Prepping the horses to start training

I am so happy to have my two boys back. I love Tissy immeasurably but she is not the most affectionate pony, so it’s nice to have geldings that love attention, kisses and cuddles. Plus they are so super fluffy from a winter in the Welsh hills that they’re even cuter than usual.

They weren’t given any hard feed during their Welsh Mountain stay so it’s time now to re-introduce feed in proportion to the change in grazing and starting work. I don’t have any equine nutritional qualifications and have always relied on Baileys Horse Feeds to plan my horses diets. But this year I wanted to learn more and look a bit closer at what I was feeding my horses, knowledge is power after all and I felt I needed a better understanding of how to balance their diet.

Cue FeedXL, it’s an independent website that you input your feed and it shows your the micro and macronutrients, you can input forage quality and analysis, play around with quantities and save feed programmes. I personally have made one feed programme for each season, as this is where my forage changes, then for each season I have an out of work, easy work and hard work feed programme.

It’s really cool to be able to see how you can change feed and the balance of vitamins and minerals by playing around on the site. I used a mix of grass, haylage, Baileys Ease and Excel cubes and Performance Balancer with British Horse feeds Speedi and Fibre beet with Science Supplements Well Horse Performace. Then I just change the amounts around until I get a perfectly balanced diet for each scenario.

I have a 10% discount code if anyone wants to give it a go:

https://feedxl.referralrock.com/l/1BETHLANGLE54/

Secondly I need to make sure my saddles are fitting the boys well, as they will have changed shape over winter. I bought Qantas a new Reactor Panel saddle back in November, and just recently bought Azid the exact same. So now we’re awaiting a fitting with the saddlers (although I’m not bad at fitting panel saddles myself I do prefer to get them checked a couple of times a year). I decided to switch from my BUA because it’s just too light and it doesn’t look like the FEI will be abolishing weights any time soon and my Free and Easy’s because I would like the support of the manufacturer and the ability to order new parts or have a custom design (Free and Easy are no longer in production). Both those saddles are now up for sale if anyone is interested in having them.

Lastly the farrier will pop shoes back on, as they have been barefoot over winter. Once the basics of feed, feet and tack are sorted it’ll be time to get back training ready for hopefully a fun season. That I will savour all the more after the last year of no competitions!