Are You Sitting Comfortably?

So your saddle fits your horse to perfection, but does it fit you? Leslie Bliss finds out why it is crucial to make sure this key piece of equipment is as comfortable for the rider as it is for the horse

- Leslie Bliss

YOU would expect someone who spends more hours in the saddle than most to put his own comfort at the top of the priority list – but you would be wrong.

“My bed is comfortable, I regard an armchair as being comfortable, but I don’t think of saddles in terms of comfort,” says Simon Lawrance, Heythrop joint-master and field master, former five-star event rider, advanced medium dressage competitor and British Eventing central region under-18 coach. “My priority has always been the comfort of my horse over my own.”

And that is something master saddler Mark Fisher has heard before.

“‘I don’t matter,’ they say. But they do matter,” stresses Mark, who is in charge of making sure Britain’s World Class riders sit in perfect harmony with the constantly changing musculature of the country’s elite equine athletes.

Now there is scientific evidence that proves that rider comfort matters, thanks to Vanessa Fairfax of Fairfax Saddles, recipient of the Queen’s Award for Enterprise for her revolutionary innovations. Together with her trusted research team of Mark Fisher and Russell MacKechnie-Guire of Centaur Biomechanics, this trio has used the latest analysis technology to show that the position and composition of knee blocks affects not only rider position, but thereby also the performance of the horse.

Vanessa says: “We wanted to quantify comfort. To do that, we measured the synchronicity between horse and rider. As a rider, you want to be ‘at one’; in other words, ‘in sync’ with your horse. You want to feel you are sitting in the saddle rather than perched on top of it.