Getting ready for the competition season
With the weather slowly improving and daylight hours increasing now is the time to start focusing on fitness and building muscle strength ready for the season ahead.
Muscle health and performance
Developing strong and healthy muscles that adapt well to training and recover quickly is a key part of keeping your horse going all season and enjoying every minute of it.
Muscle health is influenced by both training regime and diet. Fuelling performance is much more than just choosing the right energy source. Muscles need fuel too, and they need specific nutritional support that enhances post-exercise muscle growth and cell proliferation.
Exercise is key
Exercise stimulates muscle specific genes, which drive muscle cell proliferation and support muscle growth and recovery. Exercise also stimulates metabolic genes, which are involved in metabolism of energy, influencing use of glucose and fatty acids depending on whether the horse is working mostly aerobically or anaerobically.
Exercise is key to building muscles and training them correctly for the sport in question.
Dietary support for the athletic horse
One of the key areas of dietary management for muscles is the use of antioxidants. Exercise is necessary to improve muscle strength and performance, but training also causes production of free radicals which can lead to oxidative stress. Managing oxidative stress is important as it causes damage at a cellular level, leading to muscle damage, soreness and rhabdomyolysis (tying-up).
Oxidative stress is caused by molecules known as free radicals, including reactive oxygen species (ROS). Free radicals are by nature unstable and reactive. Exercise causes a rise in the level of free radicals for a number of reasons including increased oxygen consumption, running down energy resources, muscle hyperthermia (over-heating), and temporary states of hypoxia (oxygen deficiency) that links to acidosis and increased free radical formation.
You can’t avoid free radicals, but you can counteract them by providing antioxidants in the diet. There are 2 main categories of antioxidants, endogenous antioxidants and exogenous antioxidants.
Endogenous antioxidants – produced by the body, for example glutathione and superoxide dismutase.
Exogenous antioxidants – obtained from the diet, for example Vitamin E, Vitamin C, selenium and plant flavonoids.
Antioxidants work by neutralising and stabilising free radicals, so they are no longer able to react and cause damage to cells. Antioxidant is a term used to describe the function a nutrient or compound has. There are many nutrients and compounds that have antioxidant properties and can be supplemented in the daily diet to help balance out exercise induced oxidative stress. Working with a combination of antioxidant sources will get the best results as antioxidants are ‘team players’ working together to manage oxidative stress. When looking to supplement the diet with antioxidants consider a mixture of exogenous antioxidants for maximum effect.
Inclusion of antioxidants is recommended on a daily basis and is research proven to aid recovery and have positive effects on muscle genes that are important for muscle growth. Antioxidants are also part of managing inflammatory response. Damage to cells caused by free radicals, when combined with other challenges related to exercise, such as the accumulation of lactic acid, activates monocytes (white blood cells) and other cells to produce proinflammatory cytokines. Cytokines are small proteins that regulate inflammatory responses, which when triggered in skeletal muscle can exacerbate local inflammatory responses, leading to inflamed sore muscles.
Making sure your horses diet contains an adequate level and variety of antioxidant sources appropriate for the horse’s level of fitness and workload is an essential part of keeping your horse healthy and getting the most of their training program.
