Charlie O’Hara Is Out to TransForm High Performance Horse Health

Charlie O’Hara founder of TransFormer Equine with first ever TransFormer Equine Sport Horse of the Week award winner Chase Hickok.

Lexington, KY - Just who is Charlie O’Hara and what makes him so confident that he can transform today’s high performance horse health industry? O’Hara, founder of Transformer Equine™ Products for Performance Horses and its drug-free, all-natural supplements, Arthrocize and Equilize, would say that the best place to start is at the beginning: with the origin of his company’s name.

“You have to see it as a two-part word. Trans-, meaning ‘change’ and form-, meaning the shape of things.” The philosophy behind Transformer™ he says is building products that change the form of a horse in a definable way. In high performance horse sports, whether that’s racing or showing, nothing is more defining than the element of winning versus losing, and this lifelong horseman is confident he’s got an inside track to improved performance with Transformer™ products.

O’Hara is one of 15 children born into a family of horsemen, including brothers who work with Equibase and Penn National racetrack. His own professional horse career started during the era of such Thoroughbred racing greats as Kentucky Derby winners Ferdinand, trained by Charlie Whittingham, and Alysheba, trained by Jack Van Berg.

“Jack,” O’Hara said of the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame inductee, “breathed confidence into everyone he met. He knew how to get a horse fit and ready.” So does O’Hara, whose products have been proven in the rigorous world of horse racing and now, he believes will be a natural for show horses.

“Ruffian’s veterinarian, Dr. Jim Prendergast, went wild for Equilize,” he said. “It’s fantastic for boosting immune response and opening a horse’s lungs! It is not a performance enhancer. What it does is keep airways free of obstruction and lung tissue healthy. In the beginning we knew it helped ‘bleeders,’ so our only mistake when we first introduced it is that we only saw the tree, not the forest.”

O’Hara created Equilize as an all-natural daily supplement to normalize and stabilize a horse's body systems, while performing strenuous activities, without the use of drugs. Based on each horse’s individual metabolism, the ingredients have the potential to boost immune response, repair damaged tissue, reduce irritation of the throat and lungs, and reduce stress.

U.S. Racing Hall of Famer Richard Mandella convinced him that Equilize delivered “phenomenal results” keeping airways clean in more young equine athletes than just bleeders. So did longtime horseman, Frank Lyons, host of the ESPN Sports Radio racing podcast in Lexington, KY, sponsored by TransFormer Equine: “I’ve seen the positive results with many horses and many trainers.”

If Equilize’s popularity could be likened to a horse coming from the back of the pack to lead in the homestretch, then his second TransFormer Equine product, Arthrocize, has been a front-runner since breaking from the gate. “You will see results in three to five days. Why? It’s simple. One ingredient: hyaluronic acid. Sure, there are injectable products, but no one has access to the same molecular weight that we do in a supplement. Ours has the smallest molecular size and weight possible to travel through the gut all.”

Arthrocize is an all-natural equine joint health supplement featuring 225 mg per ounce of the highest purity and lowest molecular weight sodium hyaluronate (HA). One of the first professionals to use (and fall in love with) O’Hara’s joint supplement was Jerry Hollendorfer, trainer of California Derby winner and Kentucky Derby hopeful, Bwana Bull.  “Smaller molecules equal superior digestibility and fast results,” O’Hara said. “The world didn’t need another joint health injectable. It needed a nutritional alternative.”

Now, he says, it’s time to change the shape of dressage and show jumping horses. The TransFormer Equine Products team has been busy at Wellington, introducing horse people to the same winning solutions that race horse barns have been trusting now for years. More advice from O’Hara is available as short videos produced and posted in early February on the company’s Facebook page, TransFormer Equine and RidersUPESPN Radio

Charlie O’Hara has lived a lifetime around some of the greatest horses and trainers in the world. Transforming joint and respiratory health isn’t just a business to him: it’s in his blood. In high performance horse sports, time is everything, including time spent in recovery. So TransFormer Equine is bringing to the horse show world two of the same drug-free, all-natural daily supplements – Arthrocize and Equilize – that deliver improvement in equine joint health, and reduction in throat and lung irritation in racehorses, in as little as three to five days.

“These supplements work fast so horses last,” said Charlie O’Hara of TransFormer Equine, who presented the TransFormer Sport Horse of the Week Award during week five of the Adequan Global Dressage Festival to 19 year-old Dutch Warmblood gelding Sagacious HF and rider Chase Hickok. The longevity of such a horse, says O’Hara, including nearly 150 trips down medal-winning Grand Prix centerlines over a still-vibrant career is why, for every step he makes and every breath takes, TransFormer Equine will be proudly watching.

TransFormer Equine Products are available at Big Dees Tack & Vet Supplies, The Horse of Course mobile store, Wellington, FL and race horse supply stores.

To learn more about TransFormer Equine products visit www.transformerequine.com or email info@transformerequine.com or call toll-free (800) 615-8829.