27/11/2025
Yes to 👇🏻. This is part of ( including ongoing wear and tear to my body) why I have minimised my saddle fitting service as got so fed up of people expecting a ‘quick fix’ when longer term plans of better work, vet assessment, rider and horse physio and more sensible training goals would often be a better place to start than just a fancy online girth and overly expensive saddle pad.
We owe it to our horses to take a step back sometimes and look at the bigger picture. Stand and observe your horse with unblinkered eyes every now and then and dont forget asking advice from a pro costs nothing!! 😉
We live in an age of convenience.
Groceries arrive at our doorstep in under an hour, you can order almost anything to ship by tomorrow and entertainment appears with one tap.
Without even noticing it, we've started to expect the same kind of immediate results with our horses. This cultural craving for convenience has set the stage for the horse world to become flooded with “quick fixes”.
Training aids or harsh training techniques that promise faster results.
Gadgets that mask behaviour instead of addressing emotion or biomechanics.
Corrective pads and specialty girths that claim to “fix saddle fit” with no assessment.
We reach for what is fast, accessible, and comforting to us, even when it may not be in the best interest of our horse, who is ultimately the one paying the price for our impatience.
Recently, there’s been a new pad circulating widely, one that covers the withers and sits under the front of the saddle, claiming things like:
“Achieve the perfect saddle fit” “Corrects saddle fit instantly” “The soft pad conforms to your horse’s back for maximum comfort and relief”
While there is a time and place for a well-shaped half pad, it is something that a skilled saddle fitting professional should recommend and incorporate when adjusting your saddle, not something you pick up because an ad told you it would cure everything.
Somewhere along the way, we’ve become blind to the goal of long-term health, soundness and welfare for our horse and the bar has been lowered so consistently that “good enough for now” has become completely normalized.
Our craving for speed and convenience has pulled us so far away from that truth that many riders no longer recognize when they’re choosing what’s easy over what’s ethical.
We have reached a point where many people would rather buy a $200 gadget that promises an instant fix than invest in a proper assessment, a well-fitting saddle, and the professional guidance their horse actually needs.
Riders are skipping professional assessments because they take time or money and instead chase the illusion of improvement rather than doing the work that produces actual improvement. Because it’s easy, fast, it lets them keep riding and it feels like a solution. But feeling like a solution and being a solution are not the same thing.
Correcting posture, building topline, and addressing muscle atrophy takes, time, patience and groundwork, but a quick fix allows you to keep riding the horse, a bandaid “solving” your problems.
So before making any impulse Black Friday purchases, ask yourself:
"Am I doing what is best for my horse… or what is easiest for me?"
If we as an industry can start answering that honestly, then maybe, just maybe, we’ll stop normalizing quick fixes and start returning to the level of consideration and care that our horses deserve.
