The importance of diet, correct exercise and photos!
Helping your horse build topline, or develop and maintain muscle mass, is key to performance. It also helps to reduce injury by ensuring that your horse is strong enough to complete the work you ask of them. Here are two examples of horses who I have been working with to improve muscle development. For each horse, these photos were taken 2-3 weeks apart.
Both horses are fed a high-quality balancer alongside an amino acid supplement, which is given 30 minutes post-exercise. I will go into the details of feeding to help your horse build topline and muscle in my next post.
They are also worked correctly, using a combination of long-reining, pole-work and cavaletti, hill-work and cross-training.
Finally, by photographing these horses every two weeks we are able to monitor their progress and adjust their diet and training as needed.
Once you get your nutritional building blocks in place and use appropriate strength-building exercises it all comes together! 💪