Warwick Schiller
Training
Warwick Schiller has been training horses professionally in the US since 1990.
Initially his passion was Reining, and that passion led to representing Australia twice at the World Equestrian Games, in Lexington, Kentucky in 2010 and Tryon, North Carolina in 2018. Along the way, Warwick discovered not only a passion for teaching, but also that explaining things to people in a way they could understand is what came naturally to him. His horse training journey and his own journey into healing, self-development and personal growth have run parallel to each other. He has always been a student of the horse learning as much as he can from many different sources and disciplines, but a number of years ago he encountered a horse that was not helped by the methods he was currently using at the time. This led him on a deep dive into methods that were outside the norms of current mainstream training, looking more into connection and relationship-based concepts. The more he learned about the horse’s nervous system and how trauma affects it, the more he looked into his own history, and the two have been leap-frogging each other ever since.
Warwick’s Youtube channel, which he started in 2011, has over 25 million views. During COVID in 2020 he started a podcast called the Journey On Podcast, in which he shares not only his healing journey, and horse training ideas, but interviews interesting guests from all walks of life sharing their journeys. The Journey On Podcast had 1.5million downloads in its first 2 years. His online video library boasts over 800 real time training videos. Warwick is excited to be back at EQUITANA, and is looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones.
Visit Warwick Schiller at the following sessions
Details
Friday November 11th
3:15 pm to 4:00 pm
Goodbye Flys Outdoor Competition Arena
Relationship before horsemanship – the incredible benefits of connection in training
Most horse training advice comes from professionals in their field of expertise. As they are professionals, their training techniques are limited by time constraints, ie, how much time the client is willing to pay for. This causes them to develop training techniques that yield the best results in the shortest time.
For the past six years I have not trained horses for the public and have had no time constraints with our horses. This allowed me to experiment with some outside-of-norm practices, and by far the biggest impact has been working on developing a connection with horses before attempting any training.
All horse behavioral problems come from a horse with a dysregulated nervous system, with them being in some level of fight, flight or freeze. A horse refusing to do something could be any one of these states. A horse pulling back is if fight or flight. A horse that won’t stand still is in flight. Working on connection first regulates that nervous system. Horses, like humans, are mammals and are social creatures who seek connection. Establishing connection first makes the training easy.
Details
Saturday November 12th
10:45 am to 11:30 am
DEG Australia Demonstration Arena
Methods or Principles?
“As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.” ~ Harrington Emerson – early 20th century efficiency expert.
Over my 30 years of training horses, giving clinics, going to clinics, reading articles and watching training videos, and watching other trainers at horse shows and expos like EQUITANA, I started to recogniSe patterns in training techniques, even ones that did not seem related. Things that an Olympic Gold medalist dressage rider said would have the same thought process behind it as something I saw someone from a completely unrelated discipline. I started to sort those techniques and methods into principles, and over more than a decade of putting techniques into groups, I found that every technique and method that was ethical and effective fell into one of 12 categories.
In this session, I will show examples of each of the principles, many of which are not just horse training principles but are relevant to every aspect of our life.
