The 10,000 hour rule

When we look at the performance of horses in sports like racing, or sports that have a definitive measure rather than a subjective one, horse performance has not improved much over the years. This lack of performance enhancement becomes even more pronounced when we compare it to the advances in human athletic performance. I used to think that this discrepancy was caused by the fact that the coaches of a human athlete can communicate more effectively--verbally--with their athlete than a horse trainer can with theirs. I think this is a factor. But two things have happened in the last week to make me aware of two other possible causes: reading Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers" and watching Dr. G. Heuschmann's video "If Horses Could Speak" for the umpteenth time.

In Gladwell's book he dismantles our long held myth that high performing individuals--from athletes to the Beatles--are born with a natural talent that pre-disposes them to sucess. This myth leads many of us to believe that we'll never be extraordinary--except in our Mom's eye--because we weren't born with "natural" talent. Rather than natural talent being the deciding factor, Gladwell suggests that the opportunity to practice that thing that we'll be noted for. In the case of an athlete it's practicing their sport. For the Beatles it the opportunity to play music together. He further suggests that the amount of the time--therefore the opportunity--has to equal 10,000 hours; this is the magical number of hours we need to apply to become an "expert" in our chosen art. (I won't spend more time on the book; you can read it for yourself.)

The second event in my transformation was watching Dr. Heuschmann's video. I was asked to attend a showing of the video to a group of dressage riders by one of our local trainers, to help answer any anatomy questions, a very nice opportunity. While I watched the video I was struck by a point raised by one of the interviewed trainers on the difference in the way we train a dressage horse today and the way they train at the Spanish Riding School. At the Spanish School they wait until the horse is ten years old before starting them in any real training. This allows them to develop mentally and physically for the demands of riding. In the world of modern competition horses are started as 2 and 3 year olds. I have certainly bought 3 year old horses with 90 days of training on them thinking they were ready to move on. Has the Spanish School somehow learned the 10,000 hour rule?

Is this rule the reason Sea Biscuit did so well? In his early life he was used as a training aid to other horses, racing against them and forced to lose. The number of these races he ran could have gave him the hours he required.

The 10,000 hour rule doesn't just apply to rock stars and horses; it applies to dogs and body therapists. If you wish to become world class you need to put in the time in practicing your chosen art. But this is not just elapsed time, it has to be time with a feedback mechanism to assure you are on the right track. The Beatle's had their fans and the music critics.

Something to think about.

Are we stretching into injury?

Those of you who know me or have read my book, know I am not a big fan of strain and hold type stretching. One problem that occurs in the stretching of animals is the "anthropromorphic" view that they are the same as humans and will not allow us to harm them. I've seen photos on the covers of books where the animal's legs are being levered into an anatomical barrier.
Even without that the idea the we can simply stretch our muscles into some type of opening without engaging the nervous system is seriously flawed. This why I advocate for PNF stretching or Muscle Energy or what I called myofascial stretching in the book.
A study done by the Australian military--12000 army recruits in the study--where one portion of the study stretched before exercise and the other did not, resulted in a higher injury rate for those that stretched.
This article in the New York times suggests that same type of problem. So, the next time you think you want to stretch ourselve, dog or horse before a competition you may want to re-consider.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/sports/playmagazine/112pewarm.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=stretching&st=cse

More Collection

I received this email response to one of the entries here. This is pretty auspicious since I was going to write something about collection today for the blog. So, I thought I would answer it for a wider audience. I’ll have to write about what I wanted to say today later.

I was able to take a quick look at your blog and was interested in the
entry about collection. This is something I have been making a matter of
study for some time so it caught my eye. I am not a proffesional dressage
rider by any stretch, but classical riding and Haute Ecole have been a
personnal passion for many years. I have studied mostly the french and
spanish schools and find little to nothing of true colletion in modern
dressage riding.
I am by no means an expert in anatomy or biomechanics, so sometimes i
have to admit what I read goes right over my head and I can get confused.
I have been reading alot of Dr. Deb Bennets writings but I am also
increasingly a fan of Dr. Claytons. I recently purchased her "core
training' dvd.
I would love to get more of your opinion on Dr. Debs understandings, it
seemed from your post you maybe don't agree with her, or were you saying
you felt their was some truth in all three of the theories? I know deb
talks alot about raising the base of the neck and freeing up the
forehand,and I know a couple of her students that also study the work of
Dr. Clayton and I havven't heard anyone complaining that they couldn't
reconcile both.
Like i said though this stuff can go over my head pretty quickly and I can
sometimes think 2 people are agreeing with each other only to find out
later they don't agree, soooo if in all your free time (lol) you would be
interested in sharing anymore of what you have found to be similar and at
odds in these two theories I would love to hear from you.

