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How to Define a Horse’s Nutritional Requirements: A Practical Guide

Determining what and how much your horse should eat each day is essential for ensuring health, wellbeing, and athletic performance. An imbalanced diet can lead to health issues, metabolic disturbances, suboptimal body condition, or poor performance. In this article, we will review the key factors to consider in order to define your horse’s nutritional requirements as accurately as possible.

Why It’s Important to Assess a Horse’s Nutritional Needs

Understanding a horse’s true nutritional requirements is fundamental to designing a diet capable of:

  • Preventing both deficiencies and excesses of nutrients
  • Maintaining optimal and stable body weight and body condition score (BCS)
  • Actively supporting athletic performance
  • Preventing or managing metabolic diseases and disorders
  • Planning targeted supplementation and avoiding unnecessary treatments or costs
  • Ensuring long‑term health

Key Factors to Evaluate

A horse’s nutritional needs derive from the analysis of its individual characteristics—what is often termed the anamnesis.
Key factors include:

1. Current body weight

Which can be estimated using the formula:

Weight (kg) = (Heart girth² (cm²) × Body length (cm)) / 11,880

We have a video on this topic—click here to review it!

2. Body Condition Score (BCS)

Which helps determine if the horse is underweight, ideal weight, or overweight. We also have a video for assessing BCS here.

3. Health status

Because the presence of conditions such as gastric ulcers, laminitis, insulin resistance, etc., require specific dietary adjustments.

4. Type and intensity of work

As well as frequency and duration of training sessions, to estimate actual energy expenditure.

5. Temperament

Since more nervous or excitable horses generally have higher maintenance requirements.

Practical Example

Consider a 500 kg horse, with a BCS of 4 (good body condition but slightly lean), competing in 130 cm show jumping, training 6 times per week for 1 hour per session. Its estimated nutritional requirements are:

Based on these requirements, a sample feeding program might be:

  • High‑quality forage: 10‑12 kg/day (~2‑2.5% of body weight), especially because of the need to improve BCS. Forage should generally supply around 50% of the daily energy requirement.
  • Complete feed for sport horses with high protein content: 3‑4 kg/day, split into three meals.
  • Supplementation:
    – Mineral salts throughout the year to compensate for electrolyte losses from sweating (e.g., Elyte C+E).
    – Adding a fat source if needed (e.g., Olio Vit).
    – Possible additional supplement for muscle health, such as Beta E‑Muscle, containing Betaine and Vitamin E.

Final Recommendations

  • Review the diet every 3‑4 months, especially during competition season.
  • Regularly monitor body weight and BCS.
  • Be alert to changes in behavior, coat condition, feces, performance, or appetite – they may indicate a nutritional imbalance.

Defining a horse’s nutritional requirements is a highly personalized process. Every horse is unique: what works for one may not be suitable for another.

Interested in nutritional advice? 

At Unika, we develop personalized nutritional solutions every day for athletic horses of all disciplines. Contact us for free advice and to create the perfect plan for your horse

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