Equine Performance Solutions

08/31/2026

When Max arrived, he was severely underweight and completely shut down😔
He had no interest in interacting with people, and when people saw him for the first time, the most common comment was, *“Well… he’s got a cute face.”*
I like spicy, cheeky horses, and I remember making the comment that I didn’t know if he had enough fire in him...😆
Turns out… he had plenty😳
One medical disaster after another got in the way of us bonding, but once he got some groceries in him, he started coming back to life.
But the horse that came out wasn’t easy.
He wasn’t cheeky—he was defensive, easily triggered, and angry.
Frustration or even the slightest aggression toward him only fueled him, and he made it very clear that if I was going to fight him into submission, he was going to fight back—no matter the cost.
Other horses being ridden around him would send him into a frenzy.
And I don’t mean what you see in these videos.
I mean completely checked out.
No awareness of his surroundings.
Rearing.
Striking at me.
Leaping around me—and sometimes it felt like over me.
Hooves flying way too close for comfort.
Slipping. Falling. Over and over.
With absolutely no concern for my safety or his own.
And in those moments, there was no reaching him. No training through it. He was gone.
There were days I wore my helmet and crash vest just trying to wrestle him to the round pen or arena in hopes of accomplishing something.
He was on a different level—like nothing I had ever experienced before, and I have always been drawn to complicated and difficult horses...
And for the first time in my life, I thought - I don’t know if I can do this.
My plans to reshape his body, posture, and movement came to a screeching halt because every attempt I made to help him was perceived as an attack he needed to defend himself against.
That’s what sent me down a completely different path—one I never had any interest in before.
I started learning from people like Tik Maynard, Warwick Schiller, Josh Nichol, Buck Brannaman, Ray Hunt, Tom Dorrance, and Jonathan Field. Listening to any podcast or interview I could find to better undersand their philosophy.
Their approaches gave me a new way to understand Max—and new tools to meet him where he was.
Through all of that, along with the wisdom from more classical riders and my background in functional anatomy, I began to discover a new way to create better posture, spinal alignment, and movement.
The results of that journey are what became this class.
This course wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the challenges Max brought me.
And while our journey is far from over, it has been one of the most rewarding ones yet.
Click Link to join me in the Equine Posture & Movement Training Masterclass
https://vicke-s-site.thinkific.com

08/31/2026

A couple of weeks ago I sat down and had a great conversation with April Schaefer on her Equine Advocate Podcast. We had a great chat about everything horses, bodywork, movement training, posture, nutrition etc.
Have a listen and please pardon my slight nasally, horse voice. I was recovering from being sick😷🤒

EP 76 THE EQUINE ADVOCATE PODCAST
Join Vicke McCall and I for a fabulous conversation about equine posture and movement-and how emotional, mental and physical components impact this!

https://open.spotify.com/episode/76EBbQBhtLiumQ9f3NAiBF?si=nez3yOrFQ4K0wYwBZgF3CQ

Vicke is an equine bodyworker, movement specialist, and educator dedicated to helping horses move, perform, and feel their best. With a lifelong passion for horses and years of hands-on experience, she specializes in identifying the underlying causes of movement dysfunction rather than simply addressing the symptoms.

As a certified bodyworker, Vicke integrates sports massage, myofascial release (MFR), acupressure, craniosacral therapy, PEMF, and laser therapy into her bodywork practice. Her work is complemented by an in-depth understanding of equine functional anatomy, posture, and movement, allowing her to help horses develop healthier posture and more efficient movement patterns.

Known for her success in rehabilitating horses with complex movement and behavioral challenges, Vicke focuses on developing stability, balance, and spinal alignment to improve function while supporting long-term soundness and performance. Through her educational approach, she combines the emotional, mental, and physical aspects of the horse to develop calmer, more engaged, and willing equine athletes.

Vicke has also developed the Equine Posture and Movement Training Master Class, an online educational program designed to make functional anatomy understandable for everyday horse owners. She gives owners the knowledge and confidence to recognize what is happening with their horse's posture, visualize what is possible, and apply a practical framework that helps horses develop healthier posture, movement, and long-term performance.

Website: www.equinemovementretraining.com
page: facebook.com/equineperformancesolutions
Instagram: www.instagram.com/vickemccallequinebodywork/
Movement Training Course: Equine Posture & Movement Training Masterclass

08/28/2026

The original idea for my Equine Posture & Movement Masterclass actually came from wanting to offer my clients more support.

