Hello,
I have a hard working 5 year old Belgian/Percheron cross mare that currently gets 12 pounds legends performance (10% fat) plus 4 cups oil per day. I have recently switched her to this diet from a mix of legends (6% fat), oats, and 4 cups oil because it was taking too much oats to maintain her condition and this diet made more sense to me anyway. Her body condition has improved a little on the new diet but her performance doing aerobic activity is dramatically improved. Now, she's an absolute machine with any long slow distance type work, which is the bulk of what we do. The only down side has been that she is not as eager (or as able) to do work requiring aerobic excersion. It makes some sense to me that if I know I'm going to be doing this type of work, I could "preload" her by feeding a small amount of oats/corn an hour or two before the work is needed, such that her glucose would be spiking while she is preforming the hard aerobic work and the work would be over by the time her glucose dipped. Is this crazy? Does it negate the gains we've made with the EPSM diet in general? Thanks for your thoughts,
-Andy

Hi Andy. Since you say you have recently switched diet I'd suggest giving her new diet a bit more time. Feeding a starch/sugar meal to horses usually causes only a very short blood glucose (sugar) spike - horses respond to increased blood glucose very promptly and very strongly with an insulin surge, which rapidly drops blood glucose. Some researchers propose that these rapid ups and downs of blood glucose may influence disease problems such as laminitis. That said, I know of one EPSM endurance horse whose performance improved when small amounts of sugar were fed during the race. So, if in a few months you don't see improvement then you could try a very small amount of oats (rather than corn) before work to see how things go.

Thanks again for the advice. In case you are curious, I waited a couple weeks and her "fire" came back again. I didn't need any supplemental oats, just a little more patience...

Great news Andy - thanks for letting us know!