Saddle Fit and the Equine Therapist: What We're Allowed to Say About the Saddle

The saddle sits on almost every horse we treat, and fitting it isn't our job. That leaves a grey area most of us have learned to work around, when what it really needs is a clearer question.

The restriction was on the right again.

A twelve year old warmblood gelding, working at dressage, who found bending right far harder than bending left. I'd treated it on my first visit and he'd gone better for it. On my second visit it was back, in the same place, looking almost exactly as it had before.

Most of us know that moment. The same finding, in the same horse, under the same saddle, and the quiet question of whether we're missing something.

The saddle is often the first thing my eye goes to in that moment, and for a long time it was also the thing I said least about. I'm not the saddle fitter. The fitter is rarely there, so I can't ask what they've seen or why they've made the choices they have. And the last thing I want is to walk onto a yard and undermine another professional in front of their client.

So the saddle becomes the elephant in the room. We know it matters to how the horse moves and to whether anything we do will last until the next visit, and we work around it anyway.

What I didn't have for a long time was a way of thinking about it that respected the fitter's job, still did mine, and didn't leap to blaming the saddle just because it was the most obvious thing sitting on the horse.

Two jobs, not one

The grey area starts to clear the moment we separate two things that usually get blurred together.

Judging whether a saddle fits belongs to the qualified saddle fitter. Tree width and angle, panel shape, flocking, the hardware that holds it all together. That's their training, their tools and their responsibility, and adjusting any of it is outside our scope.

Reading what the saddle is doing to the horse is a different job entirely. How the horse moves with it and without it, how the back responds, how the rider sits in it and what that does to the load, whether the behaviour around saddling has changed. That's dynamic loading, physiological adaptation and clinical pain, which is exactly what we're trained to assess.

Bradley Whale puts it plainly in the material we teach from: evaluating saddle fit is beyond the therapist's scope, and evaluating dynamic loading, adaptation and pain is precisely our mandate. Once that line is drawn, there's a great deal we can say without saying anything about fit at all.

Cause, compensator or messenger

The question most of us were never taught to ask is not whether the saddle is good or bad. It's what job the saddle is doing in this particular horse.

Bradley's model gives it three possible answers.

The saddle can be the cause. Its geometry is directly creating focal pressure or restricting movement, and the back is responding to that.

The saddle can be the compensator. It's accommodating something the horse already had, an asymmetry, a muscle that's developed unevenly, the demands of a particular job, and it sits the way it does because the horse underneath it is shaped the way it is.

Or the saddle can be the messenger. It's moving, slipping or tipping because something in the horse or the rider is moving it, and its displacement is the clearest sign we have that something else needs looking at.

Those three answers lead to three very different conversations. Only the first one starts with the fitter. The second starts with the horse's history and development, and the third may well start with the vet, the coach or the rider's own body.

Which is why "I think the saddle's wrong" is such an unhelpful thing to say. It names one possible answer out of three, it gives the fitter nothing specific to work with, and it can send an owner off to spend money solving the wrong problem.

It also explains why a saddle can look right on a horse standing in the yard and still be part of the story. The back changes shape once the horse works, and Greve, Murray and Dyson (2015) measured changes in back dimensions after just thirty minutes of exercise, even in a correctly fitted saddle. A fitting is a snapshot of a horse that keeps changing, and we're often the ones who see that horse most regularly in between.

The gelding who couldn't bend right

Back to the gelding. Two visits, the same restriction bending right, and the same improvement that didn't last.

So rather than asking what was wrong with his right side, I worked through the framework in order. Where is this starting? What is adapting to it? And what is simply showing me the result?

The restriction bending right was the messenger. It was where the problem showed up, not where it started. The saddle sat in the middle of the system, carrying whatever arrived from above into the horse underneath. And when I followed the chain back to its source, it didn't start in the horse at all, and it didn't start in the saddle. It started with the rider.

None of that was her fault, and none of it is something anyone could see from the ground. Riders carry their own asymmetries into the saddle the same way horses do, and the horse adapts to whatever he's given.

So on the third visit, rather than treating the same restriction a third time, I asked his rider to get herself looked at by a bodyworker.

The pattern broke. There was no more restriction bending right.

The horse was never the problem. He was telling the truth about what was sitting on him, and the saddle was simply the part of the story in between.

One test that tells us where to start

The shift is a small one, and it begins with watching rather than judging.

Watch the horse move without the saddle first, in hand or on the lunge, and keep your eye on one thing. The swing through the back, the length of stride on each rein, the way the hind legs track. Then watch exactly the same thing under saddle with its usual rider.

If the asymmetry is already there without the saddle, the horse is where it starts. The saddle is compensating for it or carrying the message, and the conversation begins with the horse, and possibly the vet, before it ever reaches the fitter.

If the horse moves evenly without the saddle and the asymmetry only appears once the saddle and rider are on, that's specific, and it narrows the question to the saddle or the rider. Where it's possible, a different rider on the same horse in the same saddle separates the two, which is exactly the kind of test Bradley's framework asks us to run before we draw a conclusion.

Then put what you saw into words that describe rather than diagnose. "She moves evenly in hand on both reins, and under saddle she shortens on the right hind and the saddle drifts left in rising trot." A fitter can work with that. So can a vet, and so can a coach.

If you're an owner reading this rather than a practitioner, the same principle applies. Film your horse moving without the saddle and then being ridden, from behind and on both reins, and share both clips with your fitter and your therapist together rather than asking either of them to guess.

None of this asks us to step outside our scope. It asks us to use it fully, and to bring what we've found to the people whose job it is to act on the other parts.

The saddle will always be in the room. What changes is whether we treat it as something we're not allowed to mention, or as one more source of information about the horse.

We don't fit the saddle. We read what it's telling us.

PS. If you assess horses professionally, Bradley Whale and I are running a live webinar, Saddle fit and what it's really telling us, on Friday 30 October at 6pm UK. We'll work through cause, compensator or messenger, why a saddle that fits standing still can change once the horse moves, the saddle that slips, and a six-stage assessment you can use on any yard. It's £29 with the recording included: When is an asymmetrical pelvis actually a problem? A Systems Approach for Practitioners

Nika Vorster is an equine chiropractor and biomechanics specialist working with performance horses and their riders. She is the founder of The Horse Listener.