Aftereffects

A couple of weeks ago, Kate told me that she was hauling eight hours north to a clinic this last weekend with the Traveling Horse Witch. I was immediately on board after reading her Facebook page, which had a TON of super interesting things that made me nod vigorously and think of TC.

So Kate, one of her awesome AA clients, and I headed out on Saturday midday, arriving late into the evening. If there’s anyone I would want in a car with me for seven hours, it’s Kate, so the time flew past as we talked. 

Unfortunately I’d had a terrible ride on TC Saturday morning, so I spent the trip mildly spiraling and wondering if this pattern would ever end. After months of work on his posture, he feels great, we ramp up a bit, then he hits a wall after about a week and we are back to low level work to fix his posture again. I was feeling pretty shit as we headed to the clinic. We'd had such a great week of work with him really pressing up through his withers for me and then it was like Saturday morning we lost it all. I know it was just one ride, but these things seem to happen like that, he feels great for a week and then he feels terrible one ride and then I can't get the great feeling back until we have a month of working in a Training level frame. 

Kate's horse is TC's chaotic best friend, they cannot
spend too much time together because things get weird

Luckily for me, Saturday was the perfect day for it all to fall apart. After the eight hour drive and less than that many hours of sleep, the first things I saw and heard arriving at the clinic on Sunday morning were enough to completely validate everything I've been feeling and explain why this pattern is constantly happening. 

Unfortunately I've sat down to write this post a fair number of times and am having trouble consolidating the truly insane amount of information. It's not that the one day we spent there had as much information as three days at the Mary Wanless clinic or anything. It's more that the pieces of information that were given out that day was enough to completely rewrite my understanding of equine anatomy and dressage as a whole. 

I'm still processing it all and so is Kate, at random we will call or text each other things in the same way we were exclaiming them in the car on the way home. Kate's poor AA had to listen to "oh my god... faulty oscillation of the neck at the canter" "oh... oh wow, no... absolutely" and then we just get quiet and think again. 

I do want to talk about the clinic, but I think I'll do it backwards. I think I'll talk about how it's changed what I'm specifically doing with TC and then I'll fill in gaps when Kate and I have had more time to talk. Every day we've been talking on the phone about it and comparing notes as we change what we do with our horses. It's been super interesting and super fun. I think right now I'm in a place where I know that it's working on TC but I don't know how to connect it to the rest of my knowledge. 

One of the women at the clinic had the most adorable
puppy! I loved her, so cute

I've ridden TC twice between getting back from the clinic and writing this post and the change has been incredible. 

When I spoke to the clinician about TC, I mentioned that the horse was scoring well at Third level last year but that he had no topline and had hit a wall. She said "it's always Third level" and I thought that was surprising, but apparently it's a thing! I pulled a bunch of video and photos in the past and it's all lining up that we'd have hit this particular wall at this particular time. Was the saddle an issue? Absolutely! Training? Yep that too. Everything I've done research on and changed has helped, but my fundamental understanding of how to ride him in the balance he needed to be ridden in was wrong, including much of the way I've trained horses in the past, how I've been taught to ride, and how I've taught other people to ride. I'm so glad I'm not teaching much right now because it's been overwhelming. 

His body is totally different to ride

To make this post make sense, I want to talk about the two biggest things I learned at the clinic. 

First, the brachiocephalicus muscle aka the under neck muscle, is antagonistic with the pectorals. The pectorals are part of the mechanism that engages the horse's thoracic sling. That means that if the brachiocephalicus muscle is engaged (aka underneck bulging), the pectorals cannot engage and the horse cannot lift through the withers. 

Second, the brachiocephalicus muscle is symbiotic with the psoas. Meaning that when the brachiocephalicus muscle is engaged, the psoas must be engaged. So if the underneck is tight, the psoas have no ability to relax. If the psoas is stuck in the engaged position, the horse's core cannot turn on. Adding leg will exacerbate this faulty movement pattern as it shoves the horse forward over the ground, where they then balance on the underneck which then fires the psoas, often in a fairly painful way. 

