by Matt Mitchell, PT, DPT Come to The Shea Center for 30 minutes and you are bound to see someone sitting on a horse backwards, sideways, or even standing on horseback! Have you ever wondered why our clients are not always sitting facing forward in a saddle during...
Max’s mother, Desiree, says “Max loves being outside and has so much fun at The Shea Center! He is learning how to connect with animals.” Seven-year-old Max loves riding “Bliss". The first day, he was apprehensive and clung to his mother. Now, he loves to feed and...
At The Shea Center, some of our clients ride in group lessons on the Therapeutic/Adaptive Riding side of our program. These Shea Center group lessons are taught by specially trained adaptive riding instructors and can have up to a maximum of four riders in the lesson....
by Matt Mitchell, PT, DPT Recent research suggests that a robotic horse simulator may be able to produce similar physical benefits to riding a real horse.1 However; there are aspects of live horses that simply cannot be replicated by a machine. We believe these...
Additional training to become a horse leader is available for our volunteers. No horse experience is required, but we do encourage new volunteers to first “get their feet wet” by volunteering at the barn before taking the class. Pre-requisites for this class include...
If you look in the horse stalls at The Shea Center, you may notice that each horse has its own unique bedding. This bedding provides more than just a comfortable place for our therapeutic horses to relax in between lessons. Two distinct types of bedding are used for...
Long before the first client rider of the day arrives at The Shea Center, our horses have been groomed, tacked, exercised, and prepped for their lessons. It takes a lot of man (and woman) hours to get our herd of 25 horses ready for the day. The staff at The Shea...
by Matt Mitchell, PT, DPT Therapy at The Shea Center is always goal driven. Our physical, occupational, and speech therapy professionals carefully select appropriate functional goals. We also regularly measure progress over time using a variety of methods. We take a...
by Matt Mitchell, PT, DPT Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is the number one diagnosis of the clients at The Shea Center. Our team of therapists and adaptive riding instructors strongly believe in the effectiveness of using riding instruction and therapy using equine...
The Shea Center established the Advanced Volunteer Program to ensure that new volunteers have a streamlined first day. With this team of 23 volunteers, we are able to offer extra training to those who would like more one-on-one instruction before beginning to work...