Feeding advice please (protein/muscle building)

[el_Snowflakes]

Hello,

my horse is 17 years old and i struggle to keep the weight off her normally. However I have kept to a sctrict feeding regime and using minimal rugs and she has gone slightly the other way and has very little muscle over her topline. In conjunction with appropriate excercise- can someone recommend me a feed to give her which has extra protein? I do not want her to become overweight agaian but do want to improve condition ie. muscle tone. Hence why im a little reluctant to give her conditioning mix. Also i do not want anything to make her fizzy.....

any thoughts/ideas?should i just go ahead and give her a little conditioning mix?

ps. she is in light work at the moment but will increase to light/medium in summer. She is fed a small scoop of molassess free chaff with a multi vit supplement twice a day.

 

[Fintan]

Hm,

more protein does not mean more muscles. Protein is a building block for tissue but it is limited in use.

A horse in heavy work like a racehorse will not need more than about 1.2 gram digestible protein per KG of bodyweight.

The pointer is on digestible, many people calculate or better talk about percent. This does mean raw protein. The content of digestible protein in the raw protein depends on the quality of the protein source.

The best protein source you can get is soybean meal. This will have up to 49% of protein and so you will need only very little.

My hay has about 3% of digestible protein which is 30 gram per KG of hay.

My big lady will eat about 10 - 12 kg of hay but she has 650 KG and she is doing a good bit of work.

So I have to top up about 350 gram of digestible protein.

On top of the hay (the hay is strong in sugar) she will get 1 kg of beetpulp drymatter weight, 250 ml rapeseed oil, 1 KG of oats and about 500 gram of soybean meal.

Out of all this I do a mash and divide it into 2 feeds.

1 KG of Oats will supply about 75 gram of digestible protein and the beetpulp about 60 gram of digestible protein.

An overamount of protein will be stored as fat in the tissue. A strong overamount of protein will keep the liver and the kidney busy.
This is what you don`t want with a 17 year old horse, well you don`t want it in general.