Schillering

I haven't talked about my "methods" for fixing my train wreck of a horse (Arthur) in a while.  When I started things with horses, there wasn't someone hocking their goods online, videos available at the flip of a something, or anything like that (gosh I sound old *waves cane).  I learned from the horses mainly and with some awesome trainers (sometimes not awesome) that showed me what to do.  And watching lots of people fail epically with their own horses.

In general, I like finding out how things work as well as fixing things and most importantly, doing it efficiently.  This is why I'm good at training animals (and people but we won't talk about that today).  Clinton Anderson was the first marketed person I perused and while I liked what he's doing and something is better than nothing, I wasn't sold on the "program" and once more, did my own thing as it made sense to me.  Shortly before I got Arthur though, I was looking for some reining videos to try something with Piper and stumbled upon a trainer named Warwick Schiller.  I was watching the videos more to see how things looked and if I agreed, but while listening to him he totally spoke to me.

His techniques are about being structured, doing things for the right reason and letting the horse figure out the right thing.  I mean, that's so me!  So I watched some more of his YouTube things and come to find out, while he's competed in the WEG for Australia in reining, his main thing is "fixing" broked horses in CA.  He also works with each horse in the timeframe the horse needs to be worked in and takes into account the personality differences.

Oh and his subscription is like $25 a month and he literally walks you through training each horse from start to finish with hundreds of hours of video.  I could just watch and learn with him narrating.  Also, one of his project horses was a "Bucking QH" that I swear has the same backstory as Arthur so why not?

Now things aren't perfect and you need to use your brain, but in addition to the copious amounts of hours of video, Warwick also actually haunts his Facebook group himself and will reply regularly to questions and such.  Warwick's strengths are definitely his lack of bravery (why get ON a horse that you can't even catch?!), his well thought out action, his demonstrations, and background in horses in general. Oh and his main speciality is fixing dressage/eventing/etc giant warmbloods that have been mentally wrecked. 

So most of Arthur's journey has been using Warwick's methods and its been nice to have a virtual training coach to help out.

Granted it doesn't help me feel confident when I stick my foot in the stirrup, but I'm not sure anything less than a 6 pack of something would do that.

Check him out here:  http://www.warwickschiller.com/