Mary Wanless Workshop: Applications for TC

There were two things that made me go "huh, that's what TC does" in the Mary Wanless Workshop and they both happened when my trainer, Tanya, was riding her horse.

While her horse is very different than TC, they have two major similarities: the desire to get short in the neck and the desire to get down and forward with the chest.

This is a very friesian thing to do (though Tanya's horse is a warmblood), and something I've been aware of for a long time. Trying to get TC to lift through his pecs, thoracic sling, and withers while reaching to the bit has been tough. His body is made to pull a cart, not carry himself in any sort of productive way.

Baby TC says "this here is nice" 

This was super cool to watch, Tanya has been riding with Mary for... a long time (not about to date her!). As you get more and more in tune with your body, the more weird stuff can be said to you and you can find a way to do it. I have a kid who is naturally very kinesthetic, I can tell her "can you sit the trot as if you're trotting backwards" to get her horse to sit down, I can also tell her "imagine a crane is going to come in and pick your horse up from the withers" and she'll get the horse more uphill. If you ask her what she's doing, she says something completely unrelated (her language doesn't connect very well to her body just yet).

So Mary gave Tanya two things to think about and I was really excited to see how those things would translate to me on TC.

Breastplate

To get the horse to pull his chest backward, Mary said to imagine that there is a metal plate across the horse's chest, like a breastplate for humans (not horses). TC and Tanya's TC Twin like to press the top two corners of the breastplate forward and downward, drawing the bottom two corners of it backward with their hind legs.

Mary wanted the rider to imagine two strings attached to the top of the breastplate and the rider was to bring those two strings backward while pushing the bottom of the breastplate forward. Tanya said that she imagined that she was riding with a rope around the horse's neck that she could draw back on with her core.

Two Pack 

The rider's two pack is the upper part of their abs right under their ribs. There are eight pairs of segments of muscle in the abdomen and the two pack is the very top pair. Mine stick out and are fairly defined (everything below that shows how much I like food lol), so it was easy to find them, but basically think of it as your diaphragm.

From there, draw a line backward and about two inches upward to your upper back. This was what Mary called the two pack line.

To address the shortness in the neck, Mary wanted Tanya to take the two pack line and extend it forward on top of the first several cervical vertebrae of the horse and under the last several cervical vertebrae, out to the skull of the horse. She wanted Tanya to use this line to support the horse's skull as she allowed more room for the neck to stretch.

Getting even this much stretch into the bridle is hard

I'm super interested to see how these two images work with TC and I, and I'm especially excited that I have a lesson with Tanya both today and Saturday so I can ask more about this!