Send us your feedback! How do you show up to sessions with your horse? And how do you manage your stance and state when you get there? Explore how to manage yourself and your horse to establish more effective communication between your body-mind and his. Even in conversation with another human, your words only account for 7% of what you are communicating; your intonation is 38%. The remainder is your stance and state, with the latter influencing your facial expression. Dive into this ep...
Send us your feedback! This picture illustrates one of the many images that this podcast refers to. Energy, a vital but abstract concept, is best illustrated through images and metaphors. Dive into this session to explore the world of energy and discover how to direct yours effectively.
Send us your feedback! Does the regulated rider or handler regulate the disregulated horse, or does the disregulated horse disregulate the regulated rider or handler? Working with horses influences their regulation as well as their body organisation. In addition, horses can help us become more regulated. Through working together, we can lead each other into comfortable regulation. Dive into this episode and listen to the theory as well as some very relevant stories.
Send us your feedback! In this episode, I return to the nervous system — and to Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory, which reshapes our old picture of fight, flight and freeze. Your autonomic nervous system is constantly scanning for safety or threat, and it quietly drives your thoughts, emotions and actions. I explore how trauma fills your “threat bucket,” why hypervigilance is so common in riders as well as horses, and how simple cranial-nerve exercises can start to empty your "threat bucket"....
Send us your feedback! Back to Rider Biomechanics! I’ll uncover the effective alternatives to growing tall. The majority of women are hollow-backed, with their front longer than their back, and the majority of men are round-backed. There are different ways and places that people hollow, so let's dive in and explore both the challenges and the solutions! We’ll meet low‑beam headlights, seat‑bone flashlights, and two hinges that click you into neutral spine.
Send us your feedback! This episode is about how our perspective shapes our experience. So often, we measure ourselves against where we wish we were, living in the “gap” and feeling the distance between where we are and where we think we should be. This episode invites you to turn around and notice your “gains”—the small, real steps you’ve made, even if they feel tiny or hard-won. Through some stories, we’ll explore how shifting focus from what’s missing to what’s growing can change yo...
Send us your feedback! Do you want to bring out the best in you and your horse? I certainly do. In this episode, we’re diving into what it takes to bring out the best in both of you—and how to navigate the journey ahead. Every journey needs a map, and I’ll be sharing one that’s robust, reliable, and designed to guide you whether you’re just starting out or looking to refine your skills. This episode is packed with insights to help you unlock hidden potential.
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 (w...
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 ...
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 di...
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 ...
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,...
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...
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 imag...
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 di...
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 patt...
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 stor...