What Is the Proper Way to Cinch a Saddle

Cinching a saddle properly takes practice, as it should be tight enough to keep the saddle from spinning but loose enough for the horse's comfort. Practice cinching a saddle on a horse with helpful advice in this video on horseback riding.

Hi, I'm Rick Gore I'm at Travis Equestrian Center and today we're going to be talking about the proper way to cinch a saddle. There's a lot of variations on people on whether or not they want them tighter, looser, snugger, it's a lot of personal preference. I like a saddle to where you don't cut the horse in half when you cinch him but it's tight enough to hold a saddle that if he moves quickly, it's not going to roll but if I stood on one side or moved enough, I could actually slide the saddle a little bit and adjust it. So we're going to talk about adjusting this. This saddle happens to have two cinches, it has a front cinch and a rear cinch. The front cinch, important things about a cinch when you're cinching a horse is you want to make sure on the hair lay, you don't want to have the saddle here and pull forward. You want to make sure that the lay of the hair is correct on the horse so when I pull this tight, it feels comfortable. You want to inspect the cinch. When you're connecting the cinch, I like to hold it to where it's snug right there and then I don't loosen it again. If you're constantly doing this, it irritates the horse and he feels that flapping and messing and then he'll get what's called cinchy, he'll start kicking with his back feet, he'll start biting, he'll start doing things because he doesn't like a cinch constantly doing this. So once I get this cinch in a right position, I want to kind of hold it there with one hand while I'm messing with the rest of the cinch. So when I hold this cinch here, I keep it nice and snug, then I put my second loop and that's pretty much going to hold it. That will secure my cinch enough to where he's, it's not going to go flapping loose and soft. So after I have that through, then I want to have go ahead slide my second loop through. Now some people like to make three and four loops. I don't like doing a lot of loops here because this gets really thick and then when your stirrup comes over it interferes with your riding. So I like one or two little snaps here. One or two loops. I'm going to go ahead and hook it up there, I can get my fingers through there. And then I got that front cinch for the initial one. I like doing a cinch three times, because when you do a cinch, if you do it the first time as tight as it will get, you'll end up making a horse cinchy. You don't want the horse to hate having his belly cinched. So you want to make it as comfortable and as smooth as you can so it doesn't bother the horse. So I put one on there, it's kind of loose, I know it's laid right, I can put my second cinch on, usually a rear cinch, doesn't have the loops, it's got snaps so it's a little bit easier. And again I would be moving to the other side and checking the same thing on the other side. Make sure it's laid flat, there's no kinks, twists, there's no burrs or nothing, it's nice and smooth. After I get it good, I adjust the pad, get my saddle correctly, I may go ahead and take up a second cinch there, another loop. Is I want to get any kinks of skin underneath here. So I want to get those out, I'm going to have him lift his front leg and stretch right here you're going to see the skin pull right there. That tells me there's no kinks or burrs or nothing in there and I'll do that again with both feet. After I do that, I know my horse is cinched correctly. If you're looking for the right way to tighten a cinch, there's not a right way. It needs to be tight enough so the saddle doesn't spin but not tight enough to where it cuts your horse in half. That's the way to cinch a horse.