Massage for Horses
A Day Course for Horse Owners with Gillian Higgins
A practical day course where you’ll learn massage techniques you can do on your own horse.
Massage has many benefits and is such a useful skill to learn. It can be used to maintain suppleness and flexibility, promote physical and mental relaxation and reduce muscle tension and stiffness. It’s also an excellent way to develop a stronger bond between you and your horse.
During this course, you’ll gain knowledge in using massage routines for:
Maintaining the health and mobility of older horses
Preparing your horse for competition
Regular maintenance massage for general muscular health and reducing the risk of injury
This is a practical-based course so you will have the opportunity under Gillian’s guidance to practise the massage techniques on different horses, so you go home confident to carry out massage on your own horse. You do not need to bring your own horse.
Course Trailer
This massage course for horse owners is a step by step guide that will give you the confidence and skills to massage your horse with soft tissue techniques that really make a difference to equine comfort, health and performance.
Learning massage for your horse can help to improve mobility, suppleness, flexibility and posture as well as helping with mental relaxation and contentment.
Massage is a superb opportunity to develop the bond between you and your horse.
As well as giving you a number of different example routines you will also learn how to tailor massage to suit you, your horse and the aims of different massage from maintenance to warm up, relaxation and detox massage to deep tissue massage.
Whatever discipline or activities you do with your horse he will benefit from massage. We all want the best for our horses and as they do so much for us, Learning how to massage is a great way of giving back something back.
Course Details
Timetable
09.00: Welcome and Coffee
09.30: Principles of Massage - Theory Session
11.00: Break
11.30: Massage Techniques - Practical Session
12.30: Lunch
13.15: Massage Techniques - Practical Session
14.30: Break
15.00: Massage Routines - Practical Session
16.00: Discussion
16.30: Close
Notes
You do not need to bring your own horse for this course.
Tea, coffee and homemade cakes will be available throughout the day
Please bring your own packed lunch
This course is held both inside and out so please bring appropriate warm clothes for a day out on the yard.
This course is limited to 14 people to ensure small groups and individual attention.
Course Price
Course Leader
Gillian Higgins
Gillian is an equine anatomist, biomechanist, BHS Senior Coach, Professional Sports and Remedial Therapist and author with a first-class honours degree in Equine Science and Business Management.
Gillian is well known for her dynamic and engaging presentation style, approachable manner and ability to make sometimes difficult subjects seem easy, useful and relevant.
With a passion for equine massage and with the welfare and comfort of the horse in mind, she has given massage workshops all over the world. Gillian has studied a variety of equine and human modalities both traditional and holistic.
As well as conventional training, Gillian has studied Equine Therapies in America, France, Germany and Sweden and is committed to giving our equine partners the best possible levels of care and consideration.
She specialises in assessing the musculoskeletal systems and designing exercise programmes for improving posture and performances as well as assessing and addressing individual horses’ weaknesses. Gillian works with horses from all disciplines and levels from leisure to Olympic.
All of Gillian's courses are supported by a wealth of photographs and video footage taken from years worth of work including footage of her anatomically painted horses and from her dissections.
This ensures that you will be better able to visualise the anatomy in relation to the horse.
This course is run at the Horses Inside Out headquarters, Wavendon Grange near Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire.
The facilities at this central UK location include a small yard with a variety of horses, arenas and a classroom complete with audiovisual facilities.
This is a comfortable and professional space for learning where you are always guaranteed a friendly welcome.
Gillian has many bones, skeletons and anatomical models in the teaching barn for you to view and handle.
Being able to bring horses into the teaching barn alongside the anatomical models really helps to combine the theory and the practice!
