Why Moving Up a Level Means Rethinking Your Horse's Diet
Moving up a level in any discipline — whether it's eventing, dressage, show jumping, or endurance — is an exciting milestone. You've put in the hours of training, your horse is fitter and more skilled, and you're ready to take on a bigger challenge.
But here's what many riders overlook: the demands of a higher level don't just require more training. They require more nutritional support. Your horse's body is working harder, recovering from more intense sessions, and burning more energy than before. If you don't adjust the diet to match, you risk poor performance, weight loss, muscle fatigue, and even injury.
This article walks you through exactly how to adjust your horse's diet when stepping up in competition, covering energy, protein, electrolytes, hydration, forage, and timing — all in practical, actionable terms.
Understanding the Increased Demands
Before you change anything in the feed room, it helps to understand what changes when you move up a level.
Higher Energy Expenditure
A horse competing at a higher level is performing more demanding movements, jumping bigger fences, covering more ground at speed, or sustaining effort for longer periods. This all requires more energy — sometimes significantly more. A horse moving from medium to advanced dressage, for instance, is performing more collected and extended work, more transitions, and more physically taxing movements like piaffe and passage. That's a measurable increase in calorie burn.
Greater Muscular Demand
More advanced work means greater muscular effort. Your horse needs amino acids — the building blocks of protein — to repair and build the muscles that support this work. Without adequate protein quality (not just quantity), muscle recovery slows down and performance plateaus.
Increased Stress on Joints and Soft Tissue
Higher levels of jumping, faster cross-country speeds, and more demanding flatwork all increase the mechanical stress on joints, tendons, and ligaments. While nutrition alone doesn't prevent injury, it plays a key supporting role in tissue repair and resilience.
Mental and Metabolic Stress
Competing at a higher level often involves more travel, longer competition days, and greater mental demand. All of this contributes to metabolic stress, increased cortisol levels, and changes in gut health — all of which can be managed, in part, through diet.
Step 1: Reassess Your Horse's Energy Needs
The first and most important adjustment is energy — or calories. Most horses moving up a level need more of them, but how you provide that energy matters just as much as how much you provide.
Forage First
Forage should always be the foundation of your horse's diet, regardless of level. Before increasing hard feed, make sure your horse has access to plenty of good-quality forage — ideally 1.5% to 2% of bodyweight per day in dry matter. Good forage provides slow-release energy, supports gut health, and helps maintain hydration.
If your horse is a good doer, you may not need to increase forage quantity, but you may want to consider a slightly higher-energy hay or haylage.
Choosing the Right Energy Sources
Not all calories are created equal. For performance horses, the source of energy is critical.
- Fibre and oil provide slow-release energy. They're ideal for stamina work, endurance, and sustained effort. Oil (such as linseed or rice bran oil) is an excellent calorie-dense addition — you can add 100–200ml per day and increase gradually.
- Starch and sugar provide quick-release energy. Small amounts can be useful for explosive efforts like jumping or sprinting, but too much starch increases the risk of gastric ulcers, hindgut acidosis, and excitable behaviour.
As a general rule, aim to increase calories from fibre and fat first, and only add starch-based feeds (like competition mixes or cereal-based feeds) if genuinely needed.
How Much More Feed?
The National Research Council (NRC) guidelines suggest that a horse in very heavy work may need 30–40% more digestible energy than a horse in moderate work. But every horse is different. A 500kg Thoroughbred eventer moving from Novice to Intermediate may need an additional 3–5 MJ of digestible energy per day, while a warmblood moving from Elementary to Medium dressage may need less.
The best approach is to start with a modest increase — perhaps 10–15% more total energy — and monitor body condition closely over 2–4 weeks. Adjust from there.
A great starting point is to analyse your horse's current diet to see exactly where you stand before making changes. This removes the guesswork and gives you a clear picture of what's lacking and what needs adjusting.
Step 2: Increase Protein Quality, Not Just Quantity
When most people think about increasing protein, they think about feeding more of it. But for performance horses, the quality of protein matters more than the total amount.
Focus on Essential Amino Acids
Your horse needs specific amino acids that it cannot manufacture on its own — these are called essential amino acids. The three most important for performance horses are:
- Lysine — the most commonly limiting amino acid in equine diets, essential for muscle growth and repair.
- Threonine — supports muscle protein synthesis and gut lining integrity.
- Methionine — important for muscle recovery and hoof quality.
Good sources of quality protein include soya bean meal, alfalfa (lucerne), and linseed. If your horse's current diet is based mostly on grass hay and a basic balancer, you may need to add a higher-protein feed or a specific amino acid supplement as workload increases.
How Much Protein?
For horses in heavy work, crude protein intake of around 10–12% of the total diet is generally adequate, provided the amino acid profile is good. Overfeeding protein is wasteful and can increase ammonia production in the stable, but moderate increases to support muscle work are beneficial.
Step 3: Address Electrolytes and Hydration
This is one of the most commonly neglected areas when moving up a level. Harder work means more sweat, and more sweat means greater losses of sodium, chloride, potassium, calcium, and magnesium.
