Your Question Answered: How to build condition and topline on a hot horse
Question: My 500kg show jumper is coming back into work after a long break due to injury. She is hot and needs to build topline condition. What should I feed her?
Hot or excitable horses needing topline require calories from a slow-release energy source
The diet you choose for your horse needs to supply nutrients and energy to support increasing workload while ensuring your horse doesn’t get too excited.
Most horse feeds which supply all the nutrients required by the performance horse such as amino acids, vitamins, minerals, and calories are based around cereal grains, which provide fast-release energy. While this is desirable for many performance horses, it is not the best choice for hot and easily excitable horses. Instead, we recommend our Cool ’N’ Conditioning Cubes, which supply calories from slow-release energy sources whilst providing a full range of nutrients and optimal condition and topline development for your horse.
Top-dressing with a balancer is ideal for a horse returning to work after injury
As you will most likely be feeding only small amounts to begin (e.g. 1-2kg/ day) with in line with a slowly increasing work load after her injury, I would also recommend you ‘top-dress’ the diet with a balancer such as our Connolly’s RED MILLS PerformaCare Balancer.
When you are feeding a low concentrate diet to control calorie intake in line with workload and body condition, you are automatically also restricting amino acid, vitamin and mineral intake. Just what you don’t want to do if muscles need to be built and performance is required. Feeding a balancer will provide the nutrients required without adding extra calories.
Connolly's RED MILLS Cool 'N' Conditioning Cubes is ideal for building topline on a horse that is over excitable or fizzy.
You will most likely be looking at feeding a cup of PerformaCare Balancer per day in addition to Cool ’N’ Conditioning Cubes. As workload increases and you’re increasing the amount of Cool ’N’ Conditioning Cubes fed per day, the amount of balancer can be reduced accordingly. Connolly’s RED MILLS Cool ‘N’ Conditioning Cubes is a very low starch, high calorie, cereal grain free, conditioning cube for balanced and focused performance and is ideal for building topline on a horse that is over excitable or fizzy.
