Feeding for topline assistance?

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Piglet

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Feed advice for the above please. Brief history, my horse is a gangly 16.2hh TB/Cob gelding aged 7 years old who was turned away for a year or so due to the rider having lost interest until I bought him 3 months ago. I have had his teeth checked and have a professionally fitted saddle and fortnightly group lessons where I do as much as he is able to do before I give him a short break before we start again and he is ridden 5 or 6 times a week for 1 to 2 hours at a time ie lots of walking smartly up hills to try to build him up. At the moment he has 2 large bowls of Fibre Cubes twice a day with grass and ad lib hay but apart from hard work, is there anything else I could feed him to help build up top line?
 
Yes, protein. Depends on the levels in your forage, but most isn't great. I supplement my ex chaser who is a really poor doer with amino acids lysine and methionine (for his feet - how are your chap's feet??) and some whey powder, plus he has a high fibre diet with adequate protein levels. Without adequate protein he can't build soft tissue such as muscle and decent hoof tissue.
 
You cannot feed a specific part of your horse's anatomy, muscle will only grow with work (and adequate nutrition of course). Unless you are galloping the legs off your horse then he will undoubtedly get enough protein/fat/carbohydrate/fibre from his rations. If you pile on the hard feed he will most likely get fizzy and silly so feed him according to the work he is doing. Horses in light to medium work - the vast majority of leisure horses fall into this catagory - do not need more than 10 - 12% protein.
 
A decent balancer will include essential amino acids (such as lysine, methionine, aka "quality protein"). It's worth reading the labels and comparing how much of the amino acids per dose is included. 10g lysine and 3g methionine is a good level to aim for.
If your horse doesn't have a problem with alfalfa, that will also provide a good amount of quality protein (it is 16% protein) in low sugar/starch, fibre form. I like plain alfalfa pellets, e.g. from Dengie.

ETA: Percentage of protein is irrelevant, what matters is total amount (grams per day) of protein, and whether that protein contains sufficient essential amino acids (those are the ones the horse can't make himself). You only need small amounts - a few grams - of the essential amino acids, but if they are lacking, the horse can't fully use the rest of the protein in the diet to build muscle.
The easiest way to make sure he's not lacking is to provide those essential amino acids in a balancer or similar (just in case), and feed decent quality forage. I think overall lack of protein can be more of an issue with horses on restricted forage intake (good doers) who get "poor quality" hay on purpose from more mature cuts that contains less protein.
 
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