(light hearted music)
- Welcome, today we're gonna be talking about
how to tack your horse up, English style.
I'm here with Crosby, and Crosby is an off the track
thoroughbred gelding, very handsome guy.
And I usually ride him in the dressage saddle.
So that's the saddle I'm going to be using
to show you guys today, how to tack up.
I'm going to be covering some common mistakes that we can
make when we're saddling our horse.
And I'm also going to cover a correct way to do it,
where your horse is comfortable and you can be safe.
So Crosby's in the cross ties.
There's three steps we're going to go through
when we saddle our horse English.
We're first going to put our saddle pad on.
Second, we're going to put our saddle on.
And third, we're going to put our girth on.
Now, before we put our English saddle on,
we want to make sure that our horse is feeder picked out.
There's no stones or debris in those feet.
We also want to make sure that we brush our horse, and we
remove all the dirt and check him over for the day.
Crosby.
Ready to put your saddle pad on?
So he's going to eat it.
So the first step is putting our saddle pad on.
This is a dressage saddle pad,
and there are several different types of
English saddle pads, we have baby pads,
we have half pads, and much more.
So I'm going to put those up on the screen here for you.
When we are putting our pad on,
we want to first find the front of the pad,
which is where the keepers are here.
So you can see those.
We're going to be putting the pad on going
in the direction of our horse's hair.
We're going to put it too far up the neck and slide it down
in the direction of the hair.
We never want to go against the hair because you can see
when I go against the hair,
it causes the hair to stand on end.
And this could cause some rubbing when we put our saddle on
and potential saddle sores.
So you can see when I go in the direction of the hair,
it smooths the hair out.
So now that we've got the saddle pad on,
the next thing we're going to do is put our saddle on.
This is the dressage shadow we're going to be using today.
And there's a couple ways that you could put your saddle on.
The first way that I've seen is by holding the front and the
back of the saddle like this and lifting it up,
and tossing it over the horse.
By doing it this way, it's a lot harder on your back.
And I found that it tends to land a lot
heavier on the horse's back.
So instead of doing it that way,
I find it to be easier to take your saddle and set it up
into your hip like this, take your right hand,
wrap it around the back.
Left-hand, wrap it around the front.
And you're going to use your hip to swing the saddle up over
your horse's back and gently set it on his back.
So it's just like giving your horse a hug, just like that.
So now let's put the saddle on Crosby.
As we go to put our saddle on our horse,
we want to swing it up and set it down nice
and gently on our horses back.
Once our saddle is on we're to take the
middle of the pad, which is right here
and pull it up to the middle of the pommel here.
So I'm gonna lift up the pad and the pommel and wiggle
the pad up to the middle.
That's just going to give the withers
a little bit more relief.
And then next I'm going to take my billets
and put them into my keepers.
So these are the billets,
and I'm going to set them inside of my keeper like this,
and this just prevents my saddle pad from moving.
And then we have this top keeper here, which is optional.
Some people choose to cut this off.
I choose to keep it on.
You can set it underneath like this
and Velcro it in, and that just keeps the
front of your saddle pad from sliding.
So we set our flat back down,
and now we're going to look at the saddle position.
I'm going to show you at too far back, too far forward,
and in the correct position.
first, let's look at the correct position.
You want your saddle to sit just behind the shoulder,
where it locks into place.
Here we can see that the settles too far back
and the billets are by the rib cage.
Here it is too far forward, with the billets
right near the front leg.
And here it's in the correct position behind the shoulder.
So we made it to our final part,
which is putting our girth on.
So this is a type of girth that I like.
It's curved, this isn't girth by Albion,
and I'm going to be putting this on.
So my curve is facing forward.
Every girth is a little bit different.
So it depends on the style.
I'm going to be taking my billets here and running them
through my keeper and then onto my roller.
And I'm going to buckle 'em in.
So I want these buckles to be even.
So as we look at where the girth is placed,
we want it to be placed about four inches
behind the front leg here.
So we wouldn't want it to sit right up in here,
because it would restrict the horse's motion somewhat.
So even though this girth is cut back a little bit,
I want it to sit here where the horse has
plenty of range of motion.
Another way of looking at where your girth has placed,
is you can feel under your horse's belly here,
and it's nice and flat right here.
And as we move our hand back into
the rib cage, it gets wider.
So we want our girth to sit
right about here, in that flat spot.
So I'm gonna set it back down,
and there's where I want it to be.
Here it'd be too far back, here would be too far forward.
There's where it's just right.
So now I'm going to buckle it up on the other side.
So now that our girth is secure on both sides,
I just want to give you a few tips on
sinching your horse up.
First off, you want to sinch your horse up,
even on both sides.
So if you're whole on five on the left,
you want to be on whole five on the right,
once your saddle is completely sinched up
to the level that you want for riding.
The other tip is making sure that you gradually,
sinch your horse up, so many times will come out.
we want to get on our horse and we'll tighten up that girth
as tight as we can and then get on and ride.
And if we do that, it can cause some stress for the horse.
'cause that's uncomfortable for them, to crank that
girth up really tight and then hop on.
And also the horse can tense up his muscles when we do that.
And then when he relaxes his muscles,
the girth is loose and that can put us
in an unsafe position as a rider.
So what I do to prevent this
is I sinch up three times,
the first time is just in the brush stall,
just to secure the saddle on the horse.
The second time is after I've taken the horse out,
maybe into the arena and I walk them around a little bit.
And then the third time is right before I get on my horse.
So you guys have heard me say this before,
but you always want to make sure your saddle is checked by a
professional saddle fitter, so it fits you and your horse.
If you haven't done that already.
Crosby and I are going to go out for a ride.
I'm not wearing white again.
This was, got pretty dirty.
Hug buddy, I'm gonna go out and get it a little more dirty.
Hope you guys enjoyed the video and I will see you
in the next video.
Bye Crosby.
(cheerful music)