Have you ever wondered how therapeutic riding benefits the riders?
Therapeutic riding physically benefits our riders because the horses gate mimics the human walk. It helps our riders build muscle tone, improves their posture, and balance. It increases strength and endurance throughout the lessons and the more that they ride with us the stronger they become.
Cognitively we work on different educational goals such as numbers, letter recognitions, or shapes through games that we play in our arena. We work on social skills encouraging our riders to interact with peers they ride with, or with their volunteers working on different goals that we set up that they can work on together.
Therapeutic riding also builds our riders confidence, and we challenge our riders to see how much they can do independently. We also keep it safe but we want to make sure our participants are challenging themselves, and we love to watch them accomplish different goals they may not have thought they could before. It also provides a sensory input for riders that might need that. The horses gate allows the riders to focus on different skills that we have set up.
Horses benefit each of our riders in a very different and unique ways. just like Winston Churchill says “There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.” Our program proves that daily!