Body Condition Scoring And Performance

Body Condition Scoring is a method of assessing your horse's body fat coverage and should form part of your routine management plan. With practice, condition scoring is an accurate way of ensuring that your horse does not gain or lose too much body condition and shows results far more quickly than by the eye alone. This enables you to make any dietary adjustments before a problem has occurred. Whilst maintaining an optimum body condition score is of course essential to maintaining a horses overall health, research has found that it has an important role to play in supporting performance.

The Research

Research has suggested that there is a link between the body condition scores of horses competing in a variety of disciplines and how they then perform. In endurance horses, successful completions in a 160km race were highest in the group of horses with a body fat score of 5-5.5 on the 1-9 scale. Those with a score of 3 or less did not complete the race, whilst only 10% with a score of 3 were able to complete. Reasons given for withdrawal from the race included colic, heat exhaustion, lameness and metabolic issues such as exertional myopathies. The significant difference in condition scores in finishing and withdrawn horses provides a strong suggestion that there is an optimum level of body fat that may be required in order to provide sufficient fuel for the work being done during endurance competition (Garlinghouse, 1999).

Furthermore, in racehorses there is additional evidence to suggest that excess body condition will also influence athletic outcomes. Horses with a higher body fat content were slower overall, with race times increasing significantly in relation to body weight increases of more than 10kg (Cho et al, 2008). Racehorses who held lower fat scores were also able to consume more oxygen during exercise which was strongly correlated with better race times (Kearns, 2002).

Finally, additional research has further investigated the impact of obesity on the vertical force (VN) experienced in showjumping horses when landing after a fence. A higher amount of VN experienced can increase the risk of injury. For every body condition score increase (approximately 25kg), this was found to significantly influence the degree of force that was recorded within the hoof plate. For example, a 500kg horse with a Body Condition Score of 7 was found to experience an additional 722 Newtons of force on their landing limb (Clayton and Hobbs, 2019).

what is an optimum BODY CONDITION SCORE?

We are often asked ‘what is the optimum body condition score for my horse to be in?’

This can depend upon a number of factors, such as the type of work, the breed and health status of the individual horse. However, we do not want them too fat or too thin! As found, if they are too fat we significantly increase the risk of metabolic disease and laminitis, as well as putting excess strain on cardiovascular and musculoskeletal systems. If they are too thin they will have limited energy reserves and will prematurely fatigue and have longer recovery rates between training sessions. So as a general rule of thumb the aim is to have a horse in the region of a BCS of 5 or 5.5.

9. Extremely Fat

Obvious crease down back; patchy fat appearing.