Occasionally people send e-mails expressing an interest in becoming a professional saddle fitter and asking where training is available.  I don’t have a good answer for this.  It’s hard for me to imagine becoming an educated saddle fitter without spending time with saddle makers and tree makers, but they aren’t thick on the ground in North America.   Various therapeutic practitioners offer brief courses here, often in conjunction with training in therapeutic services such as equine massage, and some saddle brands offer training in aid of marketing their saddles.   

Some time ago, unhappy with the limitations of what I could learn where I was, I began to make the pilgrimage to Walsall frequently, to badger saddle makers, more experienced saddle fitters, and tree makers, crassly mining their collective centuries of experience for a fleck or two of precious insight.  The effort has been more than worth it, and this is quite odd because, in Walsall at least, almost any saddle maker you talk to will give you a completely different story about the right way to do things. 

Eventually I endured the Society of Master Saddlers’ week-long ordeal in the UK that is required as a pre-requisite for the assessment to become “qualified” by the SMS as a professional saddle fitter.  (Tip for those of you who would go down this road and want to succeed under the polite scrutiny of the examiners: Think first about what happens in your real life as a saddle fitter, then say or do the opposite.)

The UK’s Society of Master Saddlers is a sufficiently interesting body that it probably merits its own daytime TV drama.  I’m not going to get bogged down there, however; I’m going to restrict myself to writing about only some of the many aspects of this subject that I feel insufficiently knowledgeable to discourse upon. 

In any case, the SMS is the only body in the world that confers internationally-recognized professional saddle fitting credentials.  Becoming officially qualified and eligible for membership in this august body as a professional saddle fitter isn’t necessarily a token of great achievement in this field (trust me on that!), but it is not without value.  The QSF course provides a platform of basic knowledge and procedure for saddle fitters already in the profession, and attaining this qualification is a sign that the saddle fitter is committed to an established standard of professionalism.   Why else would he or she put himself or herself through this expensive and un-fun initiation?   Moreover, it can be a useful entrée into the clubby world of the British saddle industry.  Making the effort to become qualified (it’s not a small one) probably scores at least a little street cred for an outsider in Walsall.

Nevertheless, the real learning takes place (for me at least) over a long period of time; picking up new ideas from other saddle fitters and from saddle makers in Walsall; trying them in the field; coming back with more questions; seeking out new sources of insight.  One of my favourites has been the managing director of a large British saddle tree manufacturer.  An absolutely lovely man, to whom I am immensely grateful for helping me to understand the critical basics of tree design and technology, I hasten to assure him should he hear of this that I am not at all offended by his mild observation that my grasp of the geometry of tree design will always be rudimentary, notwithstanding repetitive tutorials on the subject.

If this leaves you wondering whether you are reading a blog on saddle fitting written by someone not particularly well qualified to write it, I’m afraid the answer to that is yes.  Unfortunately, whoever should be writing this instead of me hasn’t done it yet.  Had this knowledge, this deeper way of looking at saddle technology and saddle fit, been readily available when I started in this job, I think that I would have been quite a bit better at it, a lot sooner.