Riding Refinery
Re-Define The Way You Ride
The Riding Refinery Riding School
Combining Horse Training Traditions With Modern Science
Why Create A Riding School?
Humans helping horses is the foundation of my Riding School project. The riding masters of the Old School believed that every horse is valuable and should have a meaningful and purpose filled life. The modern world is not very accommodating of the natural lifestyle of horses. Within the walls of a riding school horses can find purpose and bring meaning to their existence within this human-centric modern world.
"How does a riding school represent humans helping horses?", you ask. "Isn't that more a case of humans exploiting horses for their own enjoyment?"
In the Riding School we teach you how to make your horses happier and healthier by enhancing every aspect of their lives. Riding and training is the first step in the journey to making your horse happier and healthier. Educated riding and training exercises the body and sharpens the mind of the horse improving overall health and quality of life. The second step involves learning about healthy equine environments, physiology, psychology, biomechanics, social structure, etc. Then we must turn that additional insight into practical applications to improve our horse's quality of life.
What Is A Remote Riding School?
The remote Riding School is an ambitious project to build an online forum of self study and instructor led courses with the goal of passing on to the next generation of riders and trainers a long standing equestrian heritage of horse training knowledge and traditions from the Old School. For clarification, the Old School to which I refer is a very specific training lineage that lived within the pre-World War II Spanish Riding School of Vienna, Austria. Within the Spanish Riding School, this line of training became known as the Weyrother method named after the famous chief rider Max Ritter von Weyrother; although some of these traditions likely existed even earlier. These unique training techniques found new life in the new world in the form of The Mikolka Method. Karl Mikolka was the last student in the Weyrother training lineage of the Spanish Riding School. He brought his methods to the United States and spent 40 years honing, refining, and expanding upon the methods of the Old School. In the Riding Refinery Remote Riding School, we will combine, update, and examine the ancient training techniques from the Old School with modern scientific knowledge. Sometimes, modern science reveals the errors in ancient thinking; yet, other times it explains and reveals why the ancient methods work so well.
What Is Taught In The Riding School?
The four educational cornerstones of the Riding Refinery program are:
- Equine Education - Teaching horses to be ridden
- Rider Development - Teaching humans to be riders
- Equestrian Gymnastics - Developing the mind and body of horse & rider through the art of high school riding
- Elevating Equines - Producing happier healthier horses (and riders) through science
Bonus material may include special topics such as: hoof health, equine nutrition, equine environmental sciences, equine physiology and psychology, biomechanics, riding as physical therapy for humans, and riding as physical therapy for horses.
Join The Riding School
How Do I Enroll?
Are you interested in joining the first class of the Riding School, or are you in need of more details?
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Learn more about the Riding School inside the Riding Refinery Store
The refining pot is for silver and the furnace for gold, but the LORD tests the heart. Proverbs 17:3
As fire refines precious metals by removing impurities, so too does the trainer refine the horse by daily gymnastic work in the arena.
The time tested gymnastic training process of the Old School improves the horse by imparting mobility to joints, strength to muscles, and refinement to the intellect.
