Mary Wanless - Ride With Your Mind
MARY WANLESS presents crucial information on how the Ride With Your Mind approach to Rider Biomechanics can transform your learning, your riding, and possibly your life. Out of frustration at her progression as a rider, Mary embarked on a journey to discover the 'how' of skilled riding - why couldn’t she learn to ride as skilfully as “talented” riders? Over more than 40 years she has decoded the hidden laws of rider-horse interaction and now teaches the skills that combine to create “talent”, both in person and through online courses at www.dressagetraining.tv. In these podcasts, Mary talks about her journey to date, her key discoveries, and some pivotal moments. She illuminates her key points with metaphor and story, and, at times, presents insights derived from sports psychology. Prepare to be entertained, to learn, to become curious, and to understand a little (or maybe a lot) more about your interaction with your horse. Check out these podcasts, and visit www.dressagetraining.tv for information about their vast library of online courses and webinars, presented by Mary and her Ride With Your Mind colleagues.
Episodes
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 ...
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 si...
‘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 gi...
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 g...
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 go...
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 appropria...
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 f...
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 heavi...
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 ...
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 thi...
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 tur...
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 cont...
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 l...
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 hors...
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 ...
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 ...
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 understa...
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 s...
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 steerin...
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