How to define the level of exercise for your horse?
The energy requirement of exercising horses is mainly depending on the horse’s body weight and the amount of exercise. However, many find it difficult to define the average amount of exercise over a given period, eg over one or two weeks.
Declan Cullen and Seavaghan Ash use Pegus Diet Planner
When Pegus Horse Feeds design rations for exercised horses, we will ask you to provide information about the average level of exercise or training. We will select the pre-defined levels by double-clicking on the blue text or moving the slider along the scale (see figure). Initially it is recommended to select the pre-defined level that you think fits your horse.
For a given horse, we can inspect the training level by doing the following: Define the horse in the Pegus PC-Horse program. If the horse is maintaining a steady body condition on it’s present ration, we can assume that the energy content of the ration is close to the actual requirement. We then enter the present ration into PegusPC-Horse and go to the training window (see picture). Here we can see how much energy the present ration provides. Then we can use the blue slider and adjust the level of training until the Energy requirement (upper blue arrow) is equal to the energy that the ration provides (lower blue arrow).
It is important to closely monitor any changes in the horse’s body condition. If the horse puts on weight, the training level is set too high. If the horse looses weight, the training level has to be increased. Then the rations have to be adjusted according to the new training levels.
The logic behind this is:
When the training level is set too high, Pegus PC-Horse calculates a high energy requirement, higher than the horse needs, and the ration will provide too much energy. The result is that the horse grow fat.
If the training level is set too low, Pegus PC-Horse calculates the energy requirement to be too low, and the ration calculated gives to little energy, and the horse looses weight.
Some general advice:
Maintenance (0): No training.
Light training: Energy requirement increased by 25%. Recreational riding or driving. Beginning of training programs.
Moderate training: Energy requirement increased by 50%. More active recreational riding or driving. Dressage and show jumping, distance riding and other activities.with higher intensity.
Heavy training: Energy requirement increased by 75%. For trotters, show jumpers, distance riding and for other types of horses that are trained heavily several times per week.
Very heavy training: Energy requirement increased by 100%. For thoroughbred race horses and heavily trained standardbred trotters.
Note that these levels are only guidelines. There will be substantial variation between individual horses and different training programs.
