answer your questions, and explain. I hope you’ll join me!” Mary