Mary Wanless - Ride With Your Mind

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...

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...

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 go...

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...

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 sp...

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...

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...

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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 so...

Send us your feedback! 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-pr...

Send us your feedback! 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.

Send us your feedback! 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 i...

Send us your feedback! 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 i...

Send us your feedback! 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...

Send us your feedback!  ‘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 th...

Send us your feedback! 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....

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Send us your feedback! 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.

Send us your feedback! 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...

Send us your feedback! 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 h...

Send us your feedback! 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,...

Send us your feedback! 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 ...

Send us your feedback! 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...

Send us your feedback! 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’...

Send us your feedback! 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 - perha...