The basic tool for evaluating the condition of your horse is the Henneke Body Condition Score which allows you to evaluate your horse using six areas and assign a numerical rating for overall condition. The overall rating should fall between 4 and 7 but we should all be aiming for a 5.
The beauty of this system may be that your horse is thin over his withers, or fat over his tail, but the overall score falls neatly within the acceptable range. This keeps a single element which may be affected by conformation flaws (such as a mutton-withered horse) from throwing off the evaluation of the entire animal.
Of course there are different levels of fitness as well, and my advice in this series of blogs is going to be geared toward the non-competitive rider just trying to keep the horse in reasonable shape and conditioned for 1/2 hours workouts two or three times per week.
To start we have to determine the condition of our horse as of TODAY. Mine is thin - again - and I scored him at about a 4. He is a 21-year-old TB cross and tends to shed weight at any opportunity.
The need to fatten him up is complicated by his feed allergies, he can't have timothy hay, which is the most common hay around here. I had his teeth floated and he still isn't putting weight on so it's time to rejigger the exercise-feed combination.
Post your horses age, breeding, condition score and workload and we'll work on getting feed and exercise programs for all of us!
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