10 Tips to Avoid Spring Weight Gain

10 tips to avoid spring weight gain

This time of year can be a scary time for owners of good doers, laminitic or EMS horses and ponies, or those who are slightly overweight coming into Spring and Summer. Weight gain can creep up slowly and then it can be quite hard to encourage the weight loss.

Here are top tips to avoid weight gain this Spring and Summer.

1. Get familiar with condition scoring. Use condition scoring to establish if your horse is carrying too much fat, and if its changing week by week. Taking regular photos of your horse standing without tack on, as well as using a weight tape are good ways of monitoring their weight change.
2. Restrict grazing and control grass intake. Grass can provide an abundance of calories, consider using a grazing muzzle to slow down their intake, or fencing the field and using the strip grazing method.
3. Review their hard feed. Consider if your horse really needs a proper hard feed for their workload or if you are just feeding calories unnecessarily. You could swap to a low calorie chaff with a balancer, or vitamin and mineral supplement to ensure their dietary needs are met.
4. Soak hay. Horses need forage access for healthy gut function and shouldn’t be left for long periods without access to hay. Soaking hay in clean water reduces both calorie and sugar intake.
5. Think about increasing your horse’s workload if they are otherwise fit and healthy, even a brisk walk in-hand will help burn fat.
6. Ditch the rugs. Most horses are ok without rugs this time of year unless very wet or windy – keeping themselves warm is a great way of burning calories.
7. Avoid overdoing it on the treats and limit their intake if you must feed them.
8. Slow down their hay intake. To make their forage last longer consider using a slow feeder hay net, or double net to slow intake.
9. Increase movement. Whether this is with enrichment stable toys, putting hay in multiple locations, or introducing a track system, any movement will help their weight loss.
10. Don’t crash diet. Any weight loss should be gradual and carefully planned

If you’ve done everything you can to help your horse lose weight and it doesn’t seem to be working, or if they seem to continue getting fatter, seem unwell or uncomfortable then please contact your vet as there may be underlying conditions which require veterinary assistance.