Over the years, I’ve worked with several horses from out of town that I could only see a few times a year, as well as some very complex cases. We would meet for movement training sessions, but there was often SO much to cover that by the time I left, clients could feel overwhelmed trying to remember everything we had worked on. So sometimes we would focus on small bite size pieces of them which made the progress slower than it could have been.

I would put things in writing, they would send me videos over WhatsApp, and I would pull still frames from their videos, mark them up, and send them back with suggestions for what to work on next.

Eventually I thought, I need to record this.

I wanted to create videos clients could go back and watch whenever they needed a refresher. But as I started putting those videos together, I realized that simply showing someone what to do wasn't enough.

For it to be more than just a cookie-cutter recipe of exercises, the person doing the exercises needs to be able to recognize **what’s happening in the horse’s body, what might be causing it, and how to address it.** Every horse is going to present a little differently, and even the same horse will present differently on different days as they evolve through the movement retraining process.

And that’s how the Equine Posture & Movement Masterclass was born. ❤️

What started as a way to better support my own clients has grown into something much bigger, and I’m continuing to add new material, demonstrations, and case studies as it evolves.

08/26/2026

YES to this!!!🙌

Did you know? Landings can be postural?

Farriers are taught to pay close attention to how a horse lands.

Medial first? Lateral first? Toe first? Heel first? Level?

And this is important. Gross hoof imbalance can alter distal limb alignment, influence the orientation of the hoof as it meets the ground and create a pathological environment. Correcting that imbalance can absolutely improve landing.

But there is an important distinction that is often missed! The farrier does not have complete control over the landing.

Why?

Because landing occurs at the end of swing phase. During swing, the position of the hoof is being determined by the entire limb above it.

Muscle activation controls joint flexion and extension. The orientation of the carpus or tarsus, fetlock and distal joints influences the final position of the hoof. Tendon tension provides proprioceptive information to the nervous system. Conformation affects limb trajectory. Posture changes joint relationships. Fatigue and neuromuscular tone can alter limb placement. Myofascial physiology can create constrictions.

So the hoof that eventually meets the floor is the endpoint of a whole-body movement strategy.

I had a great example of this while working on a horse in Norway.

Before shoeing, the horse had a lateral landing. I assessed the hoof and corrected what I considered to be the underlying three-dimensional hoof imbalance.

Then we watched the horse again. The landing got worse. It was now landing very obviously on the lateral toe quarter.

At first glance, you might reasonably conclude that the shoeing was wrong. And if your primary measure of mediolateral balance is a level landing, the logical response would be to take the shoe back off and remove more lateral toe until the horse landed flatter.

But I was confident in the balance I had established. So rather than continuing to manipulate the hoof to chase the visual landing, we looked further up the system.

A fascial manipulation practitioner who was working with me assessed the horse and identified significant restrictions through the chest. She treated those restrictions.

We changed nothing on the foot. We watched the horse again. It landed level.

That is a hugely important clinical lesson. The hoof had not changed. The shoe had not changed. The trim had not changed. The horse above the hoof had changed.

This is entirely consistent with the framework developed in my upcoming book. Changes in posture, muscle tone or fascial stiffness within the scapulothoracic sling can influence swing phase, limb placement and therefore landing behaviour. Farriery can influence posture and landing, but it operates within constraints imposed by the rest of the neuromuscular and myofascial system.

This is why we need to understand the difference between landing and loading.

Landing is primarily a kinematic event. It describes the orientation of the hoof at initial ground contact. Loading is a kinetic event. Once the hoof contacts the ground, force rises, the centre of pressure migrates, joint moments develop and the structures of the digit begin resolving ground reaction force.

And importantly!

Landing does not reliably predict loading.

Research discussed in the book has shown that the orientation of initial contact does not reliably correspond to centre-of-pressure distribution later in stance. A horse can land laterally and subsequently load centrally. A visually level landing can still develop asymmetric loading as force increases.

This matters because the hoof does not remodel according to what it did for the first instant of contact.

Morphology reflects the forces applied, sustained and accumulated through stance.
And this forces must be resolved by the rest of the body.
Impulse and repeated midstance loading contribute to the time-dependent deformation and adaptation that ultimately shape the hoof capsule and create a bi-directional relationship between hoof morphology and posture.

So imagine what could have happened in the Norway case.

If I had looked only at the lateral landing and continued removing lateral hoof until it looked level, I might have altered a hoof that was already mechanically balanced in an attempt to compensate for a problem originating elsewhere in the system.

I could have created hoof imbalance to compensate for postural asymmetry.

That is the danger of chasing landings.

This does not mean we ignore landing. Farriers absolutely influence it, and grossly abnormal landing can be valuable information.

It means we need to recognise its variables and, importantly, recognise the limits of trimming and shoeing.

Once hoof imbalance has been appropriately addressed, persistent landing asymmetry should make us ask another question!

Is the hoof still causing the landing, or is the landing now telling us something about the horse? Or is it simply normal for that individual?

The relationship works in both directions.

Hoof balance → limb orientation → proprioception → muscle and fascial tone → posture.

But also

Posture → muscle and fascial tone → limb orientation and swing phase → landing → stance mechanics → impulse → hoof morphology.

It is a closed loop.

And that means good modern farriery sometimes requires knowing when not to take any more hoof away.

This distinction between landing and loading, how posture influences the hoof, how the hoof influences posture, and where the limits of farriery sit within that system is exactly the kind of discussion we will be getting into during the TED USA Tour clinics.

Because sometimes the most important thing a landing tells the farrier is that the answer isn’t in the foot.

08/25/2026

The thing that was hardest for me to learn with in-hand work was clarity.

I'm a pretty gentle person, and I tend to do really well with highly sensitive mares that feed off my calm energy and can feel the smallest shift in my presence. With Max, I had to learn to change that. Even though Max was highly sensitive and easily triggered, he didn't respond well to vague or unclear energy. I had to learn to stand a little taller and become stronger and clearer in my energy so that he could still feel me from a distance. If I didn't, he would push into my space, rear, strike, etc.

When Max is being good, it's still easy for me to shrink a little and become smaller in my stature. I used to think of that as taking the pressure off and rewarding him.

But Max doesn't see it as a reward. The moment I shrink and become unclear, he immediately becomes bigger and starts pushing into my space again.

I can stay calm, strong, and assertive, but still kind. I can soften and reward him while still maintaining my presence and being absolutely clear about where my space is. I just have to constantly work at it...

It's funny because clarity has always come pretty naturally to me when I'm riding, but it was something I really had to work on with my in-hand work.

And Max has been a very good teacher. 😅

08/21/2026

Teamed up with Maria Fegan again today for a dress rehearsal of sorts, checking how the colors show up and figuring out how to best demonstrate what I plan to talk about during the Painted Horse presentation at the Equine Education Summit on September 6!
Hope to see you there!
Big thanks to Pam Rickard Ellison for allowing Ziggy to model! He is the perfect pony for painting🥰🎨🖌️🧑‍🎨

This is a two day event and I’m presenting on both days. The painted horse will be on Sunday and will build on the functional anatomy and posture that I’ll talk about in Saturday’s presentation.

08/19/2026

A little sneak peek at Kyon’s progress 🥰

When we started, Kyon had a difficult relationship with contact. He would either invert or drop his neck, tuck his chin, and curl behind the vertical rather than maintaining a steady connection through his body. In both versions, his throatlatch area would be too closed up. He was reluctant to move forward and had started refusing to move into the canter.

Yesterday, I uploaded a recap video of my riding progress with him to the course platform and wanted to share some moments from our canter work here. I found video from the first day I asked him to canter, and it’s pretty interesting to watch.

His canter was quite disorganized and four-beat. He was tracking on more than two tracks, with his haunches traveling to the right in both directions. If anything, I would expect the haunches to be positioned slightly to the inside in the canter, but never to the outside. He was also stepping wide with both hind legs, with the inside hind stepping past the midline of his body, even though we’re traveling on a straight line.

Like I mentioned above, the canter was four-beat, but instead of what I often see, where the diagonal pair is no longer traveling in unison, it’s mostly the inside front leg that stayed on the ground too long, completely eliminating the moment of suspension.

Over time, his balance, posture, and relationship to contact have improved. And that four-beat canter is now pretty consistently three-beat, with better suspension, more uphill balance, and above all, a willingness to move❤️

Progress isn’t always linear, and it hasn’t been with Kyon either. But this is why I find movement patterns so fascinating. The things you start seeing when you really start looking are wild. And once you see it, you just have to try to make sense of it to start improving it... 😅

The more detailed progression video, with much more explanation, is now available inside the Equine Posture & Movement Training Course. 🐴