Pony also benefited from this work! More on him
at a later time

So rewind a year ago, I was feeling confused. Something was wrong with my horse but nothing I was being told in my lessons seemed inherently wrong. TC needed more energy, engagement, suppleness, a more robust connection. I was instructed to add leg, to add power, to ride suppling exercises. But the more I did this, the harder he became to ride and the more his muscles wasted away. 

In addition, his aid system was completely insane. The only aid he'd reliably respond to in the same way was the whip, but only at the trot. Leg could mean go, sure, but it could also mean balk, it could mean quicken, it could mean hover trot. Reins were blasted through sometimes and yielded to others. My seat mostly meant nothing, even when I dedicated time to working on it. For the last year, I've been trying my best to rebuild a simple aid system but he's felt... slippery. And I've never been able to explain to someone what that actually meant. I couldn't get my aids on him and those that did go on him seemed to slide away ineffectively. 

Much harder to the right

I did a lot of things, made a lot of changes over the last year. I have no regrets with any of them. I think moving him to the ranch has been amazing for both of us. I think changing saddles (fingers crossed for this weekend) has been great for him. I think all the bodywork has opened up a lot of things that we've needed to work through. But nothing has made the amount of sense that this weekend did. There's always been something missing and I finally feel like I've found it, because it addresses the riding portion of it. 

So when I got home, I slept the best I could and then drove down to the ranch on Monday morning. I worked on TC's shoulders on the ground, just some of the massage work that the book I bought a few years ago talked about. Both of his shoulders were fairly tight, I couldn't get my fingers under his shoulder blades. I mean, I've been told to narrow his shoulders while riding him for years now AND his previous saddle jammed forward into his shoulder blades. His shoulders were collapsed around his neck, that can't be comfortable.

I then got on him and walked him around the arena with no contact. I then asked for his outside foreleg to abduct away from his body and then asked him to engage his inside pectoral muscle to shift his weight onto his outside foreleg. Even just doing that allowed him to swing more through his back than I've felt in the past. Tracking left was easier to get than tracking right. 

From there, we continued that work in the trot with him stretching forward, downward, and out. I just trotted around on a loose rein shifting his weight. Nothing too exciting. I started feeling like my whip was in my way so I put it down and continued the work. I then picked up the reins a little bit. I immediately felt the brachiocephalicus and the psoas tighten. My feel through his back disappeared and I lost the ability to know what he was doing in the contact, I saw the bulge at the third vertebrae and knew it must not be good. I increased my bear down, pushed my hands a bit forward, and changed my posting mechanic to include more suction and he relaxed into contact, loosening up his neck and the swing in his back started again. 

The trot started to get easier and easier to ride. I didn't have to be constantly managing him, I just sat there. I didn't have to plan too far ahead for steering, he was just able to turn whenever I asked him to. That broken down aid system that I thought I'd fucked up just... worked. I could halt him from my seat and he stayed balanced in the transition. I didn't need the whip to get him going, or my spur, really. He never quickened his trot, just stayed in the same swingy tempo. All these issues we'd had seemed to melt away. And his facial expressions through the ride were amazing, he had a soft eye, floppy ears, and he was breathing deeply and steadily. He slotted into work with an ease that I've not ever felt on him.

Lots of stretching to come this week and next

I just walked and trotted both days after doing some massage work on his shoulders, psoas, and brachiocephalicus, nothing too exciting. I didn't ask him for any collection or any movements. My goal was to release the psoas and the brachiocephalicus and to work on him engaging his pectorals. Widen his shoulders and get his back swinging. 

The plan is to rebuild him like this. I've penciled in about two months of this type of work, this coincides with treatment for hind gut ulcers, which also came up at the clinic and TC showed a lot of the signs of having them. We'll hopefully get our saddle tomorrow and I'll have instructions on how to change the fit as he hopefully builds muscle. 

My brain is still reeling from the other information I've learned. I'll put it into writing sometime next week. Kate comes out today to help me with TC and Sunny so I'm sure I'll have more to share on both of them next week as well. 

I'll hopefully be attending a clinic with the clinician this fall/winter to continue working along those lines. But even with just the information I gathered from auditing, I'm so excited to move forward and I think I've got almost all of the puzzle pieces in line. All that's left is allowing them to slot together and for us to build our partnership back alongside his topline. Fingers crossed!