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[RC] Endurance Equine Nutrition - Ridecamp GuestPlease Reply to: ti Tivers@xxxxxxx or ridecamp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ========================================== Hi Ti, Regarding your 99% of the US endurance participants not having the foggiest idea - I think you're dead wrong about this. I've spent significant time, asking, researching, sharing and exploring nutrition for my horse AND receiving tremendous input/information from others specifically in the endurance community. I think you might be surprised just how many others there are out there that devote extensive time to balanced nutrition for their equine partners. Are we perfect? No. But the last guy that was perfect was hung on a cross (at least from my understanding). All the best, Sandy 99% of= the participants in US endurance haven't the foggiest idea of= how exercise science interfaces with supportive= nutrition- Sandy, You quoted part of what I said--but look at the rest of it. "How exercise science interfaces with supportive nutrition". Equine nutrition doesn't just exist in a void all by itself in the case of endurance athletes. The underlying exercise science, and application in the individual horse, is what determines the necessary nutritional support. For every athletic discipline there is a different nutritional protocol and for every individual athlete, the nutrition must fit as closely as possible the stressors that athlete is currently experiencing. So, looking at the broad subject of equine nutrition is not enough. That's why, in an earlier post, I said "Specificity is King". My specialty is applied equine exercise physiology--basically, what work is necessary to deliver a given performance on race day. But I'm forced to know how to deal with all the other peripheral issues as well--biomechnics, nutrition, biochemistry and energetics, health issues, injury avoidance and rehab, to name just a few. Diagnostics, hematology, shoeing, gaiting. All are interrelated. But the underlying core science when building and competing athletes is not nutrition, but exercise science. THAT's where the ignorance lies. There is no way to determine what to feed until you know and can predict, accurately, the metabolic stressors your individual athlete faces in a race. And that's when you can fill in the "holes", through nutrition, through exercise, through a change in shoeing or equipment. To do that, you have to be monitoring as many aspects of the animal's real-time physiology as possible, keeping a daily log of all that information so that you can refer to it as you make constant changes in exercise and diet and other parameters. You have to know where you are and where you're going, in terms of these parameters. For example, what is the maximum heartrate your horse can safely sustain for, say, 30 miles? And, how much weight will he lose doing so? And, how long will it take for that weight to rebound? And, what does that lost weight consist of--tissue destruction, fuel depletion or simple deydration? And what is his starting and ending blood glucose, given a regiment of several approaches to during-ride nutritional support? What is the beginning and end body temp and hydration status? What is your horse's percentage of lean mass. How does a change in equipment or other environmental factors impact on working HR? How many hours at what HRs has your horse delivered over the past year? What is your horse's Efficiency Score, now, and when you started? Are you going anywhere or just spinning your wheels? If the latter, what are the factors that are stopping you? If you are constantly thinking about such things, then I welcome you to the 1%. Otherwise, you know where you are and where you need to go, don't you? ti =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Ridecamp is a service of Endurance Net, http://www.endurance.net. Information, Policy, Disclaimer: http://www.endurance.net/Ridecamp Subscribe/Unsubscribe http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/logon.asp Ride Long and Ride Safe!! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
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