Stretches

You'll learn how to safely and effectively take a horse through a sequence of stretches and core-strengthening exercises involving every major muscle group. This is taught through reading material, demonstration, and hands-on practice, and the horses absolutely love it.

Case Studies

You'll apply your skills to performance horses with real-life issues. Each student is assigned a horse, works through evaluation, massage, and stretching, and shares results with the class. We evaluate each horse before and after, so the differences are easy to see, which helps you start your new career with confidence.

Saddle Fitting

You'll learn to properly evaluate and fit a saddle to a horse. Left unrecognized, poor saddle fit can lead to back pain and a range of other physical and behavioral problems. This section covers the anatomy of the equine back and the saddle, and how to pair the two correctly.

Starting Your Business

We close the course with an honest look at what it takes to succeed in this field. Every student's goals are different, and this is an open, collaborative space to learn from instructors and past students, including what's worked, what hasn't, and how to market your services well.

Guided Externship

This is what sets Elite apart from our other programs. After your hands-on days, you'll complete your externship from a distance, alongside the same group of students you trained with in person. Over the following 3 months, you'll complete 25 case studies on real horses and join 6 group Zoom sessions with your instructors.

In those sessions, you'll walk through the horses you've been working on as a group, share what you're seeing, and get direct feedback. You're welcome to share photos and videos of your sessions for input, and instructors will guide you on how to keep improving each horse's care from one session to the next. We also spend time on client communication, since explaining your findings clearly is just as much a part of this work as the hands-on skill.

To complete this portion, you'll need access to horses to practice on, your own, a friend's, or horses within your community, therapy centers and rescues both work well. Instead of leaving with a certificate and a question mark, you leave having already done the work, with your instructors and classmates in your corner the whole time.

Cupping, Gua Sha & Fascia Work

This is new territory for Elite, and it's a meaningful step beyond massage alone. You'll study the body's myofascial lines, the connected chains of fascia that run throughout the horse, and how tension in one area can show up as restriction somewhere else entirely. Understanding these lines changes how you read a horse's whole-body pattern, not just the spot under your hands.

From there, you'll learn the benefits and proper application of cupping therapy: how negative pressure lifts the tissue rather than compressing it, drawing blood flow to the area, releasing adhesions, and creating space within the fascia that massage alone can't always reach. Alongside it, you'll learn gua sha, a scraping technique used to break up tension along the fascial lines and support lymphatic drainage.

Both modalities are taught with the same care we bring to everything else: proper tool use, correct pressure and timing, how to read the horse's response, and the contraindications you need to know before ever introducing either technique, including skin conditions, certain injuries, and situations where a veterinarian should be involved first.

Just as important: these are real, billable services. Cupping and gua sha are increasingly requested by horse owners who already value bodywork, and offering them gives your practice something to grow into beyond a standard massage session, additional techniques you're trained to perform, and additional services you can charge for.