Collection is probably THE most misunderstood aspect of horsemanship. If you haven’t gone to the website www.animalsi.com and read the chapter from my next book on collection (it’s coming out in the IASI Journal) I encourage you to do so, I’m going to write here assuming you have.

Before I start I want to assure you that I am a very big fan of Dr. Deb. I’ve been following her work for 30 or years, since she was writing for this Arabian Horse newspaper that I can’t remember the name of. I still think her three volume set on confirmation is the best, but disagree with her use of “woody” to describe equine movement.

The theories, or schools, of collection have three components to them:

1. when in the horse’s training they take place

2. how the body looks and acts

3. how to train the horse to arrive at collection.

(It seems like the latest part of training is the appropriation of the misguided idea of “core” strength from the human athletic training and applying it to the equine. I’m saying “misguided” because I’m not a believer in the core strength concepts and as such may be leading the parade of the misguided!)

One of the main problems with understanding collection is, as you point out, reconciling all of the confusing viewpoints and terminology that’s used; rounding the rear, pushing from behind, round frame… It’s like that telephone game where people get the message completely scrabbled by the time it reaches the end of the line. I contribute this to the westerner’s inability to listen. I have this problem in spades, I’m a visual learner so when someone says “round” that may mean one thing to them but a completely other one to me.

I thought that collection and round was the same thing, until I rode a collected horse! I used to take dressage lessons during the winter when I wasn’t conditioning my endurance horse on the trails. (From Dr. Deb’s confirmation books there is a description of how to attain “round” that I used to think was the way to collect a horse—squeeze into closed hands, like a toothpaste tube with a cap on…—but I now know this is inaccurate.) The feeling of riding a collected horse is one of power coming up through the withers. Do you agree? Not, of being pushed from behind.

To remove some of this confusion people have resorted to using bio-mechanical terms, which if they don’t understand them or if their audience doesn’t understand them, can result in more confusion. (I’m developing an online course which will explain some of the more commonly used bio-mechanical terms as well as the kinesiology.) Understanding physics, (statics and dynamics are called “mechanics” in physics) is a pre-requisite for fully understanding bio-mechanics.

To answer your question more directly, I think that the top line theory and the bottom line theory both have merit and problems.

The top line theory is what could be called “classic” where the idea is that the horse “pulls” the forehand back onto the rear end. (This looks quite a bit like a speed skater bent over while racing.)This was tested by Dr. Clayton’s lab with Paul Belasik riding the horse into a Levade. Obviously an upper level movement, which implies the horse, was in training for some time. Which insinuates; that many horses may have not been able to make it to the end of the training to where they could do this maneuver. There lies the rub for me in the top line theory, the dropout rate due to injury to horses in training.

The bottom line theory, I call it this only to contrast the two and in response to something Dr. Deb wrote that there is no top line muscular development required to achieve… This theory is based on supposition of a “ring” of muscles that encircle the thorax and cooperate to bring the rear end under the horse. There are two problems with this, one is the coordination required by the horse’s nervous system to achieve this and the actual inclusion of the psoas muscle as part of the ring. (The psoas is postulated as a prime stabilizer of the equine spine in this theory; I see it as a flexor of the femur and a reset mechanism for the spine’s rotation. So, this is where I have one basic disagreement.) Again, with this theory there is a lack of training methodology and long term general success.

Both of these theories seem to neglect some bio-mechanics, motivation for the horse and some basic musculo-nervous physiology.

The last theory is the thoracic sling theory that has been put forward by me since 1994, long enough ago that I don’t know who I stole it from, and by Dr. Clayton’s labs’ work, as documented in 2003? (I don’t have my references in front of me, or even behind me.) This theory, as I propose it not necessarily Dr. Clayton’s view, is that the thorax is propelled upwards and backwards by the rhythmic contraction of the thoracic “sling” muscles… I’ll let you read about this in the chapter that’s online at www.animasi.com.

In some sort of conclusion, I think that thoracic sling theory is the unifying theory for collection of the normal ridden horse and if training methods are used to free the shoulders that we will see more horses make it to the level of Levade. That both the top and bottom line theories describe places on this path of training, with the bottom line coming before the top line in the training cycle.

While this discussion is fun for me, I am not a trainer of dressage horses and don’t offer any real suggestions on how to train. What I am more interested in is how do the therapists that I train use this information to make intelligent well thought out interventions to help the horse. Freeing the shoulders is incredibly easy to accomplish and should be incorporated in all horse training.

Thanks for spending the time reading this and for sparking the discussion.

