Fun with massage

Last night, I had the saddle fitter out. Unfortunately, she only spent a few minutes looking at my saddles. She decided that Saga needs a medium gullet, but is very narrow around his spine and withers because he has no muscle there. She recommended a ThinLine pad, and that was pretty much the sum of my saddle consultation. Since I'm not very satisfied with that, and still don't understand a lot of details about saddle fit, I will probably get another saddler who was recommended to me out next week. In the meantime, I will try a friend's ThinLine pad to see how that works.

While the saddle-fitting session was less than satisfactory, the massage part of the session went extremely well. I learned that Saga is very tight on the under side of his neck, and all through his haunches. I also learned a number of stretches that I can do with him to help work those muscles (I'll have to describe those in another post, when I can take pictures of what I'm doing, because some of them are hard to explain). A friend of mine recommended another stretch to loosen his hips, so we'll be adding that one to the mix too.

I also discovered that when doing carrot stretches, I can "help" him a little by gently holding his halter - not pulling his head to the side, but just holding his halter. He can barely make it to his shoulder, he's so stiff in his neck. I should also mention that it's hard to do carrot stretches with a horse that doesn't like carrots - those teeny horse nuggets just don't provide much motivation!