Performance / sport horse balancers

[Toffee44]

Samba is the fittest she has been.

Currently hacks out for 2 hrs fairly fast

Schooling 30min-45min

Jumping once a week

And will be out hunting when we can.

This is about 4/5days week

Currently she is on baileys low cal, oats(1 Stubbs split between two feeds), amd quickbeet( will be going back to speedi beet when bag finishes)


Thinking of changing the low cal for either Spillers performance or baileys performance. And perhaps adding Alfa a?!?

I would say she is a good doer but in this current work she is having a 5kg haynet at night and turned out on ok grazing every day and looks fab.

She just quickly becomes a horse that needs spurs to get going again, ideally would have her with some more oomph and go for longer.

 

[khalswitz]

Performance balancers don't add pep as they don't contain a lot of calories - they provide quality protein and extra nutrients required for horses in hard work - and bear in mind 'hard work' is considered to be racing/3 day eventing/ high level dr or sj/ polo/ high level endurance etc.

My boy is on a similar workload, 6 days a week of either 2 hours fitness hacking (ie trot and canter mainly up and down hills) or 1 hour in the school schooling novice dr or jumping 80-90cm, plus doing PC and odd comps. I was told by a nutritionist this is light work.

Worth trying the alfa a, or adding something like sugar beet or linseed for some extra calories if you feel she needs it. But a performance balancer would be a waste of money tbh...

Plus, many nutritionists recommend a stud balancer instead of a performance balancer anyway as has similar makeup but a fiver a bag cheaper...

 

[flintfootfilly]

Personally, I'd switch the balancer for Blue Chip Original which has 1.8mg selenium per day instead of the 1mg per day which your current one provides.

Selenium is vital for muscle health, especially in exercising horses, so a switch of balancer may well help him be able to sustain his exercise longer.

No idea beyond that, but I'd certainly start with that change.

Sarah

 

[khalswitz]

Personally, I'd switch the balancer for Blue Chip Original which has 1.8mg selenium per day instead of the 1mg per day which your current one provides.

Selenium is vital for muscle health, especially in exercising horses, so a switch of balancer may well help him be able to sustain his exercise longer.

No idea beyond that, but I'd certainly start with that change.

Sarah

Completely agree - IF your ground is deficient in selenium. Most of the UK is, but our land isn't, and I've had people tell me to feed extra selenium due to his EPSM for improved muscle health... which would have been overdosing to the detriment of his hoof quality if I hadn't known about our ground and hay testing high in selenium.

Selenium is a tricky one - too little is bad, but too much is also bad!!

 

[flintfootfilly]

Ah, you must be one of the very few areas that has plenty of selenium, Khalaswitz. Out of interest, how much selenium is there in your forage (mg/kg DM)? Ours is only 0.03 - 0.05mg/kg, so very definitely at a level associated with muscle problems in a variety of species worldwide. Sadly, some of the companies doing analysis still report the results with the concentration and then either "low", "average" or "high"....... but those descriptions apply only as a measure of how the sample compared to others tested, not to its adequacy. I've known quite a few people caught out that way (not suggesting you are one of them).

Without forage analysis or local knowledge of high selenium levels, I certainly wouldn't add any above that provided in an off the shelf balancer.

Sarah

 

[khalswitz]

Ah, you must be one of the very few areas that has plenty of selenium, Khalaswitz. Out of interest, how much selenium is there in your forage (mg/kg DM)? Ours is only 0.03 - 0.05mg/kg, so very definitely at a level associated with muscle problems in a variety of species worldwide. Sadly, some of the companies doing analysis still report the results with the concentration and then either "low", "average" or "high"....... but those descriptions apply only as a measure of how the sample compared to others tested, not to its adequacy. I've known quite a few people caught out that way (not suggesting you are one of them).

Without forage analysis or local knowledge of high selenium levels, I certainly wouldn't add any above that provided in an off the shelf balancer.

Sarah

I'll be honest I can't remember off the top of my head - my YO has the test results. However ours defo had numbers, it was a general soil and forage test we did. However we discussed it with our nutritionist afterwards and I know she said it was great, and pretty unusual. But ours is reclaimed bog land that was never farmed before the horses went on it, and the lack of fertilisers etc makes a difference...