Excelsior Horsemanship

01/05/2024

For all you Bonnie followers, here's her latest.

Send a message to learn more

20/10/2023

What a great day of lessons with some awesome ponies! So many great steps forward in training and a perfect end to the week! Congratulations to all the hard work these ladies have put in over the summer and fall. Hershey the Tennessee Walker has started learning to relax and stretch out her walk on a loose rein, handsome Kai the paint had a great time learning a western half halt with his rider, and my darling baby FERGUS is picking up a bit of stretchy trot with his owner! A skill the two are learning at the same time making my trainer heart extra proud! As always, I’m so grateful for all of these wonderful students and their horses allowing me to be a part of their team 🥰 great work all!

30/08/2023

Hey Raleigh followers!

We have a RARE Pasture Board Space opening here at Excelsior Stables this September 2023. I'm posting here first to offer our followers, friends, and supporters the first opportunity to inquire or recommend us to a friend 😉 Please message the page or Roxy if you're interested! Details below:

Full care pasture board is located in Eastern Wake County, approx. 30min from NC State.
$450/mo full care Pasture Board
Two on-site trainers, lit riding arena, twice daily feeding, hay provided, Feed-through Fly control provided, 8-stall barn with stalls available for overnight rental. Lit tack room, bathroom, and separate feed room.
Our barn is a small, close-knit group that operates more like a co-op than anything. We work together to make sure your horse's unique needs are met within the best of our abilities. 15 minutes to Sandy Pines Preserve, several Hunter/Jumper and Dressage professionals local within riding distance from our barn should you wish to lesson. Our barn is predominately English, Eventing/Dressage, with a few Western riders, one Fox Hunting/Endurance rider, and some Working Equitation thrown in for fun!
I teach mobile lessons in Sporthorse foundations in the Raleigh area and our other trainer takes on beginner Hunter/Jumper students with and without their own horses.

Though not at all required, this would be an excellent board situation for someone interested in occasionally working off their board with feed shifts or for a college student interested in learning more about training horses/managing a barn! We welcome supervised kids and adults alike.
Please message me if interested in details. I'll share our exact address, answer questions, and can arrange a tour if interested.

07/08/2023

Our East NC partner is up and running!

Miriam is the Excelsior Trainer based North of Willmington NC. While both of us help horses at all levels of training, Miriam's own pedigree(resume) gives her a leg-up when it comes to developing Sporthorses as sound and happy athletes! We work closely together and cross-consult often. As some of you know, we also travel back and forth for teaching/speaking engagements between our two locations. Miriam loves taking horses I've started and giving them a 'big kid job' and I love collaborating with Miriam to get our sport-ready horses fit and agile. Go Miriam! We're so excited to have you on our team!

If you're a fan of Roxy and her training methods, give Miriam a follow too to show your support for this awesome team of ladies!

26/07/2023

Now this is some cool food for thought!

18/07/2023

Training your own horse is a long game, and sometimes it can feel like a single new skill takes an eternity to master… but then, if you stick with it, the pieces all align and the skills click and then next thing you know you’re starting to operate your relationship to your horse with feel.

I got to watch those pieces click for Jordan Leigh Zachman tonight and her lovely mare Xiomara as they did their first ever session in-hand. Jordan’s feel and timing have been in development for months, and Xia hasn’t always made her job easy. Tonight, they shined. She picked up on this work like a fish to water, matching steps and energy with Xia like a professional and working with that push-pull energy I try so hard to describe with justice. What a joy to watch both as a trainer and friend, I just had to share it 🙂

01/10/2022

Jasper hopes all our friends stayed warm and dry like he did during Hurricane Ian! Though the pastures are soggy, all our Excelsior horses did well 🥰

24/09/2022

Wishing a good time and a successful first Endurance ride to Alex and Liberté today! They will be competing in the limited distance race at the Biltmore. Good luck, guys!

