At Let’s Rope, our commitment to the community and readership has inspired us to provide practical, comprehensive information. We hope this study inspires you to look into your own pads and how they help or hinder your horse’s performance. In this study, we strived to show how pads of different types and shapes fit your horse. These are simply our observations for you to draw your own conclusions. However, it is quite difficult to see how the pad conforms to your horse’s back without X-ray vision. Saddle Pad fit is extremely important. Even a custom fit saddle can be ruined if used with a pad that doesn’t fit correctly. This study is to help visualize how different types of pads fit and conform to the horse’s body.
Barium paste being loaded into tubing.
Barium tubing applied to topline of horse and bottom of pad.
How We Did It In order to take a look at different saddle pad fits, we visited our friends at the Brazos Valley Equine Hospital and used their state-of-the-art X-Ray facility. In order for the topline of the horse and the bottom of the saddle pad to show up on X-Rays, we attached a tube filled with Barium paste to both surfaces. This caused a very visible line to be seen on every scan, and the results are what you see here. Unfortunately, X-Rays cannot pass through a material as dense as a saddle, so instead, we weighed each pad down with a 50-pound sack of feed. Because of this, the weighted images have the pellets in the frame, seen as the out of focus granules, but we also got a view of each pad as it fits under weight. TWENTY FOUR
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