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...
Sep 13, 2024•20 min•Season 1Ep. 70
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 narr...
Sep 06, 2024•21 min•Season 1Ep. 69
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 in...
Aug 30, 2024•20 min•Season 1Ep. 68
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 i...
Aug 23, 2024•22 min•Season 1Ep. 67
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 s...
Aug 16, 2024•18 min•Season 1Ep. 66
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 severa...
Aug 09, 2024•21 min•Season 1Ep. 65
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 b...
Aug 02, 2024•22 min•Season 1Ep. 64
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 fir...
Jul 26, 2024•21 min•Season 1Ep. 63
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...
Jul 19, 2024•18 min•Season 1Ep. 62
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’l...
Jul 12, 2024•19 min•Season 1Ep. 61
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 sha...
Jun 22, 2021•21 min•Season 1Ep. 60
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 ‘s...
Jun 14, 2021•22 min•Season 1Ep. 59
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 mi...
Jun 01, 2021•23 min•Season 1Ep. 58
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!...
May 25, 2021•24 min
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 anatom...
May 19, 2021•25 min
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...
May 10, 2021•23 min•Season 1Ep. 55
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 ...
May 03, 2021•22 min
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 o...
Apr 26, 2021•24 min
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Apr 19, 2021•22 min•Season 1Ep. 52
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...
Apr 14, 2021•22 min
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-proof way of measuring your stirrup length. Hopefully suggesting an unusual and profound stretch that ...
Apr 04, 2021•22 min
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.
Mar 30, 2021•24 min•Season 1Ep. 49
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 is the egg?’ Horses can change their asymmetry within minutes of a new rider getting on. Experimentin...
Mar 22, 2021•23 min
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 in the scales of training. But any attempt to make a non-linear subject linear will have flaws, and th...
Mar 15, 2021•23 min•Season 1Ep. 47
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. The schema I have introduced in these podcasts draws on geometry, anatomy, and the ability to ‘thin...
Mar 08, 2021•22 min•Season 1Ep. 46
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 the idea of a treadmill inside him, joining his seat bones to his lower neck. It can have glitches, and...
Mar 01, 2021•24 min•Season 1Ep. 45
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. It adds the novel and life-changing idea of the horse’s ‘chest plate’, which I dreamed up after doin...
Feb 22, 2021•26 min•Season 1Ep. 44
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Feb 15, 2021•24 min•Season 1Ep. 43
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.
Feb 07, 2021•25 min•Season 1Ep. 42
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. The disconnects can happen in the top part of the horse, and/or in the bottom part of the horse (h...
Feb 01, 2021•24 min•Season 1Ep. 41