11/08/2022

Sweet Bonnie and our kids instructor, Taylor, helping a new student find her way to a lifelong passion 🥰

We have a few openings for kids lessons at our Zebulon location. Lessons are suitable for beginners with interest in learning ALL aspects of horsemanship from foundations up! Reach out if interested 😊

04/08/2022

Help Wanted at Excelsior Equine in Zebulon. *PAID position*
Primarily need help filling 3-6 feeding shifts/week on a flexible schedule HOWEVER the opportunity does exist to assist with training or teach youth lessons in the future for the right candidate.
Our barn focus is on accessible foundations for horse and human with an emphasis on creating versatile sport horses and confident riders.
We offer both mobile and on-site lessons and are excited to find a new team member who shares our passion for horses, people, and continuous education!

20/07/2022

This! I DO believe in starting horses early, the younger the better for their future mental and physical well-being. But what does ‘starting’ mean? Well, for our foals and weanlings, it means halter training, standing for vet and farrier, ground manners… for two and three year olds it means assessing their build and growth and starting more Walk-Trot groundwork, first ‘rides’ if physically ready, and learning to lunge and ground drive, and for those 4yr up it means lots and lots of long, slow, distance training! Point is, there’s more to starting young horses than riding and there’s more to riding young horses than just ‘bucking out’ and cantering circles.

17/07/2022

The Excelsior Equine team had a great time showing at Portofino Equestrian Center this last weekend.

Congratulations to Alex Zachman who competed for the first time with Liberty at Intro A and B. Though Alex is new to Dressage and less than a year into riding, he's proven that practice, patience and tenacity can make all the difference. I've watched Alex and Libby put in long hours together at the barn over the last year as Alex has tried to juggle being a new rider himself with training up a young and inexperienced Saddlebred. Libby has definitely not made his work easy but the relationship between these two is second to none and this weekend it showed. Congratulations again, and here's to many more successful shows!

Another shoutout goes to Blue Bonny Lass, AKA Bonnie, Bonbon, or "My Big Blue Dumpster Fire". She goes by many names and takes a lot of trash talk thanks to her never ending stream of medical maladies, but Bonnie tried her best this weekend to show at her second Intro Western Dressage test. It was a good time all around and Bonnie handled the heat and show environment like a seasoned professional. She's vet cleared to start canter work so here's to moving up, Bonbon!

27/04/2022

In a perfect world, starting baby horses wouldn’t have to be a roller coaster ride with unexpected twists and turns.

Sometimes starting baby horses can look pretty scary, for both the horse and its first rider.

I don’t pretend to be a cowboy but I’ll sit a buck where necessary. However, my favorite way to sit a buck is to never have it happen in the first place.

Yeah, in a perfect world I’d love all of my first rides to go like this one featuring training-horse Cade the Dutch Warmblood. I would love for all baby horses to experience a good upbringing with an owner as supportive of their training as Cade’s mom is.

There's no such thing as a perfect world, but it still makes me happy when I am able to get glimpses of what that may be like when first rides look like this.

17/01/2022

15/01/2022

What happened to Zen!?!

I've gotten a lot of people asking over the last few months about what happened with my EMM mustang, Zendaya. Here is our first update of 2022 and I answer these questions and discuss my plans for Zen's future.

What happened to Zen!I've gotten a lot of questions about Zen and where her video blogs went! In this latest blog update I explain the technical issues wit...

19/10/2021

Sky the Standardbred is in for training learning how to live life without racing or broodmare expectations. This is an exercise we do with most of our horses but for any kind of ex-cart horse it is especially beneficial!

Sky is a 2008 Standardbred mare here at ExEq for training. Sky is learning how to relax into the life of a riding horse for her new owner. Even though Sky ...

10/09/2021

LEARNING IS NOT LINEAR

Learning is recycled, over and over, in a spiral.

You constantly revisit the things you have already learned.

Each time you revisit something, you see it from a deeper place of awareness, and learn new things.

If you feel like you're going back to the basics, or revisiting things you have learned before, GOOD!

