The Art of Natural Dressage

Forty years ago when I was training, showing, coaching, and instructing if you'd told me one day I'd be sitting on a synthetic materials saddle I'd have laughed at you. Not ME.

I'm seriously considering, because my Pariani is so special, that I might even consider a synthetic jumping saddle (probably an All-Purpose) for training work. In fact I'm going to be putting a student who wishes to expand from Dressage into jumping on my Pariani, but you can be sure I'll be nervous about it being out and on someone else's horse. Brrrrr.

So I shall shop the synthetics and see what I can find that fits well enough.


The rigging on this lightweight saddles will fool you. The end of bars come down when you mount up and sit. It's only when you put the very light saddle on and check it that the bar tails are up. Fooled me at first. A standard leather, and heavy tree saddle is down on the horse just because it's heavy not so much because of design. It's down lighter in back than at the front though.

Yes, the gullet, or throat, is often too low on this saddles. I dinged a Morgan on the withers, Dakota, I was training using this saddle and on checking found out the shims had been misplaced when I saddled, poor guy, my bad.


Which tells you they buy trees in "lots," instead of choosing them for each saddle and ordering the proper size. Tsk.

All western saddles do this? Or just these synthetics? I'm very choosy about how the stirrups are hung and it was a factor in picking the BigHorn brand. Also the rigging will fool you. If you are saddling (at least it would be with my BigHorn) and you have placed the saddle so the cinch falls, when tied, straight down you have placed the saddle too far forward.

Horses with less barrel you usually can place the saddle correctly so the leading ends of the bars will not gouge the top of the shoulder as the horse strides. And you can align the girth a bit back from just behind the elbow, but with a large barreled horse, as so many Arabians are, and most certainly my Andalusian is, it will slip forward anyway and go all slack suddenly.

The answer is to go ahead and swing the cinch forward into the girth groove and learn to ride with the saddle a bit loose. It can be done if the horse has withers.

All this is to respond to the problem of "behind the girth leg position," you comment about. Yes, the leg will fall, if your setup is like mine, just behind the girth. The horse doesn't care, and I don't care if the angles and mechanics are correct for the job we wish to do. The girth doesn't and shouldn't control where the leg is. The horse's anatomy should.

I hope I don't offend, but I find so often folks have been exposed to certain instructors that try to formulate everything and have sets of "patterns," the rider is supposed to follow, especially for "seat."

Some AND members discuss seat (Josepha for one) in a way that makes far better sense. The horse dictates, or should, where you sit, how you balance, how you move.

Much emphasis is and should be on developing feel for what the horse is doing under you. Learning to relax as a discipline (weird to tie those two terms together, but it's true).

Developing core strength not so you can tense a muscle more tightly, but so that it can be used, or a group of muscles can be used, through its or their full range without tension. Riding, if one understands this and adopts or rejects a saddle based on this business of feeling the horse through you body, the motion, the position, tensions, the releases, should be the standard for the SADDLE. I hope I'm not being obtuse or opaque in this way of speaking of it.

Often we have thought we found the perfect saddle (expensive usually) and for some reason not really discernible by any experts (though they may claim to know) it just doesn't work for us or our horse or both. Usually both.

I applauded the saddlers and suppliers that allow one to try out saddles now. I wish they had done more of that in my day. I went through a lot of saddles to find the few that were right.


A spare, but elegantly direct way of saying what I've tried to say in my ramble above.


Yes. Very important. It's too late when you've drawn blood or created a bruise.


I would agree fully except for one point: it is not distributed the same, and feels very differently and is managed differently by the horse from one position, standing, to the other, sitting.

There is a lightness to some riders having nothing to do with their scale weight, and a heaviness to others. I had to learn to distinguish and to help the "heavy seat rider," and I must say of all the tasks of learning I took on in professional work this was the most demanding of me.

It is about that core strength issue. Do they a muscular range of motion through their middle, and that extends down in to their legs and up to their neck?

Regardless of the saddle if a rider reacts to movement with sudden muscle tension they are felt by the horse as "heavy," in the seat, and the horse has to continually adjust. It's very tiring for the horse and soon they too develop into a stiff sudden muscle tension horse and become a poor ride, all the grace they were born with taken out of them. Very sad.

We agonize how the saddle fits the horse (not a bad thing to do) but we should be looking too at the other side of the saddle. What is that rider doing?



I sounds as though this serves you well.

I am not convinced that either bareback or using saddle pad designs have any particular advantage for the horse. Unless the material is dense enough to distribute the pressure outward from the very sharp ischia that we humans sit upon (even very fat people have sharp butt bones) an undivided saddle pad isn't much of an advantage if any.

I'm sure that there are those that disagree with this. I am basing my thoughts and opinions on many years of riding on many kinds of horses, and a good deal of that as a kid, from about 10 years old through my teens, and even a bit in my 20's, riding about bareback or with just a folded blanket on the horse, with a surcingle.

I realized years and years later that the difference in behavior with the same horses, under bareback, or saddle was so much in favor of the saddle that I'm ashamed I rode bareback so much. Many horses, I'm sure, have a higher tolerance for the pressure, and many riders may well sit bareback so that the ischea are not pointed directly down, so that their experience will have been or is different than mine. But I would truly love for us to all take a look at such things.

I suspect, though I have no direct experience, that the better designed treeless saddles are, as you say, made to stay up off the spine. I think you can find some very good commentary by owners and those that have tried various kinds here in this particular forum, "What Tack?"

If I wanted to go treeless I'd be reading and asking questions of those very folks.

All in all I think the winning treeless saddles are going to be so from the selection of certain materials that can maintain enough body and stiffness to do some of what a treed saddle does, but less harshly than a treed saddle.

