Playing Hooky

I'm feeling a little guilty, since I'm supposed to be finishing an article for a magazine and instead I'm writing here. But that's not the only thing that's keeping me away from the article. I've been working in a number of animations for the online course, which leads me to what I wanted to write about.
One of the things I like to do, to get inspiration for doing the animations, is look at the work of other people. I was having a problem with a "particle system", which I'm using to illustrate an embryology concept--this is one of those things that Rolfers seem to all do when we are explaining fascia, that being we resort to embryology to show that the body is not made up of "parts"--and searched the net to see if anyone else had solved this problem. What I found was a great website for a film/media school that had a montage of their work. www.brandnewschool.com
At the beginning of the montage the video had a roll of welcome text in different languages. Each language was in a different color and each sentence was on it's own line. So, the first line in each language came first. Then the second line in the paragraph...so that the languages were interspersed and you had to pick yours out of each paragraph. At first this was really confusing to me, but soon, within one or two lines my eye was locked on to the white english text.
This really interested me, so I ran the montage again and tried to not read the english but the concentrate on the german. Again, my eyes locked on the english.
Now I'm fascinated and wonder if this is indicative of how we see things we "know" but don't see things we don't know. You know?
Do any of you know if there's research into this kind of thing--beyond "what the blib do we know..."?
Ok, back to the article.

How much should we "dumb-down"?

When I decided to leave engineering for health care, I took a year long anatomy and physiology course at the University of Colorado. Since I was late in applying to school I had to get on the "wait" list for the class. There were 300 people in the auditorium when I went to the first class!
I asked the professor after the first lecture if there was any real chance to get in the class. He, told me to wait until after the first exam and there would be plenty of room. He was right. After the first exam over 50% of the class dropped since it was so hard.
When the professor was challenged about how difficult the exam was he responded " So many of you want to be doctors. If I ever have to go into surgery and one of you are the surgeon I will be very comfortable knowing you know your A&P.".
This is how I run my classes, they are for people who are willing to push themselves to learn what they don't already know.
It seems like we--this is the collective we of people who instruct others--try to dumb things down so much that I wonder if we know what we are talking about. This will only harm the field of animal body therapy.

What to do?

These days people are all trying to figure out how to make ends meet. This may mean that they won't be spending as much on their and their animals alternative health care. This will be mostly true if they don't perceive a direct relationship between the therapy and they achievement of some goal they may have.
When I worked for Hewlett Packard as an engineering manager the country went through another recession, companies weren't buying our products. During this time I heard about the strategy that Intel Corporation had for these types of economic downturns; they spent more money on the research and development to be able to produce better products and lead the market once there was a turn around in the economy.
We can and should do something similar to Intel, by investing in our own training. By gaining a new skill or, better yet, improving one we already have, we'll be poised to help our clients when they are able to afford our work again.
Spend time keeping in touch with your clients so they know you are still out there and that you are continuing with your development. You want to be on the "top" of their mind when they think about alternative therapies for their animals again.
Take time to get together with your colleagues and share our knowledge with them. If you belong to a discussion group participate in it. I recently started a discussion forum on www.animalsi.com please feel free to join it. I am asked every week for referrals to good body therapists, this is a way to make yourself known.
I like to spend my down time going over my course notes from my previous trainings, re-reading books, and looking for new ideas.
The most important thing is to stay involved with your work, keep your hands tuned up and let people know you're still out there.

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.

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