Online Course Commercial

Signal to Noise

Have you ever struggled to tune in a weak radio station? Static fills the speakers as you strain to hear the station while tweaking the dial. Of course today's radios jump electronically to the station with the strongest signal when you push the next button. In electronics what determines a "strong" signal is the signal to noise ratio. Signal is also called intelligence. Noise is what we want to reject or filter out.
When we work with out client they are going through a very similar process of trying to determine what in our input/touch is intelligent and should be listened to and what is extraneous noise and should be rejected. Each time the client makes a decision about this their ability to adapt or change is reduced a little--I subscribe to the theory that we have only so much adaptive capacity and that it is not measured in time but in decisions like described here. If we are inputting a lot of extraneous noise into the client's body, through touching them with no purpose to the touch--petting--than they will use their adaptive capacity on filtering out that touch and not gain as much benefit. If on the other hand, no pun, we are sure about what we are trying to achieve with our touch than our signal to noise ratio will be high and the client will benefit more, if only in that we did the filtering for them.
The next time you are working with a client ask yourself before you touch them if you are sure of what you are trying to achieve with our intervention.

Collection Part 2

I finally got the video "If Horses Could Speak" which I ordered in December! The video goes along with the Dr. Heuschmann's book "Tug of War: Classical vs Modern Dressage". If you are a therapist reading this blog save the $60 and buy the book first. The video is more like a documentary of what Dr. Heuschmann believes to be "classic". It is a beautiful piece of work from a film perspective, and wonderful to watch. It won't however teach you anything that you can use in your therapy sessions. I buy these kinds of things to use in my course, so they pay for themselves in the long run. Even as a rider you won't learn any new or old ways to train your horse.
Dr. Rolf stated that if you wanted to come to a new conclusion about something you needed to start with a new premise.(Actually this isn't her statement, she was repeating it.) Dr. Heuschmann encourages us to come to an old premise in training our horses--which I totally agree with--while using old premises about anatomy and biomechanics--which I disagree with.
The old premise that Dr. Heuschmann keeps to is that locomotion is caused by muscular contraction, that muscles are separate entities within the body and that fascia is found in specific "spots". He holds to an old style anatomy view of a trained veterinarian. I seriously doubt if Dr. Heuschmann uses any type of alternative therapy with his horses. He most certainly doesn't discuss the skeleton, nerves or fascia, other than as mentioned above, in this video or his book. (I haven't finished the book yet.)
I have a lot of respect for what he is doing and would love to talk with him. I plan to go to a clinic if and when he comes to the US. Or, perhaps, I should try and go to Germany and work with his horses, they could certainly benefit from it.
The lastest on the collection front. There are 3 main theories which I will call: the topline, the bottomline and the shoulder freedom theories.
The topline is a theory that is proposed by the "old" school represented by Dr. Heuschmann and Paul Belosak and such. This theory holds to the pyramid of training which has collection as the last part of training of the riding horse. It holds the supple back as sacrosanct--I totally agree--and assumes that the horse's front is lifted up (dorsally) and back (caudally) by the muscles of the rear and topline. This was seen to be so in experiments carried out at the McPhail research center with Paul Belasik riding a horse in piaffe, which is an extreme dressage movement.
The bottomline theory is proposed and championed by Dr. Bennett. She proposes that collection occurs throught the contraction of the "ring of muscles" on the bottomline of the horse, with little or no activity in the topline. This hasn't been tested in a research setting.
The shoulder theory has two parts to it: the shoulder only theory and the shoulders as the instigator theory--this is my theory so it gets the tricked out name. In this the shoulder only theory, proposed by Dr. Clayton the soft tissue of the thoracic sling propels the front end dorsally and caudally shifting the center of mass towards the rear. In my theory it is the thoracic sling that "allows" collection--moving the COM dorsally and caudally--through the freedom of two forelimbs coming more vertically,and the contraction of the topline and bottomline--sans psoas. Maybe this should be called the unifying theory of how a quadruped can start to move like a biped.
Any comments?

The great collection debate

I put a copy--draft--of a chapter from my next book on the website wwww.animalsi.com. The chapter is on "collection" of the horse. Collection is a term/concept that is really misunderstood--one author called it "mythunderstood--and as such it is difficult for someone to know what to believe it is.
There are those people who go back to the classics and read them to gain a better understanding of it. Throughout my riding career, in taking lessons, I've been told that I/we need to "collect" the horse. Often this was accompanied by an indication that the horse should "round" its back to indicate it was collected. It didn't seem to matter that the horse may be round behind while tight along the top line as in some champion cutting horses I watched on TV last week.
In my research on what collection means anatomically, I've come across three main, what I'm calling, themes: 1. the topline, 2. the bottom line and 3. the shoulder freedom theme. I've always been a proponent of the shoulder freedom theme and designed my work around this. This theme has been backed up by research by Dr. Hillary Clayton as has the first theme. What I've come to conclude is that collection occurs through the interaction of these three themes.
I'll write more on the website, so I can add some illustrations and animations. If you get a chance to visit and read the chapter, let me know what you think.