How To Choose The Right Saddle For Jumping

Hi, I'm Charlotte Platt and we're home in West Sussex.

One of the most important things for me is my saddle and equipment. We have their backs and settles check often and it's a really important thing.

Today, with me is Joe Dylan, my saddle fitter.

Okay, Charlotte. Have you been having any problems with this horse?
Yeah, she gets quite sore in the back, she's quite a tense, hot horse anyway, so that doesn't help. What I've had to do recently is put a riser pad on because the saddle slips back and I feel like I'm really pushing her forward with my seat and then my legs are going forward and it's just not working at the moment. The riser pad has helped but that's for short-term, so I really need a saddle fitted to her as she's also changed shape.

I think when I last saw this horse a couple of months ago, she was just coming back into work after some time off, so I'm not surprised that your saddle now needs looking at.

What I'll do is have a look at her and assess her back and see if I can find any problems with the saddle. I’ll then have a look at the saddle on her and then we'll go from there.

So this is your current saddle that you're using on your horse and what you've described to me as you just feel like your lower leg thing is being thrown forward.

So I just strip everything down and put it on the horse with nothing underneath. I'm just looking to see how tight it is around her shoulder, under the panel to make sure that I've gotcontact all the way along and that doesn't feel too bad. But the main problem I can see straight away is that the saddle is sitting too far behind and doing this.

So really you should be sat here on the saddle. So just need to lift the back up. Which is exactly what you've done with the rear Riser, which is good. However, long-term it’s not.

What I'm going to do is just have a quick look and assess her back to see if there are any areas of sensitivity that I think are saddle related. Once I've done that then we'll take a template of her and assess her current saddle to see if I can make any adjustments to that or whether we need to go for a new one.

So I think what we need to do with this saddle is actually go for different shape, for her.
It's the reason I love working with Equipe. I'm actually an independent saddle fitter and I choose to fit this brand because it gives me lots of opportunities to fit different shapes ofhorse. So I'll choose a tree that's a better shape for her. And we'll go from there.

Definitely and I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Equipe because I think they're a great brand and I chose them myself because they're so lovely and the tack’s great.