Colleen and Matt Meyer of Advanced Saddle Fit (www.advancedsaddlefit.com) have been my sponsors for years, and my friends for longer. I love them dearly as people, but I work with them because Colleen’s expertise and approach to saddle fitting is the most logical I’ve ever heard. A few times a year, Colleen comes down to my farm from their home base in New Hampshire to offer fittings of new saddles, and she does an evening lecture about saddle fit and design.

I’m happy to get my clients and friends in saddles that fit, but it’s Colleen’s lecture I always look forward to. There’s so much misinformation out there, and I’m always struck by the look on the faces of the lecture participants when they realize how the information some fitter or some tack shop owner or some random guy on the Internet gave them was, to be eloquent, totally bogus.

The punchline behind Colleen’s lecture, and philosophy of fit, is that the tree must be the right shape for the horse. It should be so obvious: the tree is the only solid thing in the saddle, the thing that keeps its shape independent of the rider’s weight, movement, etc, so it’s the thing that determines the weight bearing surface. But she mourned the lack of information available on trees from most manufacturers, how buying used saddles can be so frustrating because you have no idea what tree is in a saddle, and whether it will work with your horse.

We also talked about some alternative technologies, from the inherently faulty treeless saddles that are “adjustable” in various places, to some neat “new” ideas in fitting that just haven’t quite become practical yet. Colleen talked a lot about padding, how there is a big place for corrective padding—horses who aren’t muscled correctly, or fitting the young and still-growing horse—but she also talked about how no pad on the planet will help a tree that is too narrow, and how we often only look to the front of the saddle to check for narrowness, not the crucial part of the tree that is between the stirrup bars.

One of the most aggrivating things about saddle fit is that there’s some “magic” to it—the horse and rider have to be on the one to decide if they like a saddle or not. Even if the tree looks perfect, the panels are thick and squishy, and the pad used is technologically advanced, horse and rider still have to go well in it.

My Midgey is a great example of this. I’ve been riding him in a wonderful saddle, which I love, but as of late I’ve been considering looking for another option. Colleen had a look at his current saddle, which she thought fit great, but had me sit in a few other saddles as well, all that fit Midge well. The first was OK, but I felt he wasn’t 100 percent thrilled with it; the second made me completely unable to sit the trot, and the third made me feel like I was going to be split in two. The saddle that he went best in, and that I felt the most comfortable in? The Isis, the same saddle I ride Cleo and Ella in. Does it fit him? Yes, but just as well as the other four saddles I sat in. So why is the Isis the one? Perhaps because it works best for my anatomy, and I rode better in it. Or perhaps because the Saddle Fit Gods deemed it so.

In the end, Colleen reminded us all that at the end of the day, we’re trying to fit something stationary on something that is in constant motion, but more importantly we’re trying to fit something solid onto something that was never designed to bear weight. Saddle fit is about damage control, and there’s no saddle on the planet that will make poor riding or poor horse fitness obsolete. Keeping the horse’s back healthy is about more than your tree shape or flocking material—it’s a holistic process, requiring good horse health, good conformation and good training. And there’s no quick cure for that!

LaurenSprieser.com
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