Part 2: How to Saddle a Horse for Riding

Video Transcript

" Hi my name is Sarah Stetner. I'm an expert horse rider and I'm doing a video on behalf of Expert Village. We are continuing to saddle up the horse; I just need to cinch the horse and we will be in business. So as I'm getting ready to cinch the horse, you always cinch from the left side as long as doing everything else on the left side. This is the easy way to do it. You put the saddle stirrup up here on the horn so that way it is out of your way to cinch. So in order to see if you are good to go on adjusting the saddle up or adjusting the saddle back is, I kind of put the cinch, you want the cinch right here. Right in the girth part so it is not too far up, but not too far back as well. So that right there is about perfect cause it is going to slip back a little bit. So what you do, this is a two inch cinch so a lot of saddles are different. This saddle does not have a belt strap, which some of them have another strap that you just want loosely done here. So you come through here once, and then you are going to go to the other hook, come around, pull tight, come back around the cinch, now this is the tricky part: how tight do you want the saddle cinch. You want it not like loose where you are going to fall off, but not tight, too tight either. My horse is probably going to nip because he is cinch heavy or cinch shy. There he is being a butt because I am cinching up his stomach. It is a good thing he is not full. So we have, you can get like your finger in there, your two fingers in there, but that is still a little loose. You just want it a little tighter. If it is not moving, if your horse has a suck out problem, which I call, it is very sucking out because he doesn't want to be cinched up, so he is going to blow out his stomach. If that happens, you just kind of go for it on the looser part of a hole, and then you would tighten it later right before you get on. So I got it to my hole that I want, which is one from the top and it is pretty good. So I put the remaining of the cinch strap up here like that, just kind of loose. I could still get a finger in here so it is not too tight. If you can't get a finger in there, it is way too tight and the horse is not going to like it at all. Then I'm going to the remaining clip of the rest of this breast collar right here to the hook down here. You just clip that, but remember to unclip it when you uncinch the saddle, that is the first thing that you take off. Not the cinch but this clip. So now you are ready to get on. So that is how you saddle a horse."