That means you are progressing!

"The basic techniques, or what they call the basics, are more difficult then what comes later. This is the trap of dressage. Correct basics are more difficult then the piaffe or passage." - Conrad Schumacher

I have heard more than one dressage master say "show me you're walk and I can tell you how everything else in the ride will go."

I have joked, a bit seriously, that how you put a halter on is already preparing your flying changes (or any other movement).

Nothing is separate. Everything is connected. They are all little building blocks that add up to other moments.

If you haven't started to experience this spiral yet, you will know it when it happens.

You're ego will take a hit, you will eat humble pie. Frustration and confusion are another sure sign.

These all indicate that you're starting another spiral of growth. What feels like going back is actually moving you forward.

Eventually, you welcome the new spiral of change with excitement, because you know that knowledge and awarness are on the horizon.

You come to truly understand that it's the focus on the basic ingredients that gets you to the next step, not the "thing" itself.

Things that once were challenging, like the piaffe, start to organically produce themselves, like seeds sprouting out of the ground; by-products of BETTER BASICS.

No matter the level of rider or trainer, the spiral of learning is never ending.

Be wary of self proclaimed masters. Anything that is no longer growing in learning is shrinking in knowledge.

We are all spiraling around the same center of basics, just from different vantage points of awareness.

"The path isn't a strait line; it's a spiral. You continually come back to the things you thought you understood and see deeper truths"
- Barry H. Gillespie

12/08/2021

Zen's latest video blog is posted and it's a big one! We're about half-way through Mustang Makeover so far and getting ready to start ridden work in the next few days. If you'd like to see how an entire training session goes with Zen the mustang, check out this video. Thanks for your support!

This is a FULL LENGTH training video for my session today with Zen the mustang for the 2021 New Jersey Extreme Mustang Makeover. Zen is just past the half-w...

27/07/2021

ExEq has a new horse in for 30 days of training. Everybody... meet Loki!

Loki's owner has agreed to allow his training to be documented for a new video blog series that I will share on my Youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCYp0oLlMyklrGTVn6rZIHg

This is video from Day 1 of Loki's training. If you would like to keep up with what our work and sessions looks like for horses that come into Excelsior Equine for training, then follow along with Loki's playlist. Updates will be posted regularly (and I will continue to update on Zen the Mustang as well) but the Loki series will include much longer clips and un-edited video segments so it may not be the most entertaining for everyone. Never fear, we're not offended if you choose to skip over these videos!

HEADS UP! This video series will be a loooong one. These Loki videos will showcase a lot of unedited footage of the training process for one of our first c...

19/07/2021

Zen the Mustang, 2021 New Jersey Extreme Mustang Makeover Video Blog 7

This will be a short blog showing the steps I took to put a halter on my 2021 New Jersey Extreme Mustang Makeover horse, Zen, for the first time. (Technical...

14/07/2021

Week 4-5 with Zen the mustang. This week we worked on yielding to pressure from a rope and preparing Zen for me to approach and halter her. This video show...

14/07/2021

I know we are behind on updates! Fingers crossed our next video progress report will be coming later today. In the mean time, here's a brief update for everyone on Zen's progress and one of the aspects of my training program that we will now start to incorporate.

02/07/2021

Week 4 updates and guess what else... We have a name!

This week The Mustang has finally started to learn that humans can be pretty neat! They do all kinds of weird things like make faces when you sniff them, ta...

24/06/2021

Video Blog 4!

This one is a mini blog and training update. We had some rough things come up this week but after a few days off The Mustang is ready to continue training. Keep an eye out for Blog 5! It'll be a good one!

Week 3 work with The Mustang (Name pending her approval). Central NC has been seeing a lot of mixed weather lately, seems like there's a big storm blowing t...

20/06/2021

What is perhaps the most important realization a mustang can make?

Humans are excellent sources of belly rubs. Seriously. Why else were we given such finger-y hands if not for this purpose?