Develop Your Horse’s Topline

 comfortably. Other excellent ways to build muscle include lunging with side reins, working over cavalletti both on the lunge line and under saddle, and walking or trotting up hills at a level appropriate to the horse’s condition.

Understanding that the horse’s topline is primarily muscle, the question becomes: What can we feed to develop more muscle? Since muscle is made up of over 70 percent protein, building and maintaining muscle in the body requires the correct amount of dietary protein. Unfortunately, protein is mistakenly seen in a negative light nutritionally and often avoided. When a horse has a poor topline it is due to diminished muscle mass and potentially due to insufficient good quality protein in the diet. Proteins are made up of building blocks called amino acids, and are an essential part of a horse’s diet. Some of these amino acids include lysine, methionine, tryptophan, and threonine. These and other essential amino acids are linked together in the body to form muscle. However, not all protein is created equal, and simply feeding a higher crude protein feed or hay may have limited results. The quality of that crude protein or the amount of essential amino acids is what determines the effectiveness of that protein. Diets containing adequate levels of all the essential amino acids can drastically improve an imperfect topline.

Exercise is also important when developing or improving a horse’s topline. Exercise will condition and train existing muscles, and help build a topline, but only if the nutritional building blocks of muscle are available in the diet. Quite often, horses in low to moderate work who are also easy keepers (i.e., lower level dressage horses or horses in semi-retirement) are fed a diet that is protein/amino acid deficient. These horses have plenty of rib cover, and may even be overweight, but they have a poorly developed topline, especially over the loin, due to protein deficiency.