12.17.25 Eclectic Classroom – How Your Horse Experiences the Saddle with Dave Genadek

Product Description

In this class we’re going to step back from labels and look at saddles the way the horse experiences them: as surfaces and connectors.

You’ll learn to see past “English” or “Western” as categories and start recognizing the actual shapes that matter—where each surface lies, how it connects to the next, and how those connections either support or interfere with the horse and rider. Different riding schools use these surfaces in different ways. When you understand that, you can choose (or evaluate) a saddle based on what you want to do with your horse, not what tradition says the saddle is “supposed” to be.

A big part of this class is practical. By the end, you’ll have a clear framework for shopping for a saddle—or for figuring out whether the one you’re using is really working. We’ll cover the ten questions every horse owner needs to answer before fitting or buying a saddle:

• Is your horse ready to be fit?

• Where do you want to sit?

• How do you want to sit?

• What is your horse’s orientation?

• What saddle orientation do you want?

• What seat orientation do you want?

• What kind of pressure distribution do you want?

• What rigging configuration do you want?

• What rigging position do you want?

• Where do you want the stirrup to hang?

These aren’t abstract questions. They’re the difference between guessing and knowing. They help you match a saddle to your horse, your body, and your riding goals—and they give you a way to think clearly about fit no matter what style of saddle you’re looking at.

If you’ve ever felt like saddle fitting was a maze of opinions, this class will give you a map.

Learn more about Dave on his website.

The class will be held Wednesday December 17th via Zoom starting at 6pm MST. (check your time zone here)

Please plan on the class lasting up to two hours. We will visit about the topic then open up for questions and answers from the students.

Classes will be recorded and you will have a copy of the class automatically added to your account in The Mercantile where you can watch it again, or if you missed the class watch what you missed!

If you have any questions about the format, or how to use our forum please reach out, I’ll be happy to answer them for you. Use the contact form, or call 303-449-3537.

About Dave
Dave began his career early, doing leather work as a kid and, by high school, winning international carving competitions. That foundation in craftsmanship led him into a decade on the road, working alongside some of the most respected saddle makers of the time—Al Stohlman, Kathleen Bond, Bob Brown, Mervin Ringlaro, Bill Gomer, and Dan Crates, among others. Those years gave him a wide view of tradition, technique, and the many ways good saddles are built.

Later, Dave encountered Dr. Deb Bennett’s work, and it changed the direction of his thinking. Her emphasis on anatomy and biomechanics sparked a deep, lasting fascination that became the backbone of his approach to saddle design. Around the same period, he spent time with Peggy Cummings—one of the world’s leading riding instructors—whose influence helped shape Dave’s ideas about seat balance and rider position.

In 1994, Dave and Dan Crates started About the Horse, Inc. as an R&D facility for innovating saddle design and production methods. The goal wasn’t to chase novelty for its own sake, but to solve real problems horsemen and horses were running into in the field. Then in 2006, Dave founded AnatoTree Ltd. so he could build trees the way he believed they needed to be built—starting from the horse outward, instead of squeezing the horse into a fixed idea of what a tree “should” look like.

In 2012, responding to growing demand from his customers, Dave traveled to England to study English saddle making. That experience broadened his perspective and added another layer to his design vocabulary. Not long after, in a conversation with Deb Bennett, she remarked that she was beginning to think of saddles in terms of surfaces. Because Dave had already been using computer-aided design in tree work, that idea landed hard. It became the spark for what he later developed into the Surfaces and Connectors paradigm of saddle fit and design—an approach rooted in how the horse’s living structures meet the saddle, and how those relationships either support or restrict movement.

Today, Dave continues building trees and saddles in Spring Valley, Minnesota, where he lives with his partner, Liz Graves, one of the world’s leading experts on gait. Between them, the work stays centered on the same thing it always has: understanding how horses are put together, how they move, and how our equipment can either help that motion or get in its way.