Daily Electrolyte Supplementation
A horse in moderate-to-heavy work can lose 5–10 litres of sweat per hour during intense exercise. Each litre of sweat contains significant amounts of electrolytes that plain water alone cannot replace. If your horse is training harder and competing more frequently, daily electrolyte supplementation becomes essential — not just on competition days.
Plain table salt (sodium chloride) is a good baseline: 1–2 tablespoons per day for a horse in moderate work, increasing with heavier work or hot weather. A purpose-formulated equine electrolyte supplement provides a more balanced mineral profile.
Encourage Drinking
Dehydration reduces performance, impairs thermoregulation, and increases the risk of colic. Always ensure fresh water is available, and consider adding a small amount of salt or apple juice to water buckets when travelling to encourage drinking.
Step 4: Support Joint and Muscle Recovery
As the physical demands increase, so does the importance of supporting your horse's musculoskeletal system through nutrition.
Key Nutrients for Joint Support
- Omega-3 fatty acids (from linseed or fish oil) have anti-inflammatory properties and can support joint comfort.
- Glucosamine and chondroitin — while evidence in horses is mixed, many owners and vets report benefits for joint health.
- Vitamin E and selenium — powerful antioxidants that protect muscle cells from oxidative damage during exercise. Horses in hard work often need supplemental vitamin E (1,000–2,000 IU/day), especially if they have limited access to fresh pasture.
Magnesium
Magnesium supports muscle relaxation and nerve function. Horses in hard work may have increased magnesium requirements, and deficiency can contribute to muscle tightness, irritability, and poor recovery. However, don't supplement blindly — excess magnesium can interfere with calcium absorption.
Step 5: Manage Gut Health
Increased work, more hard feed, travel stress, and competition pressure can all take a toll on your horse's digestive system. Gastric ulcers are alarmingly common in performance horses — studies suggest prevalence rates of 60–90% in some competition populations.
Practical Gut Health Strategies
- Never work your horse on an empty stomach. A small handful of chaff or a slice of hay before exercise helps buffer stomach acid.
- Split hard feeds into smaller, more frequent meals. No single meal should exceed 2kg of hard feed for a 500kg horse.
- Maintain forage access. Long gaps without forage (more than 4–5 hours) increase the risk of gastric ulcers.
- Consider a hindgut supplement. Prebiotics and live yeast (such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae) can support fibre digestion and hindgut stability, particularly when starch intake increases.
Step 6: Time Your Feeding Around Work
Nutrient timing becomes more relevant at higher levels of competition.
Before Exercise
Allow at least 2–3 hours between a concentrate meal and hard exercise. A hay net an hour before work is fine and actually beneficial for gut health.
After Exercise
Post-exercise is the optimal window for muscle recovery. Offer water and electrolytes immediately, then a small forage-based meal within 30–60 minutes. A feed containing quality protein (such as alfalfa chaff or a recovery supplement with amino acids) within this window supports muscle glycogen replenishment and repair.
On Competition Days
Keep the routine as close to normal as possible. Don't introduce new feeds on competition day. Focus on forage, hydration, and electrolytes. Save any larger concentrate meals for after the horse has finished competing.
Step 7: Monitor, Adjust, and Reassess Regularly
Moving up a level is not a one-time dietary adjustment — it's an ongoing process. Your horse's needs will change as fitness improves, as the competition season progresses, and as environmental conditions shift.
What to Monitor
- Body condition score (BCS): Check every 2 weeks using a standardised 1–9 scale. You want to see your horse maintaining a score of 5–6 for most disciplines.
- Muscle development: Look for topline improvement and symmetry. Poor topline despite adequate work may indicate insufficient amino acid intake.
- Coat and hoof quality: Dull coat, slow hoof growth, or brittle hooves can signal nutritional gaps.
- Behaviour and energy levels: A horse that's flat in work, sluggish, or overly reactive may be telling you something about its diet.
- Recovery time: If your horse seems to take longer to recover between training sessions, nutrition may be a factor.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Overfeeding Concentrates
It's tempting to simply throw more hard feed at the problem, but overfeeding concentrates creates more issues than it solves — including gut problems, obesity, and behavioural changes. Always increase forage and oil before reaching for the scoop.
Making Changes Too Quickly
Any dietary change should be introduced gradually over 7–14 days to allow the gut microbiome to adapt. Sudden changes can cause colic, diarrhoea, or laminitis.
Ignoring Individual Variation
A diet that works brilliantly for one horse may be completely wrong for another. Breed, temperament, metabolism, age, and health history all influence nutritional needs. There is no one-size-fits-all competition diet.
Forgetting the Basics
No supplement or performance feed can compensate for poor-quality forage, inadequate water, or an unbalanced base diet. Get the fundamentals right first.
Final Thoughts
Moving up a level is a testament to the hard work you and your horse have put in together. Supporting that step up with the right nutritional adjustments helps your horse perform at their best, recover well, and stay healthy for the long term.
Start by assessing where you are now, make changes gradually, and monitor the results. With a thoughtful, evidence-based approach to feeding, you're giving your horse the best possible platform to succeed at the next level.