How Diet Affects your Horse’s Ability to Build Muscle

Dr Nerida McGilchrist PhD presents a Guest University Lecture

Your horse’s diet has a MASSIVE influence on whether your horse will build muscle or not.

Muscle is made from protein, so it is the protein coming from your horse’s diet that will support muscle development for your horse.

BUT… not all proteins are created equally!

Some proteins contain the right protein building blocks (called amino acids) to support muscle development. Others don’t.

But how do you know which proteins are which? And what is it about a specific protein that makes it good, or not good at supporting muscle development?

Let us show you!

The recording below is FeedXL’s Dr Nerida McGilchrist PhD, presenting a guest lecture to Animal Nutrition Students at the University of New England (UNE).

During this lecture, Nerida explains amino acid nutrition and what the different types of amino acids are… in really simple, easy to understand terms!

Nerida discusses the three things horses need to build muscle:

1. The correct work to encourage a horse’s muscles to grow.
2. Enough of the essential amino acid ‘leucine’ in the diet to ‘switch on’ the muscle building process; and
3. The right essential amino acids, that come from the protein in the diet, to provide the building blocks the horse needs to build muscle.

Then Nerida shows us what happens when you don’t feed the RIGHT kind of protein to your horse (using her kids building blocks and 5 of her students who are great sports!).

If you really want to understand protein nutrition and give yourself the knowledge to choose the right proteins to help your horse build muscle, this short lecture is a must watch!

And if you want more information on which feed ingredients provide the best quality protein, have a read of our popular article ‘Understanding Protein Quality in Horse Feed’.

And to track protein quality in your horse’s diet you can use our FeedXL Horse Nutrition Calculator. You can start your free trial here: https://feedxl.com/plans-pricing/

 

 

 

Do you have a question or comment? Do you need help with feeding?

We would love to welcome you to our FeedXL Horse Nutrition Facebook Group. Ask questions and have them answered by PhD and Masters qualified equine nutritionists and spend time with like-minded horse owners. It’s free!

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