![]() ![]() If you take the time to fit yourself into the saddle, your ride will be much easier, and your horse will be much happier. ![]() For a more detailed description of fitting the rider see my English book. There needs to be room for your buttocks, but often the seat size will be determined by the length of your thigh. The seat should allow you to sit in the center, and your thigh should not push you to the back of the saddle. Your knee should go approximately to the center of the knee roll, depending on the style of the saddle. The seat should not feel constricting nor should there be lumps poking into your thigh.įor an English saddle, your thigh length is very important. For a western saddle, you should have about a hand’s breadth (4 inches) in front of you and about a hand’s width (1-1.5 inches) behind you to the cantle. For an English saddle you should have about the same distance in front as behind, about 2-4 inches of space. So what should you do? Sit in the saddle and measure in front and behind of where you are sitting. Or, as in many Western saddles, if the seat dumps you toward the back and has a high rise in the ground seat in front of where you sit, you may feel the seat is too small. If the shape of the seat places the center point toward the cantle, you may feel out of balance and the saddle may feel too large, even if it is not. As the seat gets deeper, the pommel and cantle get higher, so to fit inside the space you need more length or you will be pushed up against the front of the saddle, which in many English saddles can be fairly painful. The deeper the seat is, the larger a measurement you will need. The shape of the seat and the placement of the center point greatly affect how you will feel. Measuring the seat is only a small part of the equation, however. So it is best to toss out the numbers and see how the saddle fits you. With saddles, the numbers really have not changed since we cannot make a looser fit saddle seat. But if you get out those old college jeans, there is no way they still fit. Remember the size of the blue jeans you fit into during college? Well, that same size of jeans now fits much larger, so maybe you can still squeeze into a new pair with the same number. We all get stuck on having as small a seat size as possible. These photos are from my new Western Horse’s Pain-Free Back and Saddle-Fit Book. The design or angle of the fork can change the seat measurement when the actual seat size is the same as a saddle with a different design. The rider measures from the back of the cantle to the top of the gullet as in photo 3. The buttons often are uneven, so a measurement can be different depending on which side you measure.įor a Western saddle, the saddle maker measures from the top of the cantle to the back of the gullet as in photo 2. See photo 1.The rider measures the same seat size from the cantle to the buttons on the side of the pommel. With an English saddle, the saddle makers measure from the center of the cantle to a line that goes across the front of the tree (remember there is a little roll of leather that adds to the distance, so subtract 1/4 inch or so). For one thing, the measurements usually used by saddle shops are not necessarily the same as what the saddle makers use. Do these figures represent the length of the seat? How do you measure that?Īnswer: Figuring out the seat size on a saddle is not as easy as it would seem. Question: I’m planning on buying a new English saddle, but I’m confused by saddle sizes such as 16 or 17.
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