My Background and Philosophy on Horse Training:

I really don't remember the first time I was on a horse...
I guess I have been riding all my life. I have been showing and training horses since the age of 10. When I was a kid, my Dad would get customer horses in to train and my brother and sister and I would do most of the training and all of the showing. Throughout those years I spent countless hours and tons of effort learning as much as possible to find out what it takes to make each horse perform at its best. In 2006, I started looking for a better and safer way for me and my horses, after watching Road to the Horse, a colt starting competition. I thought that I could use the philosophy of any easier way for horse and rider, to get the same results that we have been getting for years. I stumbled onto something, that was brand new to me, and has amazed me ever since. I never knew how much that you can learn from your horse partner.

Over 120 horses and mules later, I started developing and understanding a philosophy to provide the safe and gentle training methods necessary to create not only a safe and gentle horse, but also the horse partnership of your dreams, and doing so while being calm, collected, respectful, obedient, and most importantly, the horse being respected by the owner. Whether you are riding in the back yard, on trails, roping, barrel racing, reining, or cutting, all of the attributes listed above are just as important with one event as it is for the other, and I also believe that they are the keys to great horsemanship.

Here at Dixon Stables we focus on teaching people not just horses. You will learn how to properly educate your horse to gain softness, control, and respect with gentle and non-abusive techniques. These methods will in turn produce the high quality horse you desire, and make your partnership a more enjoyable one. Dixon Stables uses a philosophy of training that is based on the natural horsemanship methods of many top clinicians. This philosophy of working with horses, teaches the horses through pressure and release, thus building a communication path with the horses' mind. By communicating with the horse this way, we build a partnership with the horse that will prepare it to do anything we ask it to do. A horse can use this type of communication, of pressure and release as a foundation to excel at any type of discipline of riding.

Horses are started with extensive ground work. The horse learns ground manners, flexion, and softness. Skills learned in the ground work then become the foundation of balance, bending, and softness in the bridle when the horse is ridden. With this foundation the horse learns to move off of leg pressure, turn on the forehand, turn on the rear, bending, leads, side pass, stop, back softly, and back in circles. After the basics are mastered in the arena the horse is then taken out on the trail. On the trails the horse is ridden on their own to help them with any herd-bound issues they might have, they also cross water, and tackle different types of terrain. The horse also learns to accept being rode while popping a bull whip and have a rope thrown off of them.