A visit by the saddle fitter

Sunday, September 28th, 2008 | saddle fitting

“Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment.” - Rita Mae Brown

When the saddle fitter calls

I had a chat this afternoon with one of our clients in another part of the country about the impending visit of a saddle fitter to her barn. She is pondering whether she should sign up for an evaluation of her saddle. “Do you think they can make an objective judgment,” she wonders, “or will they just try to sell me a different saddle?”  Well, I can’t possibly answer that objectively myself.  I do know that good fit occurs along a continuum.

If the fit is perfect in one phase of motion, it may be much less perfect at some other moment. If the fit is great when the horse is at full fitness, it may not be so good when the horse has had time off.  Though a saddle may fit well enough with a light rider, the panels may not support the tree efficiently with a much heavier rider on board.  The interface between the horse and the saddle changes all the time, and since there is no absolute standard of what is good enough, we are all left with only judgment and educated guesses, really.

Moreover, where a particular horse needs to be on the fit continuum probably varies from time to time, and it certainly varies among populations of horses.  Picture the school horses who work long hours every day, year after year, with every sort of unbalanced rider, often in a saddle that is probably far from a perfect fit.  If they feel it, they don’t necessarily show it. Some high performance horses work for years in what I might consider to be devices of torture and show no obvious ill-effects in soundness or performance.  Other horses are quick and graphic in demonstrating likes and dislikes in saddles.  Some fail to perform well in any saddle, often because there is an underlying issue of pain, which could originate anywhere in the body from teeth to tail. There is only one gigantic, total truth in saddle fitting, and it is this:

Thirty million years of evolution did not design the equine back to be load-bearing, and structurally horses’ backs are not well-suited for carrying the weight of a rider. Period.

So there’s the 800 pound gorilla in the room, which we will all now ignore. That is the first great truth of saddle fitting, and the second is like unto it: No saddle can ever approach a perfect fit, for once the horse takes a step forward, the shape of the back will change, and continue to change throughout the range of motion, and beyond that, throughout the horse’s life. Imprint these truths on your minds, dear readers, and go with at least a little skepticism into the business of having your saddle “re-fit” to your horse.

You may have to sit on many saddles before you make your selection

You may have to sit on many saddles before making your final selection.Since far be it from me to say that the opinion of a well-qualified and deep-thinking saddle fitter has no value, here is a list of some sample topics you might want to have covered in this encounter:

What are the fundamental fit characteristics of my horse in terms of his body shape?

What sort of tree shape would suit him best and which saddles do you know of that are built on those trees? How closely does my existing saddle fulfill these requirements?

If there are identifiable flaws in the fit of my saddle, how feasible would it be to rectify these problems, and what are the limitations of the solutions you propose?  For example, if you are going to address this problem by flocking my saddle, how much capacity for genuine reshaping does this particular panel really have?

How long can I expect a correction to the wool filling to last before it needs to be repeated? Would I be able to extend this by having you line the panels with felt?

Do you expect to be able to achieve a better solution working inside the panels than what could be accomplished using a therapeutic pad or correction pad? If so, why?

Please ask your saddle to explain in detail how he proposes to transform this tree to that tree by putting it in his press

If you are proposing to re-fit my saddle to my horse by altering the tree itself, brace yourself, you have some explaining to do. How exactly will you alter the tree? How can you be sure that the tree will be altered symmetrically if you can’t take it out of the saddle and measure it on a gauge?

How exactly will the saddle change in shape and function? What will happen to the tension on the springs and the rivets in the head and gullet plates? The angle on the stirrup bars? If you change the width of my tree, will this mess up the spacing on my panels?

Can you imagine a scenario in which you might turn a good saddle that doesn’t happen to fit this particular horse into a weird saddle that will not fit any horse properly?

Hmmm. I can imagine that.

Tags: horse shape, questions for saddle fitter, saddle adjustments, saddle flocking, saddle shape, what happens in a saddle fitting

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