We are coming to a middle ground between soft, (the pad) and hard and rigid (treed saddles) that I can't quite find words for, but I'm sure you can understand.

Best wishes, Donald

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Love is Trust, trust is All
~~~~~~~~~
So say Don, Altea, and Bonnie the Wonder Filly.

Thankyou Donald so much for taking the time to answer all that. It is also good to open it up for others to read. I am still waiting for the elusive saddle to be designed (Josepha????).
I do agree with the placing of the leg and your observations are great. Yes I probably do have an inbuilt path that feels strange when my leg is not where it usually is and perhaps I need to rethink that. Every time I have ridden in a western saddle I have felt that I my leg aids are hampered and that my whole body position has to change in order to be able to have contact when I need it.
This brings me to how I would like to ride. First and foremost my body position and weight in the saddle has to come first. i also find this extremely difficult in a western (I don't seem to be able to "feel" where I am). The Wintec also hampers this but not as badly. The leg aids are an addition to help the horse understand where I would like him to travel and at what speed. With the Wintec I can close my thigh, or relax and open it and use my lower leg unhampered. My whole lower body has the room to allow me to adjust my position without having a high pommel or cantle to restrict my movement.
Perhaps for the horse though this works against him as there will always be moments when the rider is left behind or infront of the movement and it is a lot harder to get left behind if you are "wedged" in with a western, then the top half of the body only is left behind as opposed to the whole weight of the riders body being left behind (or in front!).

Yes I agree totally about the weight of a rider sitting or standing and the plonking effect of someone with no core strength. My point was purely that the same amount of weight is on the horses back whether the rider stands or sits but the development of a "light" seat we all aspire to!!! Now we want to add the extra weight of the saddle too........hence my love now of the synthetic weight. It is interesting what you say about the tree on the synthetic being lighter and therefore not sitting down when the saddle is placed. I had never thought of that. My concern was that when schooling (which I don't do in the traditoonal sense anymore) the saddle would leave the horses back in a rising trot and then bang back down again no matter how softly I posted in between. This is why I had it restuffed so that it would remain in contact at all times whether my weight was in the seat or forward whilst rising. I did also solve this somewhat by strapping the girth on the first and third straps which seems to anchor the saddle better towards the cantle.


I feel the same

Well I will look forward to your reviews of anything you try out or find along your search as it is one I have been on for the past two years.......haven't found anything better for both our needs yet...........

_________________
Annette O'Sullivan

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. - John Lennon

Just came across this whilst looking at something else.....isn't that always the way!

Now I like the idea you can basically stuff the saddle where you need it. It takes the changable gullet one step futher. It still has the tree but lighter weight and synthetic for convenience.
http://specializedsaddles.com/shop/index.php?act=viewCat&catId=2&ccSID-8643dd60547e611052421a6659ed64d2=e5322edd3fc23041bdd75f7b756df81e

_________________
Annette O'Sullivan

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. - John Lennon

How interesting. We'll continue to evolve the saddle it seems.

Your comments on seat, saddle configuration, etc. give good pause for thought. I thank you.

As with Kirsti my impression of the synthetics, Western especially, were that I did not like how they looked. Even when mine arrived for training Dakota I was curling my lip in a kind of derisive "look at the piece of flimsy junk," attitude.

Even when I first rode it I had much the same disgusted feeling with it's flimsiness. Yes, when I tried to be objective and look at its effect on my riding and on the horse I had to admit, it had some of the characteristics of an decent English saddle, when it came to seat and contact. In fact the lighter, very light in fact, fenders (equivalent to stirrup leathers) allows for far more feel of the leg against the horse.

And I agree with you about the loss of feel with most Western saddles. It's why I so badly miss the one I had custom made (I actually visited the saddler daily and sat about with him drinking coffee and making suggestions and adjustments with him -- a friend and business associate of mine in fact). I lost that one in a fire. Too many years ago now.

I've not tried an Australian stock saddle and it's variations but I suspect it would feel much to me like that saddle did. More leather than an English, but less than a western, and thus more contact than a western.

Best wishes, Donald

_________________
Love is Trust, trust is All
~~~~~~~~~
So say Don, Altea, and Bonnie the Wonder Filly.

Yes I agree, the sheer "ugliness factor" has put me off time and again, but more than that where the stirrups lie and where the strirrup buckle is placed on the saddle. On a traditional english saddle there is only the leather between the leg and horse and if the foot is in the correct place and weight then the leather hangs tight against the saddle and you are unaware it is there. Plus the buckle is covered for the horse and the riders thigh. The Wintec is an exact replica of an English GP saddle just with the changable gullet and lighter material.
Every western type saddle I see (moving towards lighter and less) has either a bad design as to where the leathers (in most places manmade terrible webbing) are placed or they attach lower down and the buckle seems to appear to be resting on the horses side. I cannot see how this can be comfortable for the horse and makes it almost impossible to adjust whilst on the horse.
It is interesting to see that these saddles have 3 adjustments for placing of stirrup leathers (perhaps to please all the people english and western) however even on the english version I see they have put long panels in (dressage style) perhaps because of the placing again?

It is about time more manufacturers woke up to what the public is demanding, You were extremely lucky to find a saddler that you could pick his brains. This is what I did with my saddler in Cape Town. It seemed the best option to customise what I had rather than start the search again for something that would maybe fit!!! He is fabulous and will custom make just about anything. I am thinking it's time he made me a proper bitless bridle!

_________________
Annette O'Sullivan

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. - John Lennon

Ha ha ha - so fun you also had that feeling... I did a search for the synthetci ones yesterday after reading your posts, but for now I will wait... I ahve another saddle I want much more - so I better go for that one first.... (It is very expencive of course...).


It looks like this: http://www.amazonas.as/Levade/Hjem.html