How To Identify A General Purpose Saddle

Hi, I’m Ken Lyndon-Dykes from Saddleworld, and I want to talk about all-purpose saddles today.

Now, that can mean almost anything, say, all-purpose, general purpose, eventing or a saddle you can use for lots of different things. An all-purpose saddle is exactly what it says, you can do a bit of jumping, you can do a bit of flat work, you can do a bit of hacking. But like anything that’s all-purpose it’s sort of alright for everything but not brilliant if you want to be a dressage riding or a jump rider, it is the ‘ok’ saddle.

Basically they come in lots of different guises. This particular one is called a VSD. That is a saddle which is all-purpose but not terrible straight, not terribly forward cut. You can jump a fence but you wouldn't want to be jumping a really big fence in a saddle such as this. It sits you in a nice position and has a knee roll. On this particular saddle, the thigh roll comes off, some people like to have the feel of their leg like so.

If you go to this all purpose saddle, you’ll see the more on the front and if you were going to perhaps go hunting or jump a few fences you might go for something like this which had a bigger knee roll, this particular one had point and balance straps for extra stability.     

Again, a nice thing to have is a detachable roll. This has a detachable thigh roll and knee roll because riders are different shapes as well as the horse being different shapes, and you can put this to suit your position of the leg. Also, this particular saddle has got a loop at the back where you can take the strap off and put it further back if the saddle is moving.

So, the all purpose saddle is just what it says it is. You’ll notice that this one has a flatter seat, often something like this with a flatter seat will suit a fairly wide horse or a cob and will be a little more stable.    

The size of seat and the size of fitting is going to depend upon you and your horse, both of you have to be taken into consideration and all of these particular saddles you can do